Posts from — December 2004

Kevin Drum at Political Animal opines on why the Republicans are pushing Social Security “reform”, but ignoring Medicare, which is in much worse shape. He notes that solving the problems with Medicare is going to be a mess and needs to happen much sooner.

The people doing this have little concern for Social Security, any payments they might be entitled to will amount to “lunch money” in their retirement plans. Most will be receiving generous taxpayer-funded retirements and/or are already wealthy people: nobody runs for Congress because of the paycheck. From their point of view, Social Security is an employee expense that they would like to do without. Removing the cap on Social Security taxes while maintaining the cap on benefits would not only fund the system for the foreseeable future, it might enable the rate to come down.

Medicare, on the other hand, is something that they and their friends do use. Medicare will reduce the cost of their medical insurance significantly, so they approve of it.

The problems with Medicare were, to a large extent, exacerbated by the actions of the Republicans in their Medicare Drug Bill. The drug coverage was a nice idea, but they shouldn’t have removed the possibility of negotiating for lower prices. In the free market buyers and sellers negotiate, in the Republican market consumers pay whatever the corporations want.

Bush continues his unbroken string of rewards for incompetents by awarding the Presidential Medal of Freedom to the Iraq War’s “Three Stooges”: Tenet, Franks, and Bremer.

Tenet’s pre-war intelligence was uniformly wrong. It was so bad, that it was a wonder the US managed to find the country.

Frank’s war skills were so stellar that at a time when the military was recalling 70-year-olds to active duty, he was allowed to retire. Not enough troops, and no attempt to maintain order or secure weapons dumps.

Bremer’s Coalition Provisional Authority was so inept that his efforts at rebuilding cost taxpayers billions while leaving the Iraqis worse off when he departed than when he arrived.

A note to Bush: when you award a medal that is suspended from a neck ribbon, you fasten the ribbon before hand, face the honoree, and slip it over their head, which they bow to accept the award. It’s a medal, George, not a necklace. You have a protocol chief at the White House, he/she can show you how it’s supposed to be done.

The folks over at Wampum are once again organizing the Koufax Awards for the Bleft [BLog lEFT, as opposed to BLog rIGHT or Blight].

While I’m not running for anything, there are many fine people among the Sputniki [Russian: fellow travelers] on the right-side who deserve to be mentioned.

If you go and enter a name, have the link ready to save time, and give some exposure to friends.

Looking for something different for those on your list, how about a goat or chickens?

The Beeb has an article on charities that provide livestock to the developing nations and links to a number of sites for catalogs.

Use your own discretion when using this suggestion for significant others, especially those involved in the preparation of your food.

For those who have missed the underlying theme of the Republican Party it is shifting the risks of life from their upper class & corporate base to wage earners and small businesses.

That’s what “tort reform” is all about, limiting the risks for corporations and insurance companies. The gutting of EPA and other regulatory agencies reduces the risks for polluters. The tax and Social Security reforms are shifting the costs and risks down to wage earners.

Social Security is good to go for the next 50 years. The only change necessary is to lift the cap on contributions and it is good forever. Social Security is an insurance program, the bare minimum pension.

The people who are now calling for reform screamed bloody murder when Bill Clinton suggested moving some of the Social Security trust fund from T-Bills into the stock market. This was at a time you could make money in the stock market. Now they want to do it when you can make more money in a pass-book savings account than the stock market. You are not going to “save” Social Security by de-funding it; you are just going to drive up the deficit.

I would also wonder about the status of this “personal Social Security fund” in the event of bankruptcy or divorce; is it off-limits, or can it be claimed by a credit card company or hospital?

I’ve been trying to discern the pattern in Rumsfeld’s vision for the military, and I’ve been able to pull a few threads out of the knot based on weapons systems and organizational changes he’s moving towards.

Rumsfeld is creating a military force for peacekeeping missions, brigade-sized operational units of a few thousand with light armor capable of being deployed rapidly.

He is building on the basis of the Stryker brigades currently training in the Army.

He is downplaying heavy armor and artillery, and is attempting to replace them with aircraft.

He wants to replace all of the military support personnel with civilians and contractors.

He is stressing reliance on equipment: unmanned drones, robots, satellites, etc.

It’s an interesting concept that eliminates a lot of overhead, like pensions and benefits after 20 years of service for non-combat specialties. He wants to eliminate base schools and commissaries. It reflects his experience in the business world: cut costs by reducing employee benefits, the Wal-Mart model.

This is a vision for the military in a post-Cold War world with little prospect of a major land war.

There are a couple of things wrong with this concept and his continuing pursuit of it: George W. Bush and the Iraq War. He needs the resources that he has been dismantling, and civilians can’t supply support services in a live fire area. “Just-in time” inventory control doesn’t work when your trucks and warehouses are subject to being blown up.

He planned for a quick war and a cut back to a peacekeeping operation, and that didn’t happen. What happened is exactly what his military staff told him would happen, but he ignored them because if they were so smart they wouldn’t be wearing uniforms and receiving such piddling salaries.

He had to be forced to order the body armor, the ammunition, the armored Humvees, the upgrade kits for the Humvees and trucks, because his plan said the war would be over shortly and they didn’t fit in his vision for the new “corporate” military.

He didn’t plan for the occupation, the wounded, the equipment loss, or the manpower requirements and now he’s throwing patches on problems.

If they start recalling the people discharged under “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”, you’ll know the draft is coming.

Consider this intriguing situation: Congress has been giving the Department of Defense hundreds of billions of dollars, but Rumsfeld isn’t spending it on the military. The Defense Department initially blocked the Intelligence Reform Bill which transfers some budget control from the Department of Defense to a new Director of Intelligence. Exactly how big is Rumsfeld’s “slush fund”, and what is he planning to do with it?

I pulled these from a scan of the other former British colonies spread about the world:

John Shovelan of Australian Broadcasting has an interesting take on those going to court over the US military’s use of “Stop-Loss” orders. He wonders: if soldiers with contractual terms of service must remain beyond those terms for the length of a declared national emergency, why can cabinet secretaries resign for “personal reasons”?

I would wonder about General Tommy Franks being able to retire, but a 70-year-old military doctor being recalled. It would seem that the commander of the effort wasn’t as important as doctors or truck drivers or infantry soldiers.

TV New Zealand reports that their parliament has approved a civil unions bill that recognizes both de facto and same sex relationships. Americans generally refer to de facto relationships as “common law marriages”. Such couples will have the same rights and obligations as married couples. Supporters say the bill is a human rights issue since it applies equally to both heterosexual and homosexual couples without discrimination. Marriage is reserved only for heterosexual couples.

Canadian Broadcasting is reporting the personally shocking news of a proposed merger between Molson and Coors! A real brewer aligning with that right-wing Rocky Mountain purveyor of watery equine urine…the inhumanity!

Koshka

April, 1992 – July, 2004

Koshka means female cat in Russian, but she wasn’t always sure she wanted to be a cat. Her favorite active past-time was playing “fetch” with a crumpled wad of paper, and the only way she would go outside was riding on my shoulder.

She loved heights and I had to be careful when closing doors, as she might be on the top, asleep.

She was among a group of three feral kittens that were my first attempt at hand-feeding, having been orphaned at about one month of age. Her mother was a niece of Eve and was lost to traffic. At three months her brothers were adopted, but she decided to stay with me.

Her warm furry body tunneling under the quilt to curl up at my feet is missed as the nights grow colder, and when I wad up a sheet of paper to pitch into the waste basket I still expect to hear her running through the house for a game of “fetch”.

First let me say that I appreciate the thought. People taking time out of their limited store and devoting it to learning and practicing so that they can walk around town singing for those who can’t get around any more is really nice.

I know that a lot of work goes into something like this, and some people, like Andante, really worry that all of the vowels are fully formed and projected for a better performance than the intended audience can truly appreciate.

Further, I realize that people are doing it without the expectation of wassail [hot chocolate or sweet tea would be thoughtful] or alms, as was the custom in earlier times, they are simply trying to spread Christmas cheer for its own sake [or in local cases to fulfill community service hours].

I have one small quibble: please, either limit the number of carols so that everyone can remember the words, or use printed lyrics. I can assure you that I am unfamiliar with any carol with a second verse of “dah-di-dah-dahhh-dah-di-dah” [although Little Drummer Boy comes close]. Trust me on this: there are words and the people who remember the words generally do so by wasting no memory space on the music.

I’m trying to understand how, when looking for someone to be the Secretary of Homeland Security – the people who determine who is qualified to enter the United States, who is qualified to ride on airplanes, and what primary colors to scare people with – this administration failed to conduct a background investigation on its nominee and blindly accepted what was on his resumé.

They offer up someone who was a “dead-beat dad”, embroiled in debt-problems which resulted in an arrest warrant being issued, is a high school drop-out, was involved in unauthorized redirection of government funds at the NYC agency he headed, was involved in a stock transaction that looks suspicious, hired undocumented aliens, and failed to pay taxes. That’s what has appeared in less than a week from public sources.

I wouldn’t have expected a complete background security check to have been completed in a week, but couldn’t they have at least tried a Google search before nominating the guy. People buying shotguns go through a more rigorous process than this.

Do you feel safer now, knowing this is the level of attention this administration pays to Homeland Security?

In the end it was apparently immigration problems with his housekeeper and nanny that caused Mr. Kerik, Bush’s choice for Secretary of Homeland Security to withdraw his nomination, according to reports at CNN and the Beeb.

The FBI didn’t notice that the guy had an employee without a green card? The man selected to head the Nation’s Border Patrol and Immigration service didn’t know his home sheltered an undocumented alien? They are going to charge him, right?

The NPR/Slate hybrid Day-to-Day covered the Pentagon misdirection on armoring vehicles in two reports on Thursday. Alex Chadwick talks with two NCOs who discuss using 1/8-inch steel plate and sections of wide conveyer belts to make their vehicles safer as they transport fuel in Iraq.

It was the Mike Pesca report that demonstrates how truly clueless this Pentagon is about the real world. An obfuscating Pentagon parrot started talking about all of the preliminary work that needs to be done before adding armor to trucks: redesigning the suspension, beefing up the transmission and drive trains to take the extra weight.

While I realize that the Pentagon is looking for work to funnel to future employers of its civilians and millions to spend on research is tempting, but get a damn grip. We are not talking about race cars, these are trucks! The additional weight of armor? These vehicles transport tanks! Their loads are measured in TONS! Is a couple hundred pounds of steel likely to have any real impact on a tractor-trailer?

Cable television is big on do-it-yourself shows and make-overs, why doesn’t somebody come up with a program that pits teams against each other to armor National Guard and Reserve trucks, a militarized version of Pimp My Ride. The winner gets to specify which unit currently deployed in Iraq will get a package containing maps, radios, and GPS receivers as well as the modified vehicles. Maybe they could get a tie-in with National Geographic, Garmon, Motorola, and one of the satellite radio services.

[Ed: Pimp My Ride is a real show, my neighbor’s oldest son keeps threatening to turn my name in over the appearance of my van.]

Apparently engrossed with his Star Wars missile defense system and his mission to the planets [AKA the undebated dollar dump to Tom Delay’s district], President Bush may be attempting to build a Deathstar orbiting satellite.

Of course no one will admit that’s what’s happening, not even Senator Rocketfeller, apparently having problems breathing inside the large black helmet he wore, who protested the inclusion of an obscenely expensive program that he couldn’t confirm was actually in the intelligence budget that may not exist, but if it does it’s classified.

There was a report from George Lucas’s junior assistant’s dog groomer that Mr. Lucas has been holding meetings with his intellectual property attorney about the government’s continuing unauthorized use of his trademarks which was giving a bad name to fictional evil geniuses.

Anonymous sources said that it might be an armed satellite intended to control neighboring space around the planet in violation of multiple international treaties, or seed money for a Bush project to balance the budget by assisting the relatives of deposed African leaders recover hidden assets.

Devolving . . .

Friday Catblogging^TM [Kevin Drum]

It’s Herself!

Momma Eve, the oldest cat ever. I didn’t think she allowed pictures.

They say she could catch squirrels and blue jays.

[Ed: All of the cats you will see here, except one, are descendants of this cat, who was at least 16 years old when she died. Her true grey color is shown on her right side.]