BREAKING: US Negotiating Resignation of Mubarak

Posted: February 3, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Breaking News, Diplomacy Nightmares, Egypt, Foreign Affairs, Human Rights, John Birch Society in Charge, Middle East, right wing hate grouups, Surreality, Team Obama, the internet, U.S. Politics, Violence against women | Tags: , , , , , | 29 Comments

Latest: White House, Egypt Discuss Plan for Mubarak’s Exit

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is discussing with Egyptian officials a proposal for President Hosni Mubarak to resign immediately, turning over power to a transitional government headed by Vice President Omar Suleiman with the support of the Egyptian military, administration officials and Arab diplomats said Thursday.

President Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, WH Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, and State Department spokesman PJ Crowly all took time on TV today to express American concern for use of overt use of violence, suppression, and intimidation of reporters, legitimate protest, and human rights groups.  Reporters have been beaten and ‘disappeared’.  Green Vans belonging to the State Police were caught speeding up, then running over protesters on their way to the Square. (WARNING: Video below shows this.)There is increasing evidence that the pro-Mubarak protesters are themselves state police and paid thugs.

State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said Thursday that the violence was carried out by “elements close to the government or ruling party.”

“I don’t think we have a sense of how far up the chain it went,” he noted.

There are no images coming out of journalists in Egypt.  Nile TV–the government propaganda channel–has been blaming foreign forces for the protests which is leading to attacks on nonEgyptians all over Egypt.  Nile TV journalist Shahira Amin has quit.  She’s joined the protesters.

There are increasing calls from the International Community to the Government of Egypt for restraint.  Here’s a link to an article from, of all places, China.

Australian Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd on Thursday condemned the violence, saying attacks on peaceful demonstrators are unacceptable and must stop.

“We call upon the government of Egypt to take steps to ensure that its citizens are free to demonstrate safely,” Rudd said in a statement.

“The disturbing events in Tahrir Square underline the urgent need for a negotiated and peaceful solution to this political crisis.”

UN chief Ban Ki-moon, who was on a visit to Britain, Wednesday urged all sides to show restraint during the unprecedented nine-day-old movement.

“I am deeply concerned by the continuing violence in Egypt. I once again urge restraint to all the sides,” Ban said after a meeting with British Prime Minister David Cameron.

Ban also said that any attack on peaceful demonstrators in Egypt was unacceptable and that he strongly condemns it.

In Athens, Greek Foreign Minister Dimitris Droutsas called on Egyptians to exercise restraint.

Egyptian protesters continue to pour onto the streets.  Friday protests are being characterized as a “final” Friday indicating the hope that  Friday will be the day Mubarak will quit.

One man, a 30-year-old lawyer named Tareq Hussein Ali, whose sweatshirt was so bloodied it looked like a red-brown bib, ventured his analysis. “Egypt will never be as it used to be,” he said.

…

“Last night showed that the government is at the last of their options,” Ali said Thursday afternoon, sitting on a grass patch in the middle of Tahrir – which means “liberation” – where dozens of protesters were resting under anti-government banners.

Tahrir on Thursday resembled a bustling open-air triage center. With businesses locked up long ago, young women in head scarves served water to demonstrators from inside a Hardee’s while weary-looking men sporting bandages dozed on the doorsteps of travel agencies, too many to count.

At every entrance to the square, protesters had set up security cordons backed up by neatly arranged lines of stones, in case of another attack. As in previous days, the Egyptian army presence was thin, just a few dozen soldiers looking on, and no uniformed police were in sight.

In a back alley, volunteers set up an emergency medical clinic, where doctors in dirtied white coats re-dressed wounds from the previous night. Hussein Dawood, a physician, said that more than 3,000 people had been injured, a figure that far exceeded the government’s count.

“We want the whole world to know that the Egyptian president organized an operation against his own people,” Ali said, “as if he was in a war.”

When Ali left his Cairo home Jan. 25 to join the first day of the protests, he told his parents: “I will come home victorious, or you will receive my dead body.” Late Wednesday night, after nearly 10 hours of running battles in and around the square, he was on the front lines near the museum alongside scores of young male demonstrators.

After days of watching the coverage I think I can safely say that there are very few people left standing that support Mubarak with the exception of Fox News, Tim Pawlenty, Newt Gingrich and others representing the extremely right wing element in the US.  It’s pretty obvious that instead of looking for communists under the bed that we are now to look for stylized, extremist  ‘Islamists’.  In fact, we’re now seeing some weirdish melting of Islam, Shari’a, socialism, leftists and communism.  How desperately deluded to you have to be to push that one?

“Any honest assessment on 9/11 this year, ten years after the attack, I think will have to conclude that we’re slowly losing the war,” Gingrich said. “We’re losing the war because there are madrassahs around the planet teaching hatred. We’re losing the war because the network of terrorists is bigger, not smaller.”

Gingrich pointed to the unrest in Egypt as posing a potential new threat to American security.

“There’s a real possibility in a few weeks, if we’re unfortunate, that Egypt will join Iran, and join Lebanon, and join Gaza, and join the things that are happening that are extraordinarily dangerous to us,” Gingrich said.

The right wing buzz word of the day is “Muslim Brotherhood” which is now seen to have tentacles that reach–according to professional wacko Glenn Beck–to some unknown place in US Democratic Circles. Here is an example from right wing extremist Frank Gaffney on Sean Hannity, professional bully.

The Muslim Brotherhood is often a target of right-wing pundits like anti-sharia crusader Frank Gaffney, who last month claimed the group had infiltrated CPAC. And as the single largest organized opposition group in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood has emerged as a target for the right as the protests continue.

On Hannity last night, Gaffney argued that “the Obama Administration’s policies are being viewed through, and actually articulated and implemented through influence operations that the Muslim Brotherhood itself is running in our own country.”

“You cannot possibly get your strategy right, you cannot execute it effectively if you don’t know that the enemy is actually giving you advice on how to proceed,” he said.

I mentioned this earlier, but I’m personally having to de-friend people on Facebook from people perpetuating this obvious right wing paranoia and hatred.  I’m not sure how any one could be following the coverage these last days and not realize that Mubarak’s behavior is unacceptable and that these are legitimate calls for democratic change from widespread and mainstream elements in Egypt.  I have to admit that most of these people have also been serious Sarah Palin apologists also.  We had removed blogs links from these people earlier this month for some of that behavior.  I’ve had to completely remove contact with them after the posting of some really hateful right wing posts to FaceBook.

There are legitimate concerns about the treatment of women by all fundamentalist religions.  However, it is becoming increasingly clear to most of us that these groups have jumped the shark and are motivated by ignorance and bigotry.  The complaints and shout outs I have seen recently for the Beck idea that some “caliphate” takeover is happening is clearly rooted in racism and extremist views of Islam.  Many of these are aimed not only at Egyptians but the President of the United States.  This does not reflect well for the values traditionally held by this country.  I personally find it deeply disturbing and frightening that these people are supporting a military dictatorship that is disappearing and brutalizing US journalists (more than 70), human rights activists, diplomats,  and–as BB pointed out today–US academics.

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About 99 percent of us have that sinking feeling

Posted: January 23, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: just because, Populism, right wing hate grouups, Second Amendment, Social Security, SOTU, The Bonus Class, the villagers, U.S. Economy, U.S. Military, U.S. Politics, Voter Ignorance, We are so F'd | Tags: , , , , , | 21 Comments

You know me and my wonky graphs.  You also know I blog a lot about rising income inequality and that I think it’s a huge problem.  So, this MOJO Power graph and the article it came with piqued my curiosity.  It’s from an article by Kevin Drum writing on a Timothy B Lee blogpost on the preemption of ‘genuine left wing voices’ by libertarians.   I’m not sure how libertarians could be confused for moderates, liberals or lefties but given that establishment conservatives have an orthodoxy so tight that few fit, I suppose everything else gets to wear the liberal label. But, maybe there’s more to it than that.

We talked about this a little on a thread yesterday.  Both Ariana Huffington and Kos used to be Republicans.  They left the party when the religious right took over and because, frankly, I don’t think they like the fact that so many blue collar Reagan Democrats had just up and joined their old country club.  There’s also the odd phenomenon of tea party populists that don’t seem to know where they are or where they belong either.  We’ve seen how a  lot of these folks have made their way into policy circles through their support or their horror of the current administration so I think it’s worth viewing three blog writers on that topic.  Why are so many people confused about their political identity any more?

Libertarian ‘insight’ used to the butt of jokes at academic cocktail parties where you discussed Utopian moonbattery and even worse fiction.  Now there seems to be an industry around producing what they call journals, institutions, and philosophy that is some how running loose in mainstream conversations demanding to be taken seriously.    It’s hard to do that because they don’t associate with data and they seem to thrive on passing memes that have no basis in reality.  (The ones on the FED just kill me.) They’re in the tea party, they’re all for Rand and Ron Paul, and yet, some of them have made their way to the liberal blogosphere.  What’s going on? Plus, what’s the deal with all these solid working class–in some cases UNION folks–heading to tea party rallies?  Haven’t they ever heard of Dick Armey?

Drum shows how the worst of the libertarian assumptions they hold up as facts just don’t hold up to the light of day.  He starts with a shared assumption from the right wing and libertarians as described by Will Wilkinson. This meme is the mild form libertarianism from the Hayek-Friedman sect.

It’s best to just maximize growth rates, pre-tax distribution be damned, and then fund wicked-good social insurance with huge revenues from an optimal tax scheme.

We’ve got scads of data that show this meme to be a completely false assumption.  We’d have a better economy right now if that were true.  In fact, the only time we had a decent economy in recent history was when that particular assumption was rolled back during the Clinton years.   But, don’t take it from me, read what Kevin Drum has to say.  Those assumptions are very wrong.

First, it contains an implicit conviction that libertarian notions of tax and regulatory structures will maximize growth rates. This is practically an article of faith on the right, but there’s virtually no empirical evidence to support it. As it happens, I’d argue that my preferred brand of the modern mixed economy is, on the whole, probably more efficient than a stripped down libertarian state, even one that includes lots of centrally-directed income redistribution. But not by much. Personally, I’d be pretty happy if both sides accepted the notion that within a fairly wide range of modern capitalist systems — from Sweden to the U.S., say — overall growth rates change very little. For the most part, we’re really arguing about other things.

Second, I suspect there’s no feasible path to Will’s state of the world. The problem is that a system that generates enormous income inequality also generates enormous power inequality — and if corporations and the rich are allowed to amass huge amounts of economic power, they’ll always use that power to keep their own tax rates low. It’s nearly impossible to create a high-tax/high-service state if your starting point is a near oligarchy where the rich control the levers of political power.

Third, look at the graph. We’ve had this trickle up to the one percent form of economic nonsense since the Reagan years and all it’s done is made things radically worse.   It’s led to this situation where the supply side of the curve completely craps all over the demand side of the curve in product markets.  The outright hostility to unions and the abuse and disempowerment of human beings–not human “capital”–have completely shifted  income levels and underlying market power to some place where you truly think you’d see some kind of general revolt, strike, or overthrow.

It should be patently obvious now that Wall Street has recovered, bonuses have recovered, and corporate profits have recovered while  any one not up at the top of that racket can hardly survive these days.  The unemployment rate, the numbers of foreclosures, and the numbers of bankruptcies are tips of the icebergs.  We’re not going to see growth rates of GDP that will clear that up too.  More frightening is that the powers that be don’t seem to even fake caring.

When you point all these things out to libertarians, they’ll shift the ground on you and say point me where it says in the constitution and mutter something about Wilson and the imperial presidency.  This is the place where they firmly intersect the right wing. Look, Wilson is dead.  The Bush legacy lives and the Obama legacy is still being written.  Still, some of them have crept over and become neoliberals and identified with the left.  Why?

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Politically Convenient Terrorism

Posted: January 20, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Crime, right wing hate grouups, The Media SUCKS, the villagers, U.S. Politics | Tags: , , , , | 12 Comments

Early into the Tucson massacre, I wrote a post called White Terrorist Apologia. It was based on a statement from a

Click on this picture to go to a short discussion on skinheads. Read the apologia for skinheads there in the comments. Comments like " skin heads have there place in our society" and "Great topic to write about but unfortunately, they pose no real threat to the Country as a whole! "

reader of Juan Cole’s Informed Comment that “pointed out that if a Muslim organization had put out a poster with American politicians in the cross-hairs, and one had gotten shot, there would have been hell to pay”.   We had a recent terrorist threat in Spokane with pics just shown  in the Seattle Weekly as a “sophisticated and deadly” bomb deposited along a MLK celebratory parade route.  Then,  we got the silence of the lambs.  My guess is that napsack was deposited by the Washington State Hate Group “The American Front Skinheads’ or some such spin off.  They’ve done stuff like that before. Here’s a refresher for those of you that don’t remember the early 1990s around the Ruby Ridge Incident and Waco.

In this context, the FBI recorded four incidents of right-wing terrorism between 1990 and April 1996 (when The Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996(1) “AEDPA” was signed into law), including two July 1993 bombings in Washington state, by the American Front Skinheads–one of a gay bar in Seattle and the other of the NAACP headquarters in Tacoma. More generally, from 1989 through 1991, the Justice Department reported that the number of bombing incidents in the United States increased from 1208 to 2499; none were acts of Arab terrorism. In 1993, there were forty-three deaths and over three hundred injuries due to bombings not tied to international terrorist groups.

EmptyWheel picked up on the quiet too and noted that Some Terrorism Scares Are More Useful Than Other Terrorism Scares.  Marcy discusses not only how we don’t screech about acts of terrorism most likely committed by right wing groups but that right wing blogs seem complicit in the silence.   She cites  David Neiwert and his running list of domestic terror attacks that she argues “demonstrates clearly that these are not isolated incidences”.  She also points out a very interesting headline at The Philadelphia Inquirer: ‘Has right-wing carping killed media coverage of major “domestic terrorism” case in Spokane’ by Will Bunch.

Which is why I can’t help but wonder if there’s a backstory here related to the past weeks coverage of the assassination attempt on Rep. Giffords, and the right-wing critique of some of that coverage. As you surely recall, the fact that a Democratic congresswoman was targeted in a state that has beeb a bastion of the Tea Party Movement and unrest over issues like illegal immigration provoked a number of articles about political rhetoric on the right — including the fact that Giffords had been mapped with crosshairs in the now famous political mailing by Sarah Palin’s PAC.

Does the pro-gun crowd disown these kinds of militias, own them, or just want them ignored by the MSM so as not to interfere with their spin that only leftist loonies threaten our government?  Marcy’s thoughts are pretty clear on the matter.

Because the press almost never covers these domestic terrorism incidents. And, just as importantly, our government doesn’t often (the biggest exception was the Hutaree bust) hold big press conferences to report on such events, partly is because most press conferences are about arrests, not unsolved crimes. Moreover, in spite of Neiwert’s and Bunch’s work, there is not one bogeyman, like al Qaeda, which the press can blame.

And without an easy and convenient bogeyman, terrorism scares don’t serve the same purpose for the press, or the government.

How much of this also has to do with the fact that we really have no real left in this country?  We actually have no actual liberals or socialists that really have a voice in media or a major following on the web.  All we have is ‘progressives’ and conservatives that aren’t interested in conserving anything but the wealth of the plutocracy.    As I pointed out in my January 8 post, even when the FBI and other law enforcement agencies point out these right wing militia groups, the right wing blogosphere and media turns it into an attack on gun rights and veterans. They deliberately miss the point.

This leads me to believe that we’re only subject to concern about terrorists when it’s politically convenient.  We can extrapolate terrorism out of building mosques but actually finding bombs along parade routes isn’t so interesting because it doesn’t play into the current political theatre.  The current political theatre is what’s cooking on the list of John Boehner and the like.  Right now, the list of acceptable terrorist threats include anything that might be linkable to  Mexican Drug Cartels, women wanting reproductive care, and Muslims. So, building a mosque is an act of terrorism.  Asking a pharmacist for drugs which stop uterine infections is an act of  terrorism.  Printing signs in both Spanish and English is an act of terrorism.  Actually leaving bombs on MLK day parade routes; not interesting.

We need to start calling a lot more people out on this.  It’s obvious that most Americans really don’t know what a long and violent history we have with these right wing militia groups.  Check out that running list and a similar one I posted on my January 8 thread.  These folks are violent, crazy, and well armed.  They are already in the country.  The press needs to do a better job of providing information on all threats to domestic security even when it doesn’t match with the narrative the right wing wants on gun ownership and anti-federal government memes.

Buried in our newspapers from yesterday:

Yesterday the AP reported an anonymous U.S. official saying it was the most “potentially destructive” device he’d ever seen.

“They haven’t seen anything like this in this country,” the official said. “This was the worst device, and most intentional device, I’ve ever seen.”A bit alarmist, perhaps. But no doubt that this thing exploding on a parade procession would have been horrific.

Oh, and think you’re someplace safe?

Police Seize ‘Large Amount’ Of Weapons From Blogger Who Praised Giffords Shooting: ‘1 Down And 534 To Go’

Police in Arlington, MA this week seized a “large amount” of weapons and ammunition from local businessman Travis Corcoran after he wrote a blog post threatening U.S. lawmakers in the wake of the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ). In a post on his blog (which has since been removed) titled “1 down and 534 to go” — 1 referring to Giffords and 534 referring to the rest of the House of Representatives and the Senate — Corcoran applauded the shooting of Giffords and justified the assassination of lawmakers because he argued the federal government has grown far beyond its constitutional limits. “It is absolutely, absolutely unacceptable to shoot indiscriminately. Target only politicians and their staff and leave regular citizens alone,” he wrote in the post.

Oh, and this guy wasn’t a Muslim, wasn’t a Mexican, and wasn’t a woman wanting an abortion.  He  falls into the extreme libertarian anti-government category like his buddies described up top.  His tweets indicate he’s a fan of Senator Rand Paul.  What will the Drudge Report and the Tea Party say to defend his arsenal and his speech?  Just another white guy who loves parts of the first amendment and all of the second?

Update: Description of  Corcoran’s Politics from the ThinkProgress post.

Corcoran calls himself “an anarcho-capitalist” and while his blog has been taken down, based on his Twitter page, he appears to hold views similar to those of many in the anti-government libertarian wing of the conservative movement, like many tea party activists. Anarcho-capitalism is a radical subset of libertarianism, and is often referred to as “libertarian-anarchy.” For example, echoing calls from many on the right, Corcoran tweeted, “it is unconstitutional for the Feds to even run a department of education.”

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