Skewed News (my attempt to reassure the former readers of the Seattle PI that blogs are able to step into the void and provide trustworthy coverage)

It's an American tradition at least as predictable as airport congestion around Thanksgiving: horror films released on the Friday the 13th weekend featuring someone like Freddie or Jason coming back yet again. On a probably unrelated note, Dick Cheney appeared on "State of the Union" Sunday.

400 AIG employees will split about $165 million in bonus money. The word bonus is from the Latin for bonehead, as in, "in a series of boneheaded moves, AIG nearly took down the economy, then single-handed created a deficit the size that once required a Reagan-era tax cut, and then rewarded their deciders."

50 years ago, the Barbie doll debuted. 50 years ago, the Dali Lama fled Tibet. Had he been following trends, might have realized that even the young had become so precocious that they were unlikely to back anything that sounded so unsophisticated as "dollie." In order to get more support for the Tibetans, the Dali Lama is planning to be reincarnated as a 5' 10" blonde with double-D's. He expects that this will help to create more outrage should the Chinese government again invade. At that point, taking his lead from the popularity of Barbie, "she" will go by the name Lama Dal.

Airlines lost 40 million bags in 2007. Records just released indicate that this was not accidental. As part of the 2007 bailout plan, airlines were required to lose this much baggage as part of a subtle but quite effective stimulus plan: people forced to buy new wardrobes, luggage, and toiletries actually delayed the recession by over a year.

Obama has announced his intention to stimulate small businesses. This will be easier as we go further into the recession. Between layoffs and shrinking revenues, projections indicate that half of the Fortune 500 will soon become "small businesses."

What Did We Learn?

“What did we learn, Palmer?” Asks the senior CIA official of his subordinate.
“I don’t know sir.”
“I don’t f-ing know either.”
“I guess we learned not to do it again.”
“Yes sir.”
“F- if I know what we did.”
“Yes sir. It’s hard to say.”
Closing lines of Burn After Reading

George Bush and Dick Cheney are granting interviews. From what I can tell, they did nothing wrong - there is nothing that they would have changed.

Which essentially means that they didn't learn anything. They knew what to do going in and the experience (whether it be Iraq or Afghanistan or financial crisis or economic slump or ...) did not change their minds at all.

Given that things did not turn out so well, we can only conclude one thing: if it wasn't their minds that needed changing, it was the world. Oh wait. They already made that clear. You either change the feedback or the feedback changes you.

Look for Dick Cheney to be driving around in retirement in a motor home with a bumper sticker that reads, "I'd rather change the world than change my mind."

Amazing.

Clinton Seeks "Smart Power" Middle East Strategy

AP – 8 mins ago
WASHINGTON – Hillary Rodham Clinton
said Tuesday that she intends to revitalize the mission of diplomacy in American
foreign policy, calling for a "smart power" strategy in the Middle East and
implicitly criticizing the Bush administration for having downgraded the role of
arms control.

Clinton seeks smart power? This, apparently, in contrast to Condoleezza Rice's dumb power in the Middle East? Or is that dumb luck?

In any case, I can only guess that Cheney is cursing in some undisclosed location. "Smart power! Why didn't we think of that?" Turns and looks accusingly at George, "But no. You had to continually resort to the dumb power."

Smart power. Wow. Sounds pretty much infallible. Kind of like compassionate conservative. I guess the days of Middle East conflicts are over. I can hardly wait.

Dick - Still Clueless, Still Convicted (But Sadly Not a Convict)

Dick Cheney is about to leave office. In spite of whatever worries you have about 2009, this single fact ought to be enough to buoy your spirits about the new year.

Dick Cheney - for all his egregious violations of protocol, decency, and the constitution - has skated through his 8 years in office with a minimum of media reprimand or screed. How much, for instance, did you ever hear about Cheney's stock options with Halliburton and how his personal returns soared into the thousands of percent as a result of Halliburton's no-bid contracts from the Bush - Cheney administration? In a media that feeds on scandal the way vultures feed on road kill, Cheney's moral decay was oddly passed over.

Cheney casually asserts that the president can start war without Congressional consent, (even if the war is with a concept like terrorism) and once engaged in war can suspend any laws (again, without Congressional consent). More than that, the president can launch nuclear attack without consenting with anyone.

Cheney's vision of the presidency is not that of a normal dictator, whose rule would extend without question across a mere country only. No, Cheney's president as dictator is of an emperor of the free world - able to end laws and life without challenge.

I suspect that Cheney's insistence on attacking Saddam was motivated by envy as much as perceived threat; no one questioned Saddam within the country and Cheney's reach for power has been coupled with a near refusal to explain himself. Although the man has never distinguished himself with any notable intelligence or wisdom, he feels as though he is a superior to the 300+ million Americans for whom he works and simply does not have to engage the rest of us in any kind of conversation. This is not our country - we have, in his mind, turned it over to George and him for the 8 years.

It still baffles me that George and Dick are leaving office with no worse penalty than record low approval ratings. But I'll let go of that for now. The real point is that they are leaving office. And that is reason enough to welcome 2009.

Bush Bails Out on Bailout

In a stunning turnabout, the Bush administration Wednesday abandoned the original centerpiece of its $700 billion effort to rescue the financial system and said it will not use the money to purchase troubled bank assets.

“Our assessment at this time is that this (the purchase of toxic assets) is not the most effective way to use funds,” Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson told a news conference.

[Full story can be found on click through - read on here if you want to dive into plausible fiction.]

The Bush administration has realized that it can purchase whole countries instead - "places where we can run experiments to test various economic models and bailout options before we commit to any one plan," Paulson explained.

"As it turns out," Treasury Secretary Paulson said, "$700 billion is a LOT of money. Once we realized how much we could do with it, buying bad assets didn't seem that appealing." (Reporters commented later that Paulson seemed to drag out the term bad assets is ways that he might have hoped would make an old white man in a suit sound like a bad ass.)

George Bush, who is looking for retirement property, was said to have protested any move that would prop up home prices before he moved out in January. Aids say that Bush was shocked to realize that although the resale value of the White House was still high, he would not actually get to sell it when he moved out. "If we aren't selling the place," he said to Laura, "tell me again what the deal was with showing the place to that young black couple with the two pretty little girls?" They deny, though, that this is the only reason Bush has decided to embrace a policy that would let home prices fall further.

Paulson explained that there is something magical about having $700 billion to spend at any time. "You should see the way people look at me, hang on my every word, hoping that I might throw a little of it their way. Even when I was the CEO at Goldman Sachs, it was never this good," he said. "I don't want to rush this process of deciding where to spend the money."

The Bush administration said that it has no plans to revive credit markets or the economy and might not have one until sometime after the holidays - "perhaps late January," Dick Cheney said with a chuckle.

SPAM I AM

For a brief time, mine was an outlaw blog.

A couple of days ago, I got a note from the good folks at blogspot informing me that my blog had been designated a spam blog. They warned me that they would delete the blog in about 20 days if I did not request a human review to confirm that a human writes R World. I came disconcertingly close to losing nearly two years worth of writing.

It was only a couple of weeks ago that I realized that my email traffic had dropped off precipitously because the good folks at cox had decided to randomly designate about half my mail as SPAM and hide it in an on-line folder. It took me weeks to realize what was going on and stop it. It may have taken me 20 days.

Imagine if the blog spam note had itself been designated as spam email. These two spam machines might have conspired to silence me altogether, de-blogged and de-mailed, abruptly made into an information-age eunuch by mindless algorithms.

In past centuries, censorship was enacted by church or state officials with a particular agenda, mindfully protecting us from offensive information. Today, censorship has become automatic, enacted by simple algorithms that mindlessly protect us from offensive information. It used to be bureaucrats who followed rules; now it is just rules following rules, algorithms that decide what gets through and what stays out of consciousness.

Given that machines are the new censors, I'm going to take this whole imbroglio as a compliment, proof that it was an excess of humanity that left the algorithms perplexed, offended, and convinced that I should be silenced.

Then again, I still find the whole idea of Dick Cheney being behind this thwarted attack on R World rather alluring. Knowing that I’ve made his enemies list is enough to make me feel masculine again, even when fully immersed in a bubble bath.

Update:
My buddy Eric pointed me to this article that (sort of) explained what happened to me. That Cheney is so crafty - he made it look like he wasn't just targeting me.

How Many Foreigners Would You Kill to Save an American?

I'm proud to be American, kind of. I'm proud to be a Davison, kind of. I'm proud to be a Californian, kind of. But my being an American or a Davison doesn't make me feel like my own life is automatically worth more than an Armenian or a Gonzalez or Lee. I don't think that we ought to casually kill Pennsylvanians in order to ensure the life and property of Californians. I've no illusions about Americans or Californians or Davisons being superior to non-Americans, non-Californians, or non-Davisons.


All that to say that I'm convinced that one of the thing that separates the neocons like Cheney and Norman Poderhertz from us normal people is their willingness to use a "foreigner discount rate" equal to nearly 1. Cheney has talked about a 1% doctrine. Simply stated, if there is even a 1% chance that a country poses a threat to the US, we have the right to use preemptive force to stop them. This kind of patriotism seems to me more of a pathological condition than a noble sentiment. It seems more like a sign of mental illness than a sound basis for foreign policy. The foreigner discount rate of nearly 1 suggests that a foreigner's life is worth some fraction of an American's.


You might say that I'm biased. I am, afterall, married to a Canadian. But I've met a variety of people from other countries and have yet to be able to make generalities about them any more than I can about Americans. Some are fat, some are thin, some are generous, some are selfish, some are violent, some are passive ... people are people no matter where the international sperm lottery has placed them.


There is a chance that Iran will gain a nuclear weapon within the next three to five years. There is an even smaller chance that once they have this, they will use it against another country. And there is an even smaller chance yet that this country will be us. How many Iranians does that justify killing today? Cheney and Poderhertz would likely say, all of them. I just don't buy it.


I don't like the idea of killing, but I'd be glad to pull the trigger to stop one foreigner from killing 100 innocent Americans. I wouldn't even be very squeamish about sanctioning the murder of one foreigner to save the life of one American. But once you get to the point of killing 10 foreigners for one American, or 1,000 foreigners for one American - at that point the mathematics of morality seems to make patriotism seem like an excuse for discounting the lives of others rather than a healthy affinity for one's own.


This is one of the questions I would love to hear asked at these seemingly weekly candidate debates. How many foreigners would you sanction killing in order to save the lives of 100 Americans? At this point, we'd learn whether these politicians are more in touch with their patriotism or their humanity. It seems to me like a fairly important question.

Cheney in Vegas

Last night, Dick Cheney screwed up my flight. Apparently, he was flying into or out of Las Vegas* and air traffic control backed up flights, clearing the air space for him. (It's Vegas - I say let him take his chances along with everyone else.) Instead of getting home at 10 (1 AM Indy time), I got home at midnight.

This week, Defense Secretary Gates requested another $42 billion. He won't find it here. Savings rates have steadily eroded, staying below 1% for the last couple of years. To finance this fiscally reckless administration, the U.S. has had to borrow from overseas. Yet this has become increasingly expensive during the Bush years: the dollar has dropped more than 40% against the Euro since George has taken office.

All that to ask, what's Cheney doing in Vegas? I offer the following possibilities:

1. He's at the roulette wheel and has just doubled down on black with the billions as yet unspent on Iraq's reconstruction.

2. He's using your social security dollars to fund marathon all-night poker games.

3. He's gambling away your children's future on specific NBA games he thinks are a slam dunk.

4. He's decided to risk our nation's reputation and good will on a game of craps.

5. Or, perhaps it's too late. He's already done all that and was flying out of Vegas.

* "Las Vegas is sort of how God would do it if he had money."
- Steve Wynn

Cheney Explains Why It is a Bad Idea to Invade Iraq

Odd that a guy who looks this much like Dick Cheney makes so much sense.

In Praise of Dick Cheney

Oh. Wait. I've got nothing here. Sorry.

Compare & Contrast: Cheney and Skateboarders

Compare and contrast how this country handles those who snub their noses at the law. In exhibit A, we have kids who ignore the law about skateboarding. You can see in this video the violent reaction of cops. In exhibit B, we have Cheney who ignores the laws about transparency in the conduct of his office. You see in this editorial the capitulation to his unreasonable defiance.


Exhibit A (thanks to Thomas):




Exhibit B:
Cheney
Has he gone too far?
6/29/2007
[Taken in its entirety from The Week]

Dick Cheney has his own special way of dealing with the rules that apply to everyone else, said USA Today in an editorial. “He just ignores them.” In just the latest example of a long series of “arrogant” decisions, Cheney is refusing to obey President Bush’s Executive Order 12958, which compels White House personnel to regularly inform the National Archives about material they’ve classified. Newly released documents show that Cheney’s office is claiming that he’s not an “entity within the executive branch” and so is not governed by Bush’s order. Since the vice president also serves as president of the Senate, Cheney argues, he belongs to neither the executive branch nor the legislative—and thus is not bound by the rules of either.

Even for our famously secretive vice president, said Maureen Dowd in The New York Times, this is a breathtaking, “new level of gall.” Not only is he saying he’s above the law, but that he functions on “his own dark planet—a separate entity from the White House.” The man is beyond parody, said Aziz Huq in The Nation. To keep the public from knowing what he’s doing behind the scenes, Cheney has made “extravagantly petty claims of secrecy.” Claiming executive privilege, he’s refused to let Congress or the public know what energy-industry and Christian right figures he’s met with in shaping the administration’s policies. Then, when the federal Information Security Oversight Office tried to get him to obey Executive Order 12958, he tried to abolish that agency. “If it weren’t so frightening, the irony would be delicious.”

There’s a method to Cheney’s madness, said Barton Gellman and Jo Becker in The Washington Post. By remaining completely behind the scenes while exerting enormous influence over President Bush, Cheney has made himself the most powerful vice president in history. It was Cheney who decided that the Geneva Conventions should not apply to captured terrorists, instituted interrogation tactics that many consider torture, and insisted that the administration could monitor phone calls and e-mails without warrants. Yet for all the policy that flows across his desk, “almost nothing flows out.” Cheney won’t reveal the size, much less the names, of his staff. Cheney also stamps everyday documents Treated As: Top Secret/SCI and locks most of his paperwork in “man-size Mosler safes.”

Cheney is probably the only politician in Washington who doesn’t give a damn what people think of him, said Jonah Goldberg in National Review Online. Unlike most people, “I love that.” He doesn’t pander to the press or the public; he simply does what he thinks is right. But as one of the few Cheney fans left, even I think he’s gone overboard. His argument that he’s not part of the executive branch is “goofy on its face,” and only makes a wounded White House look even worse. Cheney may not care that “millions of Americans think he’s a comic-book villain,” but his unpopularity is now dragging the entire administration down.

Many other Republicans have come to the same conclusion, said Sally Quinn, also in The Washington Post. They see Cheney as so “toxic” that they are whispering about begging Bush to replace him with a more palatable No. 2—someone like Fred Thompson. It’ll never happen, said Michael Currie Schaffer in The New Republic. First of all, Bush would never cut him loose. Second, the beauty of Cheney’s extravagant refusal to abide by any rules is that, on one level at least, it works. Cheney’s crazy, everybody says. So what else is new? After a few days or weeks, the furor dies down, and Cheney goes on making his own rules—unembarrassed and unrepentant.

Blair & Cheney in Purgatory Avoidance Talks

Yesterday, Blair stepped down as Prime Minister of Britain and promptly accepted a role as envoy to the Middle East. [Full story here.]

"He will spend significant time in the region working with the parties and others to help create viable and lasting government institutions representing all Palestinians, a robust economy, and a climate of law and order for the Palestinian people,"

An unnamed source claims that Blair is doing this in penance for his previous work in the Middle East with George Bush. If he tries to mediate peace between Israelis and Palestinians for 4 years, his time in purgatory will be reduced from 2,000 years to only 900, claimed a spokesman for an unnamed agency. Should he actually succeed at creating lasting peace, his time in purgatory will be merely 67 years.

Meanwhile, this same unnamed source said that negotiations between Dick Cheney and representatives from this agency broke down when Cheney announced that God no longer had authority over his soul. "It's some guy named Lenny," Cheney said. Having lost his soul to Lenny in an all-night poker game in the 1970's, Cheney claims that he now no longer has to serve time in hell or purgatory as a consequence of any of his actions. "It doesn't matter what I do," asserted an unrepentant Dick. "Shoot lawyers, grant no-bid contracts to the company in which I still have stock options, or vote against funding for kindergarten. I'm a free man."

"Of course, it would be harder for Dick to do penance," this spokesman continued. "Having Cheney try to broker peace in the Middle East would be rather like having Hugh Hefner design a new line of Burkas."

Cheney - Midas's Doppleganger

Everyone remembers the "We'll be greeted as liberators" reassurances of Dick, who told us "Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction."

Well, Dick has done it again. He visited Pakistan a couple of weeks ago.

Musharraf is Pakistan's head of state and his has never been a particularly secure position. Musharraf isn't the most democratic of leaders, and gets in trouble with the religious extremists who don't like his embrace of the West or his willingness to "cooperate" with the United States. He has to walk a tightrope between appeasing those who would modernize Pakistan and those who would gladly turn into a state that the Taliban could bless. To be seen as an American puppet could mean the end of his career and could tip Pakistan towards theocracy.

Into this violatile mix walks Dick. With all the subtly of a bull wandering into a china shop from a marijuana patch, Dick demands that Musharraf cooperate more with the US.

The fallout?
"... the political cost to Gen Musharraf of being seen as a puppet of the administration of President George W. Bush is becoming unsustainable. ... “It’s a whirlpool right now,” says Taffazul Rizvi, a US-trained Pakistani lawyer. “It’s an emerging situation, which can take down anyone, including Musharraf.” … Diplomats in Islamabad worry it may be too late for ... political fixes. Religious radicalism is spreading so rapidly that there is little time left to save Pakistan’s moderate political parties and institutions such as the Supreme Court that are central to the functioning of any future democracy."

Dick has become Midas's doppleganger - everything he touches turns to destruction.

Dick Cheney's Blood Clot

Doctors examining Dick Cheney discovered what they first thought was a blood clot in his lower leg. Further testing revealed that it was, in fact, his heart. A relieved Dick Cheney reportedly told doctors, "I was wondering where that had gone."