Devil in Disguise

And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.

The Book of Genesis, 2:16-17

I don't spend much time wondering about who will head the Republican National Committee, but I did happen to glance through this article. And was rewarded with these utterly stupefying remarks from former ambassador to Luxembourg and would-be RNC Chair Ann Wagner:

I left after four years of living in and around socialism. What it really did on a daily basis for me and my children, and my husband...it deepened our love, our appreciation, and our respect for America. I believe in American exceptionalism. I believe in the soul of America and the things that make us, not better, but unique.

Think about this for a second. Four years as the American ambassador to one of the smallest and most easily traversed countries on the continent, and she can't tell the difference between socialism and a constitutional monarchy.

The half million people living in Luxembourg would no doubt be surprised to discover that their application of democratic capitalism is in fact a socialist worker's paradise. Many of them, though, might wonder exactly what Ms. Wagner finds so threatening about an unemployment rate of 6%, a deficit of 5%, the 16th-best health care system in the world, the third-highest GDP per capita in the world, and an income per capita of nearly $61,000. If this is socialism, we should welcome it with open arms.

Not that I really think that Ann Wagner or any of these fools know what socialism is. (But an ambassador? Even a Bush appointee?) It's become one of many meaningless catch-alls for "not like us," another casualty in the right's assault on the English language -- in its assault on meaning itself. That is, I think, at the root of right-wing paranoia: The fear of knowledge and the dread places it might lead. To them, knowledge is not a path to enlightenment, but the road to uncertainty and doubt. What to any sane person is the signal trait of humanity is to them the devil in disguise, with the black president nothing less than the beguiling serpent in the Eden of America.

They'd like nothing more than to return the apple to the tree. Try as they might, though, it's been plucked and we're the better for it.

Kabuki Democracy

Eric Alterman of The Nation has written an invaluable essay called "Kabuki Democracy: Why a Progressive Presidency is Impossible, for Now." I've excerpted the part of about the BP/Halliburton Catastrophe, but urge you to read the complete article. Alterman writes:

...The result of this malign neglect is that post-Bush America is one disaster waiting to happen after another, all of which—when they do—are laid at the feet of the current president, regardless of whether addressing them is consistent with his policy agenda. For if he does not find a way to do so, they will likely overwhelm it. The financial crisis that dominated Obama's early months—and almost brought down the entire world economy—is one obvious example. But consider for a moment the crisis of the moment: the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico that so many in the mainstream media have sought to portray as "Obama's Katrina." Of course Obama himself is responsible for his administration's reaction to the spill as well as his ill-considered decision, taken just weeks before it took place, to allow expanded drilling in coastal areas. But almost all MSM debate on the question has treated the oil spill as an act of God, or of BP's negligence. In fact the conditions that led to the spill—including the egregious malfeasance that empowered BP and the rest of the industry to ignore the most basic precautions—were a direct outgrowth of the Bush/Cheney industry-friendly defenestration of the basic functions of the government's regulatory functions.

As Enda's report noted, before the spill no editor or producer thought to call a reporter and say, Hey, why not take a look at what's up over at the Minerals Management Service? Almost nothing had been written about the MMS at all of late, save for its now infamous four-year sex scandal. According to MMS spokesman Nicholas Pardi, there's not a single reporter in the country who covers its activities full time. And yet in the wake of this endless disaster, thanks to the energetic reporting of those institutions that are now on the job, we've learned, for instance, that the Minerals Management Service did not require oil companies to have backup systems to trigger blowout preventers in case of an emergency. No enforcement mechanisms existed at all. In recent years, regulators allowed the oil executives to fill in their own inspection reports in pencil, which were then traced over and submitted. Free hunting and fishing trips, tickets to games, expensive meals were the norm at the Lake Charles office, all provided by the oil companies. Taking such gifts "appears to have been a generally accepted practice," according to the department's acting inspector general, Mary L. Kendall. Two years ago, one MMS employee undertook four inspections of platforms while in the process of negotiating the terms of his employment with that same company. Another was suspected of using crystal meth during his inspections. It's no wonder that that the MMS collected only sixteen fines from the more than four hundred investigations of Gulf of Mexico drilling incidents over the past five years. The agency found roughly 200 violations of its regulations, but showed virtually no interest in pursuing any of them.

Meanwhile, as a result of this almost comically lax enforcement, BP executives felt no compunction in ignoring safety and environmental rules to which it was allegedly subject. One 2001 report found that the company paid little attention to the equipment it would need in the event of an emergency shutdown, equipment that might have prevented the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig. It often fell back on the least expensive and less reliable deepwater well design—called "long string"—and did so far more frequently than its industry competitors. Another report, from 2004, discovered a pattern of company intimidation toward its employees who expressed uneasiness about its safety or environmental practices. California officials accused the company of falsifying its 2002 fuel tank inspections, adding that four of five of its storage facilities failed to meet proper standards. BP was forced to settle a lawsuit brought by the South Coast Air Quality Management District for over $100 million. In 2005, a Texas City refinery explosion cost fifteen lives, owing in part to a failed warning system that one report found consistent with practices at "all five U.S. refineries, not just Texas City."

Given all of the above, Paul Krugman is quite right to point out that the failures of both the MMS and BP that led to the spill—MMS's failure "to require a backup shutdown system that is standard in much of the rest of the world, even though its own staff declared such a system necessary," as well as the exemption it gave BP "from the requirement that they file plans to deal with major oil spills" and its allowing "BP to drill Deepwater Horizon without a detailed environmental analysis"—are part of a pattern relevant not just to the MMS or even to the Bush/Cheney administration's lackadaisical approach to environmental regulation. Rather, they reflect the entire administration's attitude toward governance in general, and regulation in particular. "For the Bush administration was, to a large degree, run by and for the extractive industries," Krugman notes. Its appointees were not merely corporate lobbyists and shills who frequently enjoyed little interest and less competence in the areas they were being asked to regulate. They were often also corrupt. Again to take just one of many potential examples, the Bush/Cheney deputy secretary of the interior (the man credited with actually running the place) was the coal-industry lobbyist J. Steven Griles, who, in 2007, pled guilty to lying to Congress about his ties to Jack Abramoff's operation.

As it happens, Dick Cheney's role was crucial in creating these conditions. As Joshua Dorner of the Center for American Progress wrote, "Former Vice President Dick Cheney's National Energy Policy Task Force concluded in May 2001 that 'advanced, more energy efficient drilling and production methods: reduce emissions; practically eliminate spills from offshore platforms; and enhance worker safety, lower risk of blowouts, and provide better protection of groundwater resources.'" Dorner continues:

One of the worst elements of what has come to be known as the "Dick Cheney energy bill" had a direct role in eliminating the kind of regulatory oversight that may have prevented the blowout of BP's Mississippi Canyon 252 well on April 20 of this year. Section 390 of the legislation dramatically expanded the circumstance under which drilling operations could forego environmental reviews and be approved almost immediately under so-called "categorical exclusions" from the National Environmental Policy Act. The use of such exclusions went on to widespread abuse under theBush administration. BP's blown-out well did not undergo an environmental review thanks to a categorical exclusion. (BP was lobbying as recently as April to expand the use of such exclusions.)

Paul Krugman correctly notes that Barack Obama "isn't completely innocent of blame in the current spill," owing to the fact that BP "received an environmental waiver for Deepwater Horizon after Mr. Obama took office." Indeed, as the current deputy interior secretary later mused, "What happened to all the stakeholders—Congress, environmental groups, industry, the government—all stakeholders involved were lulled into a sense of what has turned out to be false security." But the "broader pattern" here, Krugman notes, is one of "the degradation of effective government by antigovernment ideology." As a result of this ideology's ruinous effects, we are likely being lulled into a similar sense of "false security" about any number of aspects of our public life and the government's regulatory responsibilities. These failures have the potential to despoil almost every aspect of President Obama's positive agenda, not unlike an oil gusher spewing its poison into a pristine Louisiana wetland...

Get yourself another fool:

Sunday Funnies and Arts

As always, click to enlarge.

























Watching this video of Neil Young's "Thrasher," I was struck by the differences in the iconic images of a man with a guitar and a woman with a guitar. Young's energy flows outward: He conveys a message by seducing the audience. The guitar is, if not an instrument of aggression, a second microphone that amplifies his intent to connect a personal vision. Compare Young's presence with Patty Griffin's as she sings "Be Careful":



The size of the guitar nearly overwhelms the petite Griffin, forming a protective barrier. She sings and plays with great maternal presence, drawing the audience toward her, attempting to elicit a personal empathy for the emotional vulnerability of young women...

Photo Gallery
Cacophony...

Mother's Day Peace Rose...

View of Mt. Hood...

Bow, wow, wow...

Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow in Missouri (1933)...

Spring and all in Newport...

Rose and stepmom...


Jazz funeral for the Gulf...

Critter's Crap has more Sunday funnies here ...

Wealthy Americans tell everyone else that they have to tighten their belts...

Onward, Christian bankers...

Yesterday, love was such an easy game to play...

Houston has had some great music over the years...

Lord Balderdash can neither confirm nor deny that he found that strip club "pleasant nor unpleasant..."


Happy Mother's Day! (Thanks for the reminder, Cliff.)

Torture Is Wrong. Period.

Charles Krauthammer's ongoing justification of torture reeks of the rationalization and intellectual selling out that produced torture in the first. For this reason alone and if you can stomach it, his latest column is worth reading. A nation can justify a torture policy, Krauthammer writes, under two circumstances:

the ticking time bomb scenario and its less extreme variant in which a high-value terrorist refuses to divulge crucial information that could save innocent lives.

But Krauthammer offers no evidence that the Bush Administration considered either justification as it sought legal validation for torture. To the contrary, the Administration appears to have applied torture indiscriminately on the questionable legal basis that the president's wartime powers were such that they overrode all limitations imposed by the Constitution and international treaties.

Krauthammer then offers an example -- and they always have one -- of an instance where the "crucial information" exception applied:

On Oct. 9, 1994, Israeli Cpl. Nachshon Waxman was kidnapped by Palestinian terrorists. The Israelis captured the driver of the car. He was interrogated with methods so brutal that they violated Israel's existing 1987 interrogation guidelines, which themselves were revoked in 1999 by the Israeli Supreme Court as unconscionably harsh. The Israeli prime minister who ordered, as we now say, this enhanced interrogation explained without apology: "If we'd been so careful to follow the ('87) Landau Commission (guidelines), we would never have found out where Waxman was being held."

First of all, it's news to me that the American conduct should be governed by standards ignored in a bitter central Asian racial and religious struggle. Second, who's to say that the Palestinians did not regard Cpl Waxman as a "high value terrorist" refusing to "divulge critical information that could save lives"? After all, the Bush Administration mistakenly considered Osama bin Laden's driver as a high value. Under Krauthammer's logic, the Palestinians were justified in torturing Cpl. Waxman, which they of course were not.

Of course, if he reads this, Krauthammer will marshal his considerable skill in ad hominem attacks, accuse me of drawing a moral equivalency where none exists, and add that by doing so I had forfeited the moral ground to argue about torture at all. This line of argument raises the specter of exceptionalism, under which a nation's (in this case, Israel and the United States) singular moral standing with God is so exalted that any and all of its actions enjoy moral sanction by definition. In practice, exceptionalism serves as an excuse for a powerful nation to do whatever it wants to do to weaker nations because God is on its side. One saw exceptionalism at work in the British Empire's plundering of Asia, Imperial Japan's expansionist policy toward East Asia that touched off World War II, and the United States' Indian policy and, most recently, invasion of Iraq.

Moreover, Krauthammer barely deals with just who can decide whether his circumstances have been met. He writes vaguely about the "reasonable man" legal concept and seems to include the likes of Dick Cheney and Alan Dershowitz among them. I'll pass on that one. Moreover, I doubt that many of Krauthammer's "reasonable men" could be found in Guantanamo or the rendition prisons. We certainly didn't see evidence of them at Abu Ghraib.

He goes on to airily cite the "fact" that Nancy Pelosi knew about torture as somehow relevant to its morality because Pelosi is an elected figure. (I guess that means that Adolf Hitler was essentially moral because he assumed power by democratic means.) Pelosi has pushed back on CIA claims and has received plenty of support in doing so (see Just My Little Piece of the World here and here). Let's face it: Historically, the agency that brought us the Shah of Iran, the Bay of Pigs, and the "slam dunk" of WED's in Iraq has little reputation for either competence or probity.

Krauthammer doesn't address at all the possibility that his "standards" would lead to the slippery slope of indiscriminate torture even though it is clear that that is exactly what happened. Is it justifiable to torture an innocent person in the interests of extracting "crucial information"? What is the likelihood that torture will result in wrong information that leads to grave policy errors? Are these risks worth taking? Is torture the only means of disarming the "ticking time bomb"? Does torture expose captured American soldiers to greater risk? These questions have no place in the Krauhammerian world where you can tell the bad guys by their turbans.

Back in 2004, Dick Cheney asserted that "detainees interrogated at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp had revealed that Iraq had trained al Qaida operatives in chemical and biological warfare," a claim we now know to be factually untrue (if not a lie). As this article points out, it's now known that interrogators at Guantanamo were under tremendous pressure to produce evidence of a connection between Iraq and Al-Qaeda. As the article points out

During the same period, two alleged senior al Qaida operatives in CIA custody were waterboarded repeatedly — Abu Zubaydah at least 83 times and Khalid Sheik Mohammed at least 183 times.

Did this torture produce the false information that helped justify the debacle in Iraq? Was it reasonable men putting the pressure on interrogators to justify a conclusion that had already been reached? Torture is wrong. It's always wrong. No nation, especially one that sees itself as divinely blessed, can justify it under any circumstances. The Bush Administration approved of torture because it could, because torture made the chickenhawks who got us into Iraq feel powerful. It's that simple. It's that pathetic...

Just A Song: Patty Griffin's "Be Careful"...

There just ain't no cure for the "Summertime Blues". Stupid and Contagious writes:

With its legendary guitar riff, and its combination of striking verite, innovation, elan, sparseness, and anti-establishment angst, "Summertime Blues" established a template for countless other songs, from the Fifties onwards.

In fact , it could be said that, in many ways, "Summertime Blues" opened the door for the most important music revolutions of the Sixties and, via punk, of the Seventies too. Almost all the significant artists from those periods have paid Eddie, and this specific song, glowing tributes...

Fade to gray at the foot of Canal Street...

One Hell Of A Ride

One Hell Of A Ride, Willie Nelson (4 CDs). In 1972, a frustrated and unfulfilled Willie Nelson left Nashville to return to his native Texas and settle near Austin. A major talent who had already written bona fide classics "Night Life" and "Crazy," Nelson possessed what would soon be recognized as one of the richest and most versatile voices in popular music. He dedicated the first half of the Seventies to guiding country music back to a rootsier sound and to refining his inimitable voice. Nelson spent the latter part of the decade becoming an international star who rivalled Elvis Presley as an interpreter of popular music. After that, his restless musical spirit explored one genre after another with admittedly mixed results that nonetheless displayed a musical vision unmatched in its munificence of spirit. One Hell Of A Ride condenses Nelson's remarkable career -- now in its sixth decade -- into 100 songs that pretty much deliver on the promise of its title. Perhaps the most fascinating element of the collection is the evolution of his unique vocal style. From the beginning, Nelson confounded the Nashville establishment by lagging behind the beat, much like a jazz singer. In the Seventies, he began the practice of holding one or two notes before yielding to a sudden cascade that might cram seven or eight notes into the same space occupied by the previous one or two. He also added his faint tremolo, perfecting the overall effect in time for 1977's Stardust, a crossover megahit that put households everywhere on a first-name basis with him: He became simply "Willie" to people the world over. Which doesn't mean that he stopped making great music in 1977. One Hell Of A Ride proves this with generous samplings of his memorable duets with the likes of Ray Price, Merle Haggard, and Emmylou Harris; several cuts from 1992's excellent Borderline; some fine gospel sides; and such unexpected delights as his 2001 interpretation of "Rainbow Connection." It has indeed been a hell of a ride, and the beauty is that it's not over: Jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis recently announced that he and Willie planned a July release of a blues concert from earlier this year.

Live Cactus, Joe Ely/Joel Guzman. Live Cactus isn't the best Joe Ely live album -- that will always and forever be Live Shots, one the best live albums by anybody -- but it's a pleasure from beginning to end. Ely has had a long and, outside of Texas, underappreciated career. Once considered Texas music's answer to Bruce Springsteen, he has settled into a productive tenure as one of Austin's most respected performers and recorded many fine albums. Live Cactus sounds like nothing so much as a pair of South Austin neighbors entertaining themselves on the back deck on a summer evening. You can practically see the cooler of beer between them. Accompanied by ace accordianist Guzman, Ely works through a set of faves, putting a new twist on each of them.


Lumiere Dans Le Noir, Zachary Richard. Cajun singer-songwriter Zachary Richard's first French language album proves a great vehicle for his haunting, plangent voice. It doesn't matter if you don't speak French (I certainly do not). When someone can sing that most beautiful of Western languages with with as much feeling and insight as Richard, there's no difficulty understanding what he's getting at. With the help of some of Louisiana's finest musicians, you feel Lumiere Dans Le Noir in your heart and soul, which in the end is what great music is all about.


Notes From The Underground, Elliott Murphy. Paris ex-pat Murphy follows up last year's excellent Coming Home Again with another thoughtful, witty release. Murphy's voice -- sort of a cross between latterday Bob Dylan and Mark Knopfler -- is perfect for his songwriting. Notes features literate lyrics that cover ground spanning the simple the joys of the alphabet ("A if for Amazed you walk out of the shower...F is a word I do without shame") to the spiritual plight of old age ("Tell me if you can/Am I part of a plan/Will my secrets unfold/When I'm useless and old.") On the other hand, this is a man grateful for what he has and who has come to appreciate the power of love: "I count all my blessings 'till I can't count no more/I know God's grace when I walk in your door." I try not to lean so heavily on lyrics when I write reviews, but this guy is awfully good and can speak for himself much better than I can. Listen, and listen closely.


Live From Artist's Den, Patty Griffin (DVD). Normally, it would be a great compliment to call someone Austin's best singer-songwriter. In Patty Griffin's case, though, this sells her short. Griffin is (hopefully) in the midst of a stretch of excellence comparable to Steve Earle's 1995-2000 run. Each CD she releases tops the one before it, culminating in last year's brilliant Children Running Through. Along the way, she's evolved from a terrific belter to a vocalist of inquisitive nuance and deep emotion. Now, you can see what its all about with this concert DVD, which intersperses brief interviews into a concert from New York's Artist Den. Check it out:

Wedding Day

Sublime. People kept asking us to get married regularly if it meant an event like last night's. The ceremony was brief but moving:

• Entrance to "The Lighthouse Keeper's Waltz," performed by Kevin Burke and Cal Scott
• Remarks by Rev. Herb Payton
• Reading of "I Would Live In Your Love" (Sara Teasdale) by PK
• "In My Life," performed by The Beatles
• Vows
• Recessional to "Heavenly Day," performed by Patty Griffin

We chose "In My Life" to commemorate Mark and Laura as well as to express our feelings for each other. 

More tomorrow, when I can publish the dinner menu. I can't say enough about the dinner and celebration after, though. For now, I am blessed with health, two great sons, two great stepsons, and someone to spend the rest of my life with whom I love as a wife, dear friend, and trusted confidant. 

Last night, I asked the hotel receptionist for an extra room pass for "my wife." I haven't been able to say that in over seven years. It sure felt good. And right.