I have known for quite a while now that the vote I cast for you in November of 2008 – my first ever vote for a member of The Big Two – was one that I would not regret, because I am still a huge admirer of your intellect, but would come to view with a great degree of disappointment and anger. Read the rest of this entry »

At this point we’ve all heard much too much about George Bush’s Axis of Evil [1]. For those of you that have been flying in outer space or tripping on some really good drugs for the last 8+ years since W. coined this phrase during his State of the Union Address on January 29th, 2002 it simply refers to the boogey men that ran Iraq, Iran, and North Korea at the time. Well Saddam Hussein is long gone and Kim Jong-Il either has 1 foot in the grave or will be poisoned by inhaling all the polyester he seems to have such a predilection for, which leaves us with Iran and its 2 headed leadership composed of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei not to be confused with the founder of the Islamic Republic Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Moosavi Khomeini the man that overthrew the last shah of Iran Mohammad Pahlavi and was counted by the US at any point in time as Public Enemy #1, 2, or 3 at the very least. First off it is worth noting that while Ahmadinejad is the public and “secular” face of Iran the Ayatollah has as much if not more power over internal affairs with this fact most evident during the recent riots and protests after the rigged election in June of 2009 when the president and his cabal worked their magic to insure that the primary challenger Mir-Hossein Mousavi had ZERO shot at winning!

Which brings us to present day Iran and its ongoing efforts to enrich uranium for what they say is energy and medical purposes, but what the US, most of the EU, UN, and pretty much everyone else says is for nuclear weapons. Never mind the fact that Pakistan’s nuclear guru A.Q. Khan a man we knew had the skills to pay the nuclear weapons bills – but turned a blind eye while funding the Mujahideen’s efforts in Afghanistan against Russia in the 1980s – helped Iran get to this point in their nuclear aspirations [2]. The aim of Iranian scientists is to enrich the uranium to 20%, because this is the rate limiting step (i.e., everything else is cake!), but the question is where should this be done? The US? Fat Chance! Russia? GREAT IDEA![3]…..WAIT JUST KIDDING [4]. At this point those on the right’s belief that sanctions AND bombs or lots of shooting are the only solution to this elephant in the room is viewed as the single most awesome idea.

So along came Brazil and Turkey. You know the Rainforest and Turkish Delight people! Anyway enough with the stereotypes and back to the serious stuff. Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Brazil’s President the neoleftist Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva approached Mr. Ahmadinejad and proposed a fuel-swap of 2,640 pounds of low-enriched Iranian uranium to Turkey in exchange for 265 pounds of enriched uranium just prior to a vote on additional sanctions at the UN. This was a valiant effort by the leaders of Brazil and Turkey. Sure at the micro-level the deal didn’t and still doesn’t smell as good as it did/does from afar, but the point is is that this was progress no matter how you slice it and the United States managed to stamp it out before it even had a chance in order to insure: a) its status as global Decider In Chief and b) its “Special” relationship with Israel. Before you get in a huff about me being an anti-Semite let me say without a shadow of a doubt comments by the leader of Iran about the validity of the holocaust will go down in history as a combination of the dumbest, most insensitive, and anti-empirical words ever to be uttered and for that alone his credibility is null in my eyes. BUT he is still the co-captain of the Iranian ship and unless you want a complete conflagration within the entire Fertile Crescent, which would most assuredly spread to Northeast Africa and possibly areas of Southeast Asia where anti-Israeli and American sentiment is strong, you need to understand that for better or worse he is The Boss and any illusions otherwise belong at the little boys and girls table. President Obama’s press secretary indicated that he would like an invitation
to the kid’s table when he noted in discussing Iran’s rebellious ways that “While it would be a positive step for Iran to transfer low-enriched uranium off of its soil as it agreed to do last October, Iran said today that it would continue its 20 percent enrichment, which is a direct violation of United Nations Security Council resolutions” [5] I wonder if Mr. Gibbs is referring to the same UN Security Council where then US Secretary of State Colin Powell made his case for the Iraq invasion by holding up a model vial of anthrax and speaking to the administration’s certainty that Saddam had WMD? Would that be the same Security Council? Exactly! You see our Cop of Last Resort credibility is waning by the day and our “not invented here” (NIH) approach to all things Iran looks really bad. I think The Economist’s Charlemagne said it best in offering its take on what the US should do or say with respect to Turkey’s admission to the EU “SHUT up, please, you are not helping.” This is an oh so apropos piece of advice for our current administration as it relates to The Axis of Progress and nuclear proliferation. President Obama has made great strides as it pertains to G8 nuclear aspirations specifically his recent meetings with Dmitry Medvedev, but his willingness to confront the nuance that underpins Middle Eastern and Israeli nuclear tensions is and the lack of transparency with respect to the latter erodes at his credibility in the region.

At this point it would be worth stepping aside and letting the fledgling powers in Brasília and Ankara spread their (hopefully!) dovish and facilitative wings vis à vis our more blunt, slightly hyperbolic, and historically hypocritical efforts, because everyone in the Arab League has seen behind the curtain and what they saw was an image of Uncle Sam in bed with Israel. Not a pretty picture! What do we have to lose is really the question? Progress is painfully incremental when it comes to Iran and the longer we force their hand and strengthen sanctions the more resolute we make their leadership in painting an “us against them” mentality that Iranian’s no matter their political persuasion find intoxicating. If the gentlemen (and women?) from Turkey and Brazil were allowed to resume these negotiations we would for the first time in a long time be invoking Bill Clinton’s notion that our best moments come when we lead by the power of our example rather than by the example of our power. Prime Minister Erdoğan and President da Silva are not by any stretch of the imagination crazy anarchists or even lefties for that matter. They are men who see the world through a different lense than our “leadership” and for that reason alone their efforts are worthy of debate. I am not trying to legitimize Iran’s nutty leadership, rather I am saying as I have before that ISMs are not universally applicable and with this situation we have seen what our efforts have gotten us and what it has cost us in terms of geopolitical capital. It’s time to move over rover and let Jimmy take over! In this instance we were denied our primacy as Jaswant Singh former Indian foreign minister, finance minister, and defense minister put it in describing the Phoenix like emergence of Turkey on the international stage [6]. We can either embrace globalization or decoupling warts and all but we can’t have both. A little bit of both would be ideal with the former producing true multilateralism and the latter a United States of America that realizes…This ain’t our Grandparents’ diplomacy no more!

1. Cohen, R., The Other Iran, in The New York Times. 2009: New York, NY.
2. Giraldi, P., What FBI Whistle-Blower Sibel Edmonds Found in Translation: Why is her story being covered up? , in The Dallas Morning News. 2008: Dallas, TX.
3. Erlanger, S. and M. Landler, Iran Agrees to Send Enriched Uranium to Russia, in The New York Times. 2010: New York, NY.
4. Worth, R.F., Iran Avows Willingness to Swap Some Uranium, in The New York Times. 2010: New York, NY.
5. Sanger, D.E. and M. Slackman, U.S. Is Skeptical on Iranian Deal for Nuclear Fuel, in The New York Times. 2010: New York, NY.
6. Singh, J., A Hundred Weltpolitiks, in Project Syndicate. 2010.

The Department of Defense has identified 1,162 American service members who have died as a part of the Afghan war and related operations. It confirmed the death of the following American last week:

KING, Brandon M., 23, Pvt., Army; Tallahassee, Fla.; 101st Airborne Division.

According to icasualties.org:

Iraq = 4,4412 US, 179 UK, and 139 Other > 4,730 Total

Afghanistan = 1,188 US, 322 UK, and 436 Other > 1,944 Total

The dial continues to move in the wrong direction in the latter and it is speeding up! GET OUT WHILE YOU STILL CAN MR. PRESIDENT!

Re: a recent (and largely awesome) editorial in The Times by Brent Staples addressing the phenomena of cutting and pasting senior theses.

Mr. Staples should have stopped while he was ahead. I was thoroughly enjoying his piece on the wrote nature of higher education these days and the lack of any type of synthetic analysis, with students swallowing and spitting up information in no particular order and with zero continuity. However, upon arriving at the closing of this piece I was amazed to see the author distill rap musicians (his analogy) down robots “sampling” “…beats and refrains from the works of others.” Tell that to some of the great wordsmiths this country has ever produced like Q-Tip & Phife Dawg of A Tribe Called Quest, Rakim of Eric B. & Rakim, Gang Starr’s Guru, or my personal favorites EPMD. If Mr. Staples meant to say that DJs sampled beats and refrains he should have said so. The greatest rap MCs are true American treasures and deserve the respect we afford our favorite rock n’ rollers, jazz musicians, and country stars. CHECK YOURSELF MR. Staples!

You would think that any group with a proven track record back to 1970 of fighting against discrimination and for affordable housing, quality education, and adequate social safety-nets for “…low- to moderate-income people across the United States” would be just the type of organization that our “liberal” congressman Peter Welch would go to the wall for regardless of the baseless attacks leveled at such an organization by the bigoted and racist right-wing of the Republican party? WRONG! ACORN is that organization and Mr. Welch decided to vote “Yes” on an amendment – last September 17^th – to the Higher Education Act of 1965, which banned all federal funding to the Washington, DC based association of community organizers. This forced ACORN to end all field operations and close all field offices. This was a proud, vibrant, and relevant group with approximately 500,000 members branching out into foreclosure counseling at a time when minorities and the lower 25^th percentile in the country were getting hammered by variable interest mortgages coming home to roost and declining real-estate valuations due to a variety of external and internal forces. They were influential in upping voter registration and turnout amongst minorities during the 2008 election to levels not seen before, which along with their political mobilization efforts were the reason folks like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh lashed out at them so frequently and with such vitriol.

Mr. Welch has always attempted to evince a genuine and holistic concern for the little guy regardless of color, religion, or political preference. This turns out to be nothing more than window dressing given his stance on ACORN. Why am I coming down so hard on Mr. Welch ex post facto? Well it is quite simple really he acted hastily and did not wait for a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report released June 14^th, which vindicated ACORN of misusing the $40.4 million in federal grants it received and election fraud. Furthermore, he wasn’t even one of the 23 signatories to a letter requesting the GAO “…provide information on federal funding provided to ACORN and oversight of the use of this funding.” (Note: Neither Vermont Senators signed this letter either!) I have two questions for Congressman Welch: 1) Why vote before you have all the facts? and 2) Why not signed the aforementioned letter? I wonder what the harm is in having the GAO (Run the ever pragmatic and empirical Republican Douglas W. Elmendorf) do a little gumshoing in an effort to get all the facts in a row. When the facts change we are supposed to change our minds and clearly the facts with respect to ACORN have changed and I would hope that Congressman Welch would change his mind and work to overturn last September’s amendment to the HEA. After all this type of haste when in the hands of congress gives the imprimatur to really well thought out and implemented acts like The Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 (a.k.a., The Bank Bailout) and the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002. Two great ideas that have served this country and the world oh so well! Oh yeah and one more thing the moneys ACORN received during fiscal years 2005 to 2009 amount to about 0.3% of The 2008 Bank Bailout, which begs one more question: Don’t Mr. Welch and the rest of congress have anything better to do than bully and subsequently shutdown an organization like ACORN? I thought we wanted the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth! Orwell was right Ignorance Is Strength on Capitol Hill.

Below I have plotted the average annual income here in the US back to 1815 for the US Senate and 1967 for us little people. I mean that in all seriousness, because if ever there was a graph that said it all it is this one. The inset simply shows the same data for the period between 1967 and 2009, which is the timeframe where data is available for all percentiles. You will note the inset also has a number followed by the letter x, which if you remember back to any statistics or math courses you may have taken is simply the slope of a given trend (i.e., in this case it is a linear regression). The # that proceeds each x corresponds to the annual increase in each percentile’s average annual income. There are two extremely disquieting trends in this data: 1) the “haves” (i.e, Top 5^th percentile) and “have nots” spread is widening at an ever great clip, with annual income increases for the former 2.3 to 22× that of the latter percentiles and 2) the DC fat cats are gaining on this nation’s net-worth “elite” at a pace that one would hope would cause them a mild case of opprobrium. Fat Cat Fat Chance!

Maybe those Tea-Partiers are on to something if you strip away their bigoted, xenophobic, and often hypocritical bluster. The gentlemen and women that occupy the The Dirksen Senate Office Building have seen their wallets explode “George Costanza” style, however, only poor George who’s wallet was stuffed with junk our esteemed senators have jammed their wallets, pocketbooks, or man-purses full of Cold Hard Cash. Yet, in an effort to to not appear crooked – like Mr. Costanza did when he stuffed his other pocket with napkins – these folks shower us with patronage in the form of huge defense contracts, agricultural subsidies, and a static retirement age even though life expectancy in this country has risen to 148% of what it was at the turn of the 20^th century.

To those on the right that preach against Obama’s predilection for industrial policy I would challenge them not to avert their eyes when the next defense or farm bill comes their way, because if they don’t they will see plenty of industrial policy in these two massive pieces of legislation. The fact is that when we hear senators and their little brothers and sisters in the House talk about putting a freeze on non-discretionary spending they appear to be including their own salaries in the non-discretionary portion of the ledger. It seems to me that one of the reasons The Capitol Hill Gang doesn’t really attack everyone from Lloyd Blankfein and Rex Tillerson to their buddies Warren Buffett and Monsanto CEO Hugh Grant because they know that the only way they can maintain their excessive $3,676 annual salary increase is if they cajole the club they are set to surpass within the next ten years.

If you will humor I would like to return briefly to the George Costanza analogy vis à vis DC Motley Crue in order to put a bow on this portion of the story. As this particular episode of Seinfeld came to an end Mr. Costanza’s wallet suffered a tragic end at the hands of its greedy owner who decided to stuff a guitar lesson advertisement in it. This was the last item placed in the poor wallet as it exploded due to an excess of everything from hard candy and coupons to the requisite cash and receipts. Unfortunately the only people in this country willing to expose congress for its glutinous ways, both personal and as it relates to the aforementioned ill-apportioned largesse, are the Tea Partiers on the right and the folks I have marched proudly with at The UN, The Capitol, The RNC in St. Paul, etc. Both sides have heroes and when you scrape away the veneer each makes valid points. However, they (we) couch our arguments in so much irrational exuberance and non sequitur attacks that the message and the facts that directly - or indirectly – back them up are easily marginalized or out-and-out mocked by the media and the lawmakers alike.

Seriously does it get any better than this?

Ohio: Lightning Destroys 6-Story Statue of Jesus

I chuckle as I write because I was struck by the materials used in this wonderful project at Solid Rock Church…$250,00 worth of Styrofoam and fiberglass at 16,000 feat and 62 feet high.

In case your interested here is a picture of Pastor Lawrence and Darlene Bishop. What a cute couple! Judging by the First Couple of Solid Rock’s attire they are big fans of St. Augustine’s famous quote “Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet”.

I’m sorry I have to do this as this is a must read from the original citation in The Times when Big J as it is referred to was built:

“MONROE, Ohio - Jesus first appears in a flash, a white statue rising from the flat cornfields 40 miles north of Cincinnati. Then he is gone, hidden behind a gas station.

There really is no need to say any more as the title says it all.

U.S. Identifies Vast Mineral Riches in Afghanistan

I wonder if Big (What a..) Dick Cheney knew about this one! He couldn’t have otherwise he would have insisted on a more concerted and muscular presence in Afghanistan throughout the War On Terror. Oh well chalk one up to good ol’ fashion Mullah Omar misdirection. Something tells me you will be hearing that Freeport-McMoRan (FCX)out of New Orleans will be getting their grubby nefarious hands involved in this operation given their robust play in the global copper market. Okay you heard it hear folks with FCX’s near monopoly on the global copper market and a large presence in gold we will absolutely see a strong push by them into this nascent opportunity. Just for the record FCX shares are currently trading at $65.26 on the NYSE, traded as high as $87 on January 8th, 11, and April 5th of this year, BUT are far below highs of $114 and 122 on October 10, 2007 and May 19, 2008, respectively. These two dates and the general peak in copper prices happened to coincide with a commercial and residential housing construction boom in China and lead some to believe that we had reached Peak Copper, although the latter has yet to be proven, but it stands to reason we will reach some sort of peak given the finite nature of copper availability, the world’s insatiable appetite for it, and the fact that last I checked creating it out of thin air ain’t an option! I will keep a keen eye on this and I suggest anyone reading this do the same as I demonstrated with an earlier posting on Roche and it’s share skyrocket in the weeks leading up to and after The Great H1N1 scare.

I would just say to the Pashtuns of Southern Afghanistan caveat emptor with Exhibit A being FCX’s Grasberg copper and gold mine in Indonesia, where the natives are restless and growing more so by the day. FCX is determined to see this mine to it’s complete exploitation given that it accounts for $4 Billion of FCX’s $6.5 Billion operating profit (i.e., Nearly 2/3). Some have even decided that peaceful protest is no longer helpful resorting instead to primitive but effective methods of “Message Delivery”. However, when the Indonesian government equips the mine bosses with a security force of 3,000 troops and police the odds are stacked against the indigenous peoples of Papua and Papua New Guinea (See Map courtesy of The Economist).

…change my mind? Wrong! You stay strong and resist waffling even if it means keeping a man wrongly accused of murder - by his own wife - in prison past the 35 years he has already served. Now I know most people wouldn’t choose this path in upholding the law, but one female Republican governor has decided to go rouge and in the name of politics. No no no I am not talking about the Mama Grizzly/hockey mom from Alaska Sarah Palin folks. I am talking about her mirror image in Arizona’s very own Prickly Pear Governor Jan Brewer. There are so many places I could go with the comparisons but most are totally inappropriate and mean spirited, which is what these 2 women appear to revel in along with their brothers and sisters in arms.

Anyway if there is anyone that reads this blog I urge you to call the AZ governor and demand that she abide by the Arizona Board of Executive Clemency’s unanimous 5-0 decision to release William Macumber given that the evidence against him is non-existent and another man has emphatically copped to the double murder of a couple outside Scottsdale, AZ that Mr. Macumber’s mean spirited and apparently slightly evil wife framed him for back in 1974. You can’t make this stuff up and on top of her Orwellian passage of the much publicized and downright cruel SB1070 Ms. Brewer has succeeded in topping what appeared to be the ultimate sign of ignorance with this prank.  As P. S. Ruckman Jr., a political science professor at Rock Valley College in Illinois said. “I have been following state clemency for 30 years, and this is easily, easily, the most disturbing. It’s borderline despicable.” Amazing! I must at this point apologize to the great John Maynard Keynes for paraphrasing one of his classic quotes to fit this post and know I must apologize to him for including his name in a post with the former governor of Alaska and current governor of Arizona. It will never happen again! I included this entry in the Education category as an example of what can happen if you never receive any or in the case of Ms. Palin actively seek it…What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate. Some men (women) you just can’t reach. So you get what we had here last week, which is the way he wants it… well, he gets it. I don’t like it any more than you men.