Now, I understand and appreciate Senate tradition, and the importance of respectful dialogue in the halls where political opponents come together to govern a diverse nation.

But, dear Senate Dems, have you noticed that your "friends" across the aisle don't give a flying fuck about working with you? Have you noticed they don't give a flying fuck about governing? Or about the public good? Have you noticed they are fucking currupt as shit?

As I pointed out last month:

The failure on the part of the Democrats to adjust their values to their new environment has put them on the losing side of battles they really should have won, even though they are in the minority, because they've clung to their old ways, when new and drastically different ones would be more appropriate.

Part of the problem is that Senate Democrats haven't been defeated sufficiently enough to be provoked into changing their strategy. (More on that general point later.)

Mr. Nader said he did not think there would be much difference between the justices Mr. Gore would choose and those Mr. Bush would appoint. After all, Democrats had helped confirm Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, hadn’t they? Besides, “You can’t really predict how Supreme Court justices will behave.”

And he called the possibility that a court packed with Republican appointees could overturn Roe v. Wade a “scare tactic.” On Sunday, Mr. Nader said in a television interview that even if Roe v. Wade was overturned, the issue “would just revert to the states.” Just?

Ah, Ralph Nader! I remember it well, how he told us there was no difference between the Democrats and the Republicans, and the way he explained that his candidacy wouldn't help Bush ... Good times, good times.

It would be nice, sometimes, to believe in the Devil and a Hell of fire and brimstone, just so I could imagine people like Ralph Nader suffering there for eternity plus 15 minutes (to make sure he's crisp around the edges).

One of Mr. Nader's future roommates

New York Academy of Sciences:

Extreme flooding in the region, both Bowman and Hill flatly insist, is not a matter of if but when. What needs protecting? Some of New York City is not just low-lying; it's underground. Bowman's Web site offers this inventory:

Infrastructure at risk includes subway entrances that are close to sea level, tunnels and their air and vent shafts, subway track and signal systems, bridge access roads, small bridges, airports, port freight-handling facilities, water pollution control plants and their tide-gate regulators, combined sewer outfalls, landfills, solid-waste transfer stations, pipelines, power plants, and buildings in areas with high property values and dense population.

This last item would include lower Manhattan's fabled real estate and Jersey City and Hoboken, in New Jersey.

In December 1992 a powerful nor'easter delivered a sobering preview that

• shorted out the entire New York City subway system, stranding people on trains and in stations (salt water conducts electricity, causing shorting, and it's corrosive);


• shut down the PATH transportation link between New York City and New Jersey;


• forced LaGuardia Airport to close;


• submerged part of the FDR Drive in Manhattan under four feet of water and flooded other roadways;


• raised sea level at the southern tip of Manhattan by about eight-and-a-half feet;


• flooded Battery Park Tunnel with six feet of water.

A more severe storm surge would have far-reaching effects if Manhattan's low-lying financial district were badly flooded.

In the early hours of March 6, 2006, a fire broke out at a warehouse complex near San Antonio International Airport, causing extensive damage to the offices of The Holocaust History Project (THHP), an organization that has been, for the last ten years, in the forefront of confronting Holocaust denial online, in addition to providing educational materials to students throughout the world. Arson investigators now have confirmed that the fire was intentionally set and are continuing their investigation.

It was just the latest in a series of attacks with the apparent intent to silence THHP. For the past 18 months, the THHP website has been under an unprecedented Distributed Denial of Service attack. This cyber attack began on September 11, 2004, and is being carried out by a specially modified version of the MyDoom computer worm, programmed to target the THHP web server.

[via Afarensis]

Thieves hit Democrats' office
By Betty Parker

Lee County's Democratic headquarters had its second break-in in almost as many years this week.

Thieves ignored computer equipment and other valuables, and took the party's financial records and voter data, said Lyndia Bradley, Lee County's Democratic chairwoman.

"This was a very targeted, purposeful break-in," she said Wednesday. "They were obviously interested in certain things, not things you sell on the street for money."

Computers were vandalized, but there was no sign of forced entry.

The office is located on Park Meadow Drive in south Fort Myers.

Bradley said the office is not staffed daily this time of year, and she and others were last in the office March 1.

The theft was discovered Monday.

The party's headquarters had a similar break-in shortly before the 2004 elections when the office was in a different location near the intersection of Fowler Street and Colonial Boulevard.

Thieves vandalized the office and stole records and computers in that incident.

And just before the November 2004 presidential election, vans used to carry voters to register to vote, and cast early ballots had their tires slashed outside Kerry-Edwards headquarters in Royal Palm Square in Fort Myers.

The vans carried pro-Democrat signs and bumper stickers.

Democratic campaign worker Annie Estlund remembered that incident because she volunteered in that office.

"There's just been so much of this kind of thing," she said, recalling the office break-ins. "It's hard to think politics has come to this."

A mini-Watergate?

Everything in this administration comes down to three political positioning maneuvers (and note that #2 and #3 really are subsets merely designed to serve #1):

1. Corporations should operate absolutely unfettered in order to line the pockets of the oligarchical elite (See: empire building, environmental and safety deregulation, using the armed forces to pry open new markets/ resources/cheap labor, tax cuts, union busting, privatization of anything and everything, etc.)

2. Pandering to the Religious Right (in order to get the votes to further #1).

3. Escape any and all responsibility for the obscenely awful consequences of #1 upon the 90% of Americans who fund the stupidity - and pay the personal price in their daily lives - for these policies.

Because their focus is so sharp and their object so single-minded (and simple-minded as well, considering the long-term ramifications of the damages they're causing to their own clients), nobody's safe and almost nothing is sacred. Anything that gets in their way, or is simply perceived to get in their way, is toast, regardless of the consequences.

The only thing I'd add is a #4 -- to protect and preserve the political position and historical legacy of George W. Bush. The problem is Georgie can't be re-elected, so (I ask again) what, exactly, are they preparing for, what the purpose of all this positioning (aside from providing one-stop service for their clientele)? Is it Jed, or is it something more sinister?

• Iraq is, as we all knew it would be, given the ideological predisposition of the neo-cons not to properly perpare for the post-invasion period, entirely a shambles, and there's little possibility now of anything happening except an American pull-out. How and when and who will replace us are still to be determined, but, reading the tea-leaves (which is what this exercise is all about) the pull-out seems inevitable.



• Sometimes it seems as if everyone in the Republican party (and their maiden aunt as well) is being investigated or charged or indicted or sentenced. It's not true, of course, but it does seem that way. Suddenly, the GOP is not invincible and shielded from following normal conventions of ethical behavior, and that, for them, is a very bad thing, because their normal everyday way of doing business requires that they have the freedom to operate outside the bounds of the law, ethics and morality. Without that margin to work in, they're dead.



• But lets's go back even before that, to the election of 2004, which I think was the harbinger of the doom of the Republicans, the beginning of the end. Despite the fact that Bush won, despite the success of the Republican GOTV effort to bring record numbers of people to the polls, despite the significant media differential which worked in the favor of the right-wing candidate, despite Bush being an incumbent in the White House who was a self-declared "War President", the victory was razor thin. I've kept the note I wrote at the time up on my sidebar, because I thought it was significant then, and it continues to be significant now:

  Bush's winning margin was the VERY SMALLEST for any incumbent full-term President since 1892. Over 60 MILLION PEOPLE, 49.25% of those participating, voted AGAINST George W. Bush -- more people than have EVER voted against ANY Presidential candidate in American history.

  There's no way to spin that fact as the best possible outcome for the Republicans -- it was, instead, the very worst possible good outcome for them.



• There are growing indications, not widespread yet, but glimmers here and there, that reporters (those members of it who are not right-wingers or fellow-travellers themselves) are beginning to catch on to the fact that the right uses them, by playing the "balance this" game. Knowing that outmoded journalistic convention requires one viewpoint to be "balanced" by presenting an opposition viewpoint, the right has succesfully moved the "center" of the conversation further and further to the right by moving their positions farther and farther away from otherwise accepted social conventions. This results in "he said/she said" articles in which these right-wing views are legitimatized by being paired with conventional views (usually centrist and not liberal ones, which also helps move the acceptable range of opinions out tot he right). Add water, shake, repeat. It may be the case that some reporters are tired of this, and are starting to re-state factual truths without regard to also reporting right-wing bullshit.

On firedoglake Pachacutec takes a look at the situation from the other direction: if the tide is turning, why aren't we gaining?, and comes up with more points:

• The most recent great wave of innovation in American politcs was the conservative "revolution," often traced to Goldwater and moving through Reagan to the present day. That movement has reached its apogee and is now moving past its peak. Evidence for a turning of the tide is all around us.



• What evidence? Well, for the first time in the post-Viet Nam era, to the best of my knowledge, more Americans trust Democrats on national security than trust Republicans. That's seriously revolutionary.



• The institutional strengths of the conservative establishment mask how strong we are. That's because the creation of conventional wisdom still lies in their hands, as they control the media. They worked hard, starting in the 1980's, to gain that control. Now they have it. But already, it's slipping. We are cracking it up, along with Jon Stewart and other cultural forces.



• The conservaitive revolution took a long time to build. The funding came from the corporate side of the coalition, but the grassroots passion came from the fundamentalists, who decided to move out of their own social circles to run for small, local offices, and move stealth-like into the mainstream. That also really took off in the 1980's.



• As a progressive movement, we are about where their side was in the late 1970's, before Reagan became president. And yet, the pace of our progress in the last two years has put their early progress to shame, probably because our ability to use the Internet to dissemminate information and to communicate alters the pace of social change generally.



• As a progressive movement, on the issues, we already have the Early Majority on our side, but we have to close the sale in the midterms and consolidate it in the '08 presidential campaign. The media will follow our progress, and not see it or give it credit in advance. That's because the media is in the hands of pro-establishment forces.



• To maintain strong majority governance, we don't need to win over any more than a solid, sustainable 5% of the Skeptical Guardians. Sometimes we will have more than that, sometimes less, but if we can keep a solid average above 50%, obviously, we dominate. Forget the Confirmed Traditionalists, the flat earthers. We'll never win them and we don't need them.



• Even once we win more Democratic seats in '06, we still need to push the party to stand for progressive ideals. The fundamentalists actually kept pushing the Republican party for 20 years before becoming the party establishment, or at least its co-establishment. It won't take us as long, I think, but it will take at least two more election cycles, I figure.



• We win by erosion and consistency. Thats' why I chose the graphic I chose. But I think we can cover the ground the conservative revolution covered in thirty years in much less time: more like ten years.



• Malcolm Gladwell wrote a popular book caled The Tipping Point. That was all about moving a product in the market from the Early Adopters to the Early MAjority, and he said that's the hardest part. And it is. But get this: we've already past that point. The electoral results will follow. Katrina was a tipping point. So is the Dubai Ports deal. The collapse of the American effort in Iraq, now apparent to a majority of Americans, is a tipping point.



• Finally, to sustain our gains, we have to tell America a new story about what America is and what we need. Government is not the enemy. Public service with accountability serves the public interest. "Together, We Can Do Better" is not a bad branding statement, overall. The narrative, which underlies all the stories Americans tell themselves, is up for grabs now. We have to fill that void with our story. And we will.

It has to be emphasized that just because the tide has turned (if it has turned) doesn't mean that right isn't still dangerous, or that it doesn't maintain power. The continuing presence of Roberts, Alito, Scalia and Thomas on the Supreme Court fairly much guarantees that one avenue for social reform that was once available to us is now closed off for the foreseeable future. That makes it even more vitally important for us to take back both the Presidency and at least one house of the Congress (preferably the House, although the Senate might be easier to accomplish). If we just regain the White House alone, there's still an awful lot that can be done to stop the degradation of our society, through the power of the executive branch and the bully pulpit of the presidency.

I think the tide has turned, I think the power of the right is already waning, and I think we're on the way back. It's going to take a while (just as it took a while for the right to recover from the total defeat that was the Goldwater election), and we'll be held back by entrenched forces within the Democratic party (about which I'll have more to say in another post I've been meaning to get to for several weeks), but we're heading back.

BIRMINGHAM, Ala -- Three college students were arrested Wednesday in a string of nine rural Alabama church arsons last month that allegedly were set first as "a joke" and later as a diversion, federal agents said.

Benjamin Nathan Moseley and Russell Lee Debusk Jr., both 19-year-old students at Birmingham-Southern College, appeared in federal court Wednesday and were ordered held on church arson charges pending a hearing Friday.

Matthew Lee Cloyd, 20-year-old junior at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, was arrested later Wednesday, U.S. Rep. Artur Davis said. Davis said he learned of Cloyd's arrest from the FBI. Calls to the FBI about Cloyd's arrest were not immediately returned. Cloyd previously attended Birmingham-Southern.

"While all three are entitled to have their day in court, we are very hopeful that this is the end to the fear that has been rampant in West Alabama," Davis said.

The arrests came in a probe of arsons at five Baptist churches in Bibb County south of Birmingham on Feb. 3 and four Baptist churches in west Alabama on Feb. 7. The federal Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives agency had made the arsons its top priority, with scores of federal agents joining state and local officers.

Moseley admitted to the arsons after his arrest Wednesday, according to an ATF affidavit presented at the initial court appearance.

The affidavit said Moseley told agents that he, Cloyd and Debusk went to Bibb County in Cloyd's Toyota sport utility vehicle on Feb. 2 and set fire to five churches. A witness quoted Cloyd as saying Moseley did it "as a joke and it got out of hand," according to the affidavit.

Moseley also told agents the four fires in west Alabama were set "as a diversion to throw investigators off," an attempt that "obviously did not work," the affidavit said.

[...]

The three students arrested Wednesday are white and all either attend or previously were enrolled at Birmingham-Southern, a Methodist-affiliated liberal arts college.

Five of the churches were destroyed and four were damaged, including one in which congregants, alerted during the night that churches were afire, arrived just as the apparent arsonists were leaving. That fire, quickly put out, had been set in the sanctuary near the altar -- a pattern in the other church arsons in Bibb County and west Alabama.

Jim Parker, pastor of Ashby Baptist Church at Brierfield, a Bibb County church destroyed in the Feb. 3 arson, said the congregation has been apprehensive about whether the arsonists had some "political or religious agenda."

"I want to find out the motivation of these young men. Young folks get some crazy ideas," he said.

He said he had spoken to federal agents and understood the suspects were promising students from good families.

"We really are concerned about them as people," he said. "I would just like to know what they were thinking."

(The original version of this story described two of them as "theater students" but "theater" was later dropped, and a subsequent story describes them as "aspiring actors known around campus as pranksters.")

Update: Ed Brayton catches a leader of the religious right attempting to exploit the church fires.

To dwell on impeachment now would be to drain energy from the election efforts that need to succeed if impeachment is ever truly to be on the agenda. To insist on support for impeachment as a litmus test for Democratic candidates would be to impede those efforts altogether.

Concurring: Matthew Yglesias, Josh Marshall, Roger Keeling, Sam Rosenfeld.

Oh, and me.

• Students throughout the country are blatantly stealing my deathless prose for their reports, garnering grades much higher than they normally receive, and thus bringing my site to the attention of the authorities;



• Someone has discovered that many of my posts are lifted word-for-word from the weblog of former British Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock;



• The folks at Conde Nast and NYREV have belatedly discovered that 97.83% of the material on unfutz is lifted wholesale from The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, and that, in fact, "Ed Fitzgerald" is actually nothing more than a mildly complex artificial intelligence program designed edit together those excerpts with enough "new" material (created from bits and pieces of liberal and progressive propaganda collected together through the years by the programmer, Victor Hedwick) to fool copyright lawyers into not ceasing-and-desisting on a daily basis.

Seriously, the Turn It In website, by a company called iParadigms, LLC, appears to be dedicated to preventing plagiarism [PDF] from the Internet by high school and college students. (I guess the honor system isn't sufficient any more.)

Turnitin’s unique plagiarism prevention system makes it easy to determine if students are writing original work. For every paper submitted to Turnitin, we generate two versions of a unique, customized Originality Report. ... Each report details the results of our comprehensive Internet, commercial database, and submitted student paper database searches in a concise and unambiguous format.

Our system is the most widely used, user-friendly, and technologically sophisticated plagiarism prevention tool available. It confirms instances of suspected plagiarism, and more importantly, acts as a powerful deterrent to stop cheating before it starts.

I'm going to have to ponder this a little, but my initial reaction is that it seems a little like overkill. I'm suspicious of the self-serving statistics that the company provides to support its case -- "80% of college-bound students admit to cheating on schoolwork, yet 95% of them never get caught" (more here) -- and wonder if the "plagiarism plague", isn't a bit overstated, yet another aspect of the cultural over-reaction which brought us such inanities as school "Zero Tolerance" policies where students are expelled for minor, inconsequential or inadvertant infractions.

I surely hope that no one ever analyzes unfutz for its "Originality" quotient. Even looking past the long excerpts from articles that sometimes stretch "fair use" to the limit (perhaps -- any lawyers out there like to comment?), you've got the ideas lifted wholesale from other weblogs, and those that I've adopted wholesle over the years and have no memory of where they came from. I like to credit all my sources whenever I can, typical, I think , of blogging's "transparency", but there's a lot I just don't remember where I originally came across it, and precious little I can point to on unfutz that's, ultimately, completely original with me. That's just part of being integrated into my culture, in spite of the painful ways in which my culture has disappointed me.

Kraft is not wrong about the aims of the radical Islamists. They do, indeed, wish to recreate the long-gone glories of Islam, and that means subjugating the West and replacing our system of humanistic individual rights with a system of laws based on the Qur'an. If they were to succeed, Kraft is correct that little or nothing would be left of what we recognize as our basic rights and liberties. (At its peak, Islamic civilization was quite tolerant and fairly liberal in comparison to Western civilization at the time, but if the jihadists were to win their battle, that's not the type of society they would set up.)

Where Kraft is entirely wrong is in seeing the war in Iraq as part of the fight to hold off the radical Islamists. It isn't, and it never was. Saddam Hussein was a secular dictator who occasionally used Islamic tropes and means to better control the people of Iraq, and he had the normal amount of relations with the Islamic countries around him, just as any ruler of a country looking out for his own interests would, but he was never a radical Islamist, and never a hater of the West. Sure, he played the West off against the USSR, as did many other countries during the Cold War, but he eventually turned against Moscow and developed a strong relationship with the U.S., which saw him as one of the pillars of stability in the Middle East. (The Persian Gulf War changed that, of course.)

What's more, Saddam never had strong relationships with Islamist terrorists -- that was, and continues to be, true of Iran -- and he kept the ultra-Islamists in his own country out of power and under his thumb. Saddam's dictatorship was a horror and a terrible place to live in, but not because Saddam was promoting an Islamist agenda -- he was out for himself, his family, and his tribe, in that order, and would never put any other agenda above that. Radical Islamists couldn't and didn't operate with impunity in Iraq, because Saddam did not allow it.

No, the only thing which allowed jihadists to operate at will in Iraq was the American invasion of the country, the toppling of Saddam, and, more than anything else, the criminal lack of planning and foresight on the part of the Bush Administration in moving from the invasion to the occupation. Once Saddam was overthrown, which took very little effort (as expected) our concern should have been to immediately maintain and sustain security within the country, not only for the good of our troops, but for the good of the Iraqi people, and to allow a new society to be built. It's an open question if it was actually possible to unite Iraqis into a complete and viable country, but it's dead certain that the only possible way for any such plan to succeed was to immediately establish security within the country. We clearly didn't do that, and didn't even show much interest in doing it. As a result, the insurgency was able to establish itself, and to garner growing support within the country -- and the insurgency begat the civil war, and that's where we are now.

Kraft's paen to liberal values, as well as the Bush Administration's supposed avowed aim of bringing democracy to Iraq, would be somewhat more believable if they supported those values here in the U.S. as well, but the actions of the Bush Administration indicate that they don't fundamentally believe in, or even really understand in their hearts, our Constitution or the foundational concepts of the United States. They are basically hard-nosed authoritarians who would tell us what to do whether we want to do it or not, which is hardly a democratic viewpoint. In their opinions, it's our job to jump to attention and obey blindly and without question whatever order they deign to give us, and just forget about whether those orders are lawful or justified.

But, as I said, Kraft is right that the radical Islamists are out to get us. That's why it's such a shame that when the Administration had the opportunity to do something positive to hurt them and to further our cause, in Afghanistan, they failed so completely to follow through on their initial actions. Oh, they took down the Taliban, of course, but they were so anxious to move on to Iraq that they failed to capture Osama bin Laden, and they abandoned the country to once again be a power vacuum in which radical Islamists can thrive. The "national government" we established basically controls Kabul only, and the rest of the country is in the same shape (or worse) as it was when the Russians left and the Taliban eventually took over. Our failure there makes it probable that Afghanistan will once again become a serious problem, and an open base of operation for the jihadists.

We are in a period of conflict with forces that are implacably opposed to us, but that force isn't Islam itself, it's a particular type of Islamic belief, and the way to fight it isn't with a "Global War on Terrorism", unless "war" is understood to be a metaphorical usage. You can't fight "terrorism", you can only work, in myriad ways, some military, but most of them diplomatic and economic and cultural, to get rid of the conditions which allow people who use terror to thrive. We've done essentially nothing to do that, wasting the 4 1/2 years since the attacks of 9/11 on military half-measures where full measures were needed, and a pre-emptive attack against a threat that was never imminent. Otherwise, we have done next to nothing except assign Karen Hughes to speak baby talk to Moslems and insult their intelligence and their culture.

Since 9/11, and even before, Bush and his advisors have shown us again and again that they don't know how run a government, don't know how to get concrete results at anything except stealing elections and spinning the media, don't have any feel for what policies will and will not do what needs to be done, and, worst of all, don't have smallest amount of feeling for the humanity of others, especially those who oppose them. Mr. Kraft continues in that tradition, despite his protestations of belief in values that liberals do indeed hold dear, and work hard to maintain and extend.

There's a good rebuttal to Kraft here.

[Thanks to Joan]

Five thousand years ago, much of southern Louisiana did not exist. A hundred years from now, it is unclear how much of it will remain. The region, it is often observed, is losing land at the rate of a football field every thirty-eight minutes. Alternatively, it is said, the area is shrinking by a large desktop's worth of ground every second, or a tennis court's worth every thirteen seconds, or twenty-five square miles a year. Between 1930 and 2000, some 1.2 million million acres, an area roughly the size of Delaware, disappeared. Hurricanes Katrina and Rita stripped away an estimated seventy-five thousand acres -- a loss as big as Manhattan and Brooklyn combined. The U.S. Geological Survey has published a map illustrating the process. Areas that have already vanished appear in red, and areas that are expected to vanish by 2050 in yellow. On the map, the southern coast looks as if it were on fire. According to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, "The rate at which Louisiana's land is converting to water is probably the fastest in the world."

(Other maps are available here, here and here.)

Excerpts from "Watermark" are continued here.

AT&T announces $67B buyout of BellSouth

The US telecom industry continues to consolidate--AT&T today announced a $67 billion buyout of BellSouth. Just months ago SBC bought AT&T for $16B and adopted its name. Executives believe the move will save over $2B annually.

The combined company will have complete ownership of Cingular Wireless, the largest mobile carrier in the US. According to the Wall Street Journal, insiders said that Cingular was the driving force behind the deal:

It was the steep growth of Cingular -- joint owned by BellSouth and the former SBC -- that helped push the two firms together, say telecom bankers familiar with the space. As the importance of the wireless business grew, they say, it became inevitable that SBC (which adopted the AT&T name just months ago) would consolidate its position in the South. Put together, the SBC territory would extend from California to Florida, north to Illinois and south to Texas.

AT&T will have a major presence across the country in broadband, long distance, local phone service and wireless. It will dwarf Verizon in size.

It's good to see that our regulatory agencies are doing their jobs so diligently. If I remember correctly, the breakup in 1982 of AT&T and the Bell System of telephone operating companies (most of them, except for Cincinatti Bell and Southern New England Telephone, owned by AT&T) was supposed be help consumers by increasing competition. Since then, though, the industry keeps consolidating, and the Regional Bell Operating Companies (RBOCs or "Baby Bells") created by the breakup have sucked in most of the non-AT&T competition as well, so that once the AT&T acquisition of Bell South goes through, there will only be three left:

The acquisition will also eliminate the last Baby Bell still using the famous Bell System logo (although Cincinatti Bell, an independent company, still uses it).