Now That They've Won, What Will They Do?

Cornell professors predict the Obama administration`s course
(Nov 5, 2008 at Cornell University)

Richard Booth, professor of city and regional planning
Ted Lowi, the John L. Senior Professor of American Institutions
M. Elizabeth Sanders, professor of government
Joel Silbey, the President White Professor of History Emeritus
What will President-elect Barack Obama do once in office? What can he realistically do?

From the nation's economic crisis and its bloated budget deficit to the crises in health care and foreign policy, four Cornell professors agreed that Obama's reform agenda faces daunting challenges. The problems also include working with wounded Republicans, frustrations from the inherent complexities of the nation's woes and the glacial pace of Congress.

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Ahmed Rashid: Descent into Chaos

The US and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Central Asia.
Speaker: Ahmed Rashid, author and journalist.
(Jun 10, 2008 at the University of Chicago. Courtesy of CHIASMOS)

The growing instability and resurgence of Islamic extremism in Afghanistan and Pakistan pose a great threat to U.S. interests and global security. In his new book, Descent into Chaos, Ahmed Rashid examines the rising insurgency, booming opium trade, and weak governance in Afghanistan, concluding that U.S. strategy in the region has been a complete failure.

Ahmed Rashid is a Pakistani journalist based in Lahore. He was the Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia correspondent for the Far Eastern Economic Review, for 22 years until the magazine was recently closed down. He presently writes for the Daily Telegraph, London, the International Herald Tribune, the New York Review of Books, BBC Online, The Wall Street Journal, The Nation, and academic and foreign affairs journals. He appears regularly on international TV and radio such as CNN and BBC World Service. He is the author of three books, including the best sellers Taliban and most recently Jihad.

From the World Beyond the Headlines Series.

© 2008, The University of Chicago

How Happy Can You Be?

Barack Obama's era of good feeling rolled on this week—even Karl Rove expressed admiration for his centrist Cabinet picks.

But not everyone is singing “Happy Days Are Here Again.” Democracy is messy, and even when nearly 70 percent of Americans are optimistic that Obama will be a good president, there is the other 30 percent. Look beyond the sober skeptics and the principled opposition, and you'll find an ugly fringe festival on the web, cultivating the wounds left by the 2008 campaign.

This is the Obama resistance. They are the hardcore haters, the unhinged, the paranoid—firing their shots from the outer-reaches of American politics and strafing the common sense center.

On the left, the self-appointed ideological enforcers are smelling a bait and switch. They see Obama's decidedly centrist Cabinet as a betrayal of his beliefs and his base. As the executive director of Moveon.org Eli Pariser told the AP: "If they turn out to be all disappointments, we'll have a good three years to storm the gates at the White House." For the new New Left, the reflexive rhetoric of Ramparts lives on.

They can already claim some scalps. Obama's campaign intelligence advisor, John Brennan, a 25-year CIA veteran, who was widely believed to be a shoo-in for CIA Director, withdrew his name from consideration in part because he came under fire from the blogosphere for being inadequately opposed to terrorist interrogation techniques such as isolation, sleep deprivation, and rendition.

To be sure, a large part of the far-left’s discomfort is with the non-optional war we find ourselves in against radical Islam itself—as 60’s lefty Robert Scheer complained after the president-elect’s condemnation of the Mumbai attacks, “Unfortunately, on Monday Obama stuck with the absurd ‘War on Terror’ language he inherited from Bush.” But the most focused fire of the past week, from The Nation's Katrina vanden Heuvel on down, has been directed at the reappointment of Defense Secretary Robert Gates. This criticism from OpenLeft.com's Chris Bowers is typical: "Obama's retention of Gates as Secretary of Defense signals, above all, a clear unwillingness on Obama's part to engage in politically difficult fights at the start of his administration."

This perspective is consistent with a longstanding liberal Netroots Obama critique, expressed by the founder of DailyKos, Markos Moulitsas, on MSNBC after this summer's FISA vote. Moulitsas said Obama might be one of those "spineless Democrats who are ... afraid of controversy." (Moulitsas, for his part, has declared himself skeptical but not angry at the Gates reappointment.)

In the eyes of some liberal Netroot skeptics, Obama's self-described pragmatism and cool, conciliatory manner is a sellout sign of weakness, not strength. To them, the hyper-partisan politics of confrontation is a positive good, an appropriately equal and opposite reaction to the Bush administration.

Ironically, some wingnuts on the right are blaming Democrats' techniques on their newfound commitment to tear down the next President of the United States. Take one particularly unhinged culture warrior, Michael Eden of TheAmericanSentinel.com, who writes: "Barack Hussein Obama and his Democratic lackeys get to wear the bullseyes on their foreheads for the duration of the next election cycle…don't let a bunch of appallingly blatant hypocrites tell you that you owe Obama one more iota of respect than they gave Bush… It’s time to start burning down their houses and salting their fields."

The self-described "resistance" takes on a decidedly more respectful but no less strident tone at Grassfire.org, a well-funded effort to register one million official Obama resisters by Inauguration Day. (So far more than a quarter million have signed up.) The site takes quaint pains to explain that "as the first President with African-American lineage, Barack Obama's election is a historic landmark in the long journey of purging the terrible scourge of slavery and racism from our nation's soul." The problem: "the far-left and socialistic elements that comprise the centerpiece of his agenda." As their mission statement proclaims:

Wealth redistribution and higher taxes? We Resist! ... Open borders, amnesty and undermining of our uniquely American culture? We Resist! Taxpayer-funded abortions and a radical anti-life agenda? We Resist! The weakening of our military and retreat in the war on Terror? We Resist! ... The end of marriage and the exaltation of LGBT rights? We Resist! International taxation and submitting our nation to the ideals of "global citizenship"? We Resist! The Courts stacked with leftist judges who betray our Constitution? We Resist!

The invocation of militarism in opposition also bubbled up days after the election courtesy of Phil Broun, a Republican congressman from Georgia, who actually compared Obama to Hitler and Soviet dictators in an interview with the Associated Press. Broun completely mischaracterized Obama’s support for a Civilian Response Corps, a Bush administration effort to rebuild the infrastructure of failing states, saying, "We can't be lulled into complacency. You have to remember that Adolf Hitler was elected in a democratic Germany.” Broun's office subsequently refused to issue an apology.

And the week after the election, the Rev. Jay Scott Newman of Columbia, South Carolina told his parishioners they should not take communion if they voted for "Barack Hussein Obama" because "our nation has chosen for its chief executive the most radical pro-abortion politician ever to serve in the United States Senate or to run for president" and that "constitutes material cooperation with intrinsic evil."

It would be easy to dismiss these statements as the work of a few well-placed cranks. But the politics of hate has a trickle down effect, as the residents of Madison County, Idaho—which voted 85 percent for McCain-Palin—fund out after the election when a school bus full of second- and third-graders chanted "assassinate Obama."

As we gain some perspective on the presidential campaign, we see that the fear-mongering has left psychic wounds which are not easily healed. While the far left remains fundamentally allergic to the real-world responsibilities of governing, there are those on the far right who are fundamentally opposed to uniting behind our new president, despite John McCain's honorable plea to his supporters—some of whom booed his election night request at the Biltmore in Phoenix. Just because Sarah Palin can pivot from saying Obama is "palling around with terrorists" to telling Larry King "I'm proud of Barack Obama," doesn't mean that supporters like those who yelled "Obama Osama" and other slurs outside a Palin rally in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, will know whether she was telling the truth then or now.

Politics is not blood sport and government should not be a warfare of interests. Hate makes a cheap and easy recruiting tool. The danger, of course, is that hate can ultimately lead to violence. So rather than just thinking of homegrown extremists as the benign circus freaks of American politics, we should keep an eye on their efforts, keeping in mind what President Eisenhower said a half-century ago: "The middle of the road is all the useable surface. The extremes of left and right are in the gutters."

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The scandals for KBR just keep coming

The former Halliburton subsidiary responsible for the sexual assault of Jamie Leigh Jones and the accidental electrocution of a U.S. soldier is now subject of a class-action lawsuit for exposing employees to "unsafe water, food, and hazardous fumes" at the largest U.S. installation in Iraq.

According to the Army Times, Joshua Eller, a former technician with the 332nd Air Expeditionary Wing, said that while he was stationed at Balad Air Force Base in 2006, he experienced skin lesions that spread and became worse, along with debilitating blisters on his feet, vomiting, cramping, diarrhea, and severe abdominal pain.

As former KBR Water Purification Specialist Ben Carter described in this clip from Iraq for Sale and in his Congressional testimony, KBR failed to provide adequate water safety, resulting in toxic drinking and bathing water. This war profiteer also failed to manage a medical incinerator properly, instead disposing medical waste and human remains in an open air burn pit. Eller claims that at one point, he saw a wild dog running around the base with a human arm in its mouth that KBR had dumped into the pit. And the grizzly kicker, the suit accuses KBR of using mortuary trucks that "still had traces of body fluids and putrefied remains in them when they were loaded with ice" later served to U.S. troops.

It's high time we hold KBR and Halliburton accountable. Hopefully, Congress will pass Rep. Jan Schakowsky's bill to phase out private military contractors altogether over the next five years. Until then, I fear these scandals stemming from KBR's blatant disregard for the welfare of our soldiers in Iraq will continue.

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The New Kotecki: Ron Paul a Capella

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Love For Sale (Cole Porter) in Tree Versions

1. Libby Holman

2. Eartha Kitt

3. Liza Spinelli


When the only sound in the empty street,
Is the heavy tread of the heavy feet
That belong to a lonesome cop
I open shop.
When the moon so long has been gazing down
On the wayward ways of this wayward town.
That her smile becomes a smirk,
I go to work.

Love for sale,
Appetising young love for sale.
Love that's fresh and still unspoiled,
Love that's only slightly soiled,
Love for sale.
Who will buy?
Who would like to sample my supply?
Who's prepared to pay the price,
For a trip to paradise?
Love for sale
Let the poets pipe of love
in their childish way,
I know every type of love
Better far than they.
If you want the thrill of love,
I've been through the mill of love;
Old love, new love
Every love but true love
Love for sale.

Appetising young love for sale.
If you want to buy my wares.
Follow me and climb the stairs
Love for sale.
Love for sale.

Bush: "I'm So Sorry..."

From ABC News: Bush on the Iraq War...

Looking back on his eight years in the White House, President George W. Bush said he was "unprepared" for war and pinpointed incorrect intelligence that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction as "biggest regret of all the presidency."
"I think I was unprepared for war," Bush told ABC News' Charlie Gibson in an interview airing today on "World News." "In other words, I didn't campaign and say, 'Please vote for me, I'll be able to handle an attack,'" he said. "In other words, I didn't anticipate war. Presidents -- one of the things about the modern presidency is that the unexpected will happen."

From AP: Bush on the economic crisis...

President George W. Bush expressed remorse that the global financial crisis has cost jobs and harmed retirement accounts and said he'll back more government intervention if needed to ease the recession.
"I'm sorry it's happening, of course," Bush said in a wide-ranging interview with ABC's "World News," which was airing Monday. "Obviously I don't like the idea of people losing jobs, or being worried about their 401(k)s. On the other hand, the American people got to know that we will safeguard the system. I mean, we're in. And if we need to be in more, we will."

From CNN: Bush on helping lose the election for McCain...

President Bush told an interviewer that his presidency may have helped Barack Obama win the White House.
"I think it was a repudiation of Republicans," he told Charlie Gibson of ABC News, according to a transcript released by the network Monday. "And I'm sure some people voted for Barack Obama because of me. I think most people voted for Barack Obama because they decided they wanted him to be in their living room for the next four years explaining policy."