The situation in Syria seems to be getting seriously worse, with the government security forces killing large numbers of people attending demonstrations and even funerals.

This violence has led the US and UK governments to express ‘concern’ and when the US expresses concern about the actions of the government of an Arab country, one has to fear, given recent history, that bombing will soon follow. The warmongering editorial board of the Washington Post is already demanding that Obama take action in Syria, though not specifying its precise nature.

There is a considerable lobby in the US that seeks the overthrow all the governments in the region that are perceived as unfriendly to the US and Israel and make them into client states. Syria is not too friendly to the US but not too hostile either (it has been of use to the US in torturing people on its behalf) and it has no oil, making it not that desirable a target for attack. The Bahraini and Yemeni governments are also launching brutal attacks against their own people but they are seen as allies and that should forestall any attacks, or even harsh criticisms, against those countries.

Creating a client state in Iran is the prize that the warmongers really seek which is why the slightest indication of Iranian involvement in another country is trumpeted as a sign of its malign intentions. Saudi Arabia has actually sent troops to Bahrain to lethally quell the protests there without any remonstration from the US. But if Iran were to send in troops to aid (say) the Libyan government, all hell would break loose.

Glenn Greenwald provides details on the latest revelations about Guantanamo and how the American press downplays the information that is unflattering to the US while the foreign media zeroes in on the truly awful things, such as “how oppressive is this American detention system, how unreliable the evidence is on which the accusations are based, and how so many people were put in cages for years without any justification.”

The US, France, and Britain rushed the UN and NATO to intervene in Libya allegedly in order to prevent an imminent massacre of 100,000 people, although the evidence to back up this charge was slim and looks increasingly like an alarmist lie to get public support for starting a war in Libya, similar to the lie about Saddam Hussein’s imminent nuclear weapons that was used to steamroll the US public into starting that war.
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One of the curious features about Sarah Palin that invites considerable mockery is the way she expresses herself. What does one make of the following, uttered just before the 2008 election?

We realize that more and more Americans are starting to see the light there and understand the contrast. And we talk a lot about, OK, we’re confident that we’re going to win on Tuesday, so from there, the first 100 days, how are we going to kick in the plan that will get this economy back on the right track and really shore up the strategies that we need over in Iraq and Iran to win these wars?

Or this, referring to Hillary Clinton:

When I hear a statement like that coming from a woman candidate with any kind of perceived whine about that excess criticism, or maybe a sharper microscope put on her, I think, ‘Man, that doesn’t do us any good, women in politics, or women in general, trying to progress this country.’

John McWhorter takes a stab at trying to understand why Palin speaks the way she does. He is a linguist whose book The Power of Babel I have praised before. He used to be a professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley but is now a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and is someone whose politics are at the conservative end of the spectrum and so cannot be accused of simply attempting to take a partisan shot at Palin. He seems genuinely intrigued at the way her thought processes work.

Palin is given to meandering phraseology of a kind suggesting someone more commenting on impressions as they enter and leave her head rather than constructing insights about them.
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Part of why Palin speaks the way she does is that she has grown up squarely within a period of American history when the old-fashioned sense of a speech as a carefully planned recitation, and public pronouncements as performative oratory, has been quite obsolete.
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What truly distinguishes Palin’s speech is its utter subjectivity: that is, she speaks very much from the inside of her head, as someone watching the issues from a considerable distance.
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This reminds me of toddlers who speak from inside their own experience in a related way: they will come up to you and comment about something said by a neighbor you’ve never met, or recount to you the plot of an episode of a TV show they have no way of knowing you’ve ever heard of. Palin strings her words together as if she were doing it for herself — meanings float by, and she translates them into syntax in whatever way works, regardless of how other people making public statements do it.
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Palinspeak is a flashlight panning over thoughts, rather than thoughts given light via considered expression.
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The modern American typically relates warmly to the use of English to the extent that it summons the oral — “You betcha,” “Yes we can!” — while passing from indifference to discomfort to the extent that its use leans towards the stringent artifice of written language. As such, Sarah Palin can talk, basically, like a child and be lionized by a robust number of perfectly intelligent people as an avatar of American culture. And linguistically, let’s face it: she is.

I think he’s right. Palin is ignorant about a lot of things and arrogant in her ignorance but is not unduly stupid.

While Obama was giving a talk at a fund-raising event in California for his 2012 re-election campaign, one of the attendees interrupted him by taking off her jacket revealing a t-shirt that said “Free Bradley Manning” and singing a song denouncing his continued detention. It should be noted that this was not some hippie protestor but occurred at an event for wealthy campaign contributors who had paid up to $35,800 to attend.

According to a BBC report, witnesses said that Obama was ‘visibly displeased’ and the woman was escorted out of the room and two of her fellow protestors left with her. Poor man. It must be so annoying to be reminded of one’s hypocrisy while dispensing campaign pieties and pretending to value high principles.

Although the government commits many violations of human rights that are even worse than what is happening to Manning, his treatment has become a potent symbol and I hope it dogs Obama wherever he goes.

The number of contenders courting publicity by publicly flirting with the idea of running for the Republican party’s nomination for president seems to be growing exponentially, ranging from those who are crazy to those who are pretending to be crazy in order to attract the crazy base of the party, though it is hard to tell the difference between the two groups. Me, I am waiting for the King of Crazy, Alan Keyes, to throw his hat into the ring to indicate that the craziness has reached a critical mass and we are truly off and running.

Some observers are bemused that Donald Trump has been leading the other contenders in some polls and is able to garner support in the mid-20% range, purely on his crazy birther shtick. His performance does not surprise me in the least because we now have, thanks to Keyes, a benchmark that says that the craziest of candidates can get 27% of the population to vote for him or her. It is only when candidates crack the 27% mark that I start to take them seriously.
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US photographer Chris Hondros, along with British photojournalist Tim Hetherington, were killed in Libya yesterday.

Hondros was the person who took the iconic photographs of what happened to an Iraqi family, especially a terrified little Iraqi girl, just after her parents were killed by US soldiers at a checkpoint in Tal Afar in 2005.

I cannot see that picture without the sickening brutality of war being brought home to me once again. I wrote about war and death and the impact such photos before.

Journalists like Hondros and Hetherington take great personal risks in order to remind us that was is not a video game but that real people, ordinary people, innocent people, suffer and die unnecessary deaths because of the ambitions and power lusts of a few.

And now they have become the latest statistic.

Perhaps in response to the international criticism they have received for the harsh treatment of Bradley Manning, the government announced that he will be moved from the brig at the Marine corps base at Quantico, Virginia to a prison in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

How much his treatment will improve remains to be seen.

You can always tell when the presidential election season begins in earnest for the Democrats. That’s when they suddenly discover that the base of their support consists of the less well off in society. So after giving the oligarchy almost everything they want during the first part of their period in office, they suddenly start spouting progressive rhetoric.

Last Wednesday, Obama gave his own plan for cutting the deficit and pleased his base by seeming to discover that they were still around. He first attacked the spending on wars and the tax giveaways to the rich, conveniently downplaying his own complicity in both.

We increased spending dramatically for two wars and an expensive prescription drug program – but we didn’t pay for any of this new spending. Instead, we made the problem worse with trillions of dollars in unpaid-for tax cuts – tax cuts that went to every millionaire and billionaire in the country; tax cuts that will force us to borrow an average of $500 billion every year over the next decade.

He also re-discovered his party’s commitment to the promises of the Great Society and attacked the Republican party’s plan to destroy Medicare and Medicaid.

It’s a vision that says America can’t afford to keep the promise we’ve made to care for our seniors. It says that ten years from now, if you’re a 65 year old who’s eligible for Medicare, you should have to pay nearly $6,400 more than you would today. It says instead of guaranteed health care, you will get a voucher. And if that voucher isn’t worth enough to buy insurance, tough luck – you’re on your own. Put simply, it ends Medicare as we know it.

This is a vision that says up to 50 million Americans have to lose their health insurance in order for us to reduce the deficit. And who are those 50 million Americans? Many are someone’s grandparents who wouldn’t be able afford nursing home care without Medicaid. Many are poor children. Some are middle-class families who have children with autism or Down’s syndrome. Some are kids with disabilities so severe that they require 24-hour care. These are the Americans we’d be telling to fend for themselves.

He gave a rousing promise to defend the social safety net, the way democrats always do when they are running for office.

I will not allow Medicare to become a voucher program that leaves seniors at the mercy of the insurance industry, with a shrinking benefit to pay for rising costs. I will not tell families with children who have disabilities that they have to fend for themselves. We will reform these programs, but we will not abandon the fundamental commitment this country has kept for generations.

That includes, by the way, our commitment to Social Security. While Social Security is not the cause of our deficit, it faces real long-term challenges in a country that is growing older. As I said in the State of the Union, both parties should work together now to strengthen Social Security for future generations. But we must do it without putting at risk current retirees, the most vulnerable, or people with disabilities; without slashing benefits for future generations; and without subjecting Americans’ guaranteed retirement income to the whims of the stock market.

He also seemed to notice the governmental actions that have led to rapid increases in wealth and income inequality that have characterized the last three decades.

Worst of all, this is a vision that says even though America can’t afford to invest in education or clean energy; even though we can’t afford to care for seniors and poor children, we can somehow afford more than $1 trillion in new tax breaks for the wealthy. Think about it. In the last decade, the average income of the bottom 90% of all working Americans actually declined. The top 1% saw their income rise by an average of more than a quarter of a million dollars each. And that’s who needs to pay less taxes? They want to give people like me a two hundred thousand dollar tax cut that’s paid for by asking thirty three seniors to each pay six thousand dollars more in health costs?
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There’s nothing serious about a plan that claims to reduce the deficit by spending a trillion dollars on tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires. There’s nothing courageous about asking for sacrifice from those who can least afford it and don’t have any clout on Capitol Hill.

He once again invoked the Democrats favorite “They forced me into it!” ploy to excuse his own party’s complicity in the process.

In December, I agreed to extend the tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans because it was the only way I could prevent a tax hike on middle-class Americans. But we cannot afford $1 trillion worth of tax cuts for every millionaire and billionaire in our society. And I refuse to renew them again.

Beyond that, the tax code is also loaded up with spending on things like itemized deductions. And while I agree with the goals of many of these deductions, like homeownership or charitable giving, we cannot ignore the fact that they provide millionaires an average tax break of $75,000 while doing nothing for the typical middle-class family that doesn’t itemize.

My budget calls for limiting itemized deductions for the wealthiest 2% of Americans – a reform that would reduce the deficit by $320 billion over ten years.

He also offered some vague promises on cutting Pentagon spending. Robert Greenstein of the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities says that Obama’s plans for reducing the deficit using a ratio of two-thirds cuts in spending to a one-third rise in revenue is weighted too much on cuts and will cause real hardship.

The things that Obama didn’t say tell us more about his priorities than the things he said. As many observers have noticed, the easiest way to significantly cut the deficit is to do nothing at all. Because then the Bush-Obama tax cuts would expire on December 31, 2012 and that would take care of most of the problem. But of course, Obama will ultimately give in to oligarchic demands to preserve those cuts. Rich people love their tax cuts.

When Obama agreed to a two-year extension on the Bush tax cuts in December 2010, I could not help but notice that the new deadline is just after the presidential election. Call me cynical, but my sense was that he would vigorously campaign against renewing the tax cuts but once safely re-elected would reverse course and go along with them and with cuts on Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, saying regretfully that he was forced to do so by the mean old Republicans.

I would be really pleased to have my predictions proved wrong.