Radley Balko compiles a list of all the things that we have lost in the Glorious War on Terror. He said that he compiled this list simply off the top of his head without doing a lot of research but it seems pretty complete to me. Here is his complete listy:

• We’ve sent terrorist suspects to “black sites” to be detained without trial and tortured.
• We’ve turned terrorist suspects over to other regimes, knowing that they’d be tortured.
• In those cases when our government later learned it got the wrong guy, federal officials not only refused to apologize or compensate him, they went to court to argue he should be barred from using our courts to seek justice, and that the details of his abduction, torture, and detainment should be kept secret.
• We’ve abducted and imprisoned dozens, perhaps hundreds of men in Guantanamo who turned out to have been innocent. Again, the government felt no obligation to do right by them.
• The government launched a multimillion dollar ad campaign implying that people who smoke marijuana are complicit in the murder of nearly 3,000 of their fellow citizens.
• The government illegally spied and eavesdropped on thousands of American citizens.
• Presidents from both of the two major political parties have claimed the power to detain suspected terrorists and hold them indefinitely without trial, based solely on the president’s designation of them as an “enemy combatant,” essentially making the president prosecutor, judge, and jury. (I’d also argue that the treatment of someone like Bradley Manning wouldn’t have been tolerated before September 11.)
• The current president has also claimed the power to execute U.S. citizens, off the battlefield, without a trial, and to prevent anyone from knowing about it after the fact.
• The Congress approved, the president signed, and the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a broadly written law making it a crime to advocate for any organization the government deems sympathetic to terrorism. This includes challenging the “terrorist” designation in the first place.
• Flying in America now means enduring a humiliating and hassling ritual that does little if anything to actually make flying any safer. Every time the government fails to catch an attempt at terrorism, it punishes the public for its failure by adding to the ritual.
• American Muslims, a heartening story of success and assimilation, are now harassed and denigrated for merely trying to build houses of worship.
• Without a warrant, the government can search and seize indefinitely the laptops and other personal electronic devices of anyone entering the country.
• The Department of Homeland Security now gives terrorism-fighting grants for local police departments across the country to purchase military equipment, such as armored personnel carriers, which is then used against U.S. citizens, mostly to serve drug warrants.

If the government had issued all these new policies suddenly, there would have been a revolt (at least I like to think there would have been). But all these things were introduced gradually and by both parties, after the public had been softened up by a continuous drumbeat of fear-mongering. It is only when the full list is compiled that we see how far we have sunk.

This is the danger of creeping authoritarianism.

There is a 78-year old Austrian billionaire named Richard Lugner who likes to have women celebrities as his dates at a fancy ball that is held every year in Austria. He reportedly pays them as much as $150,000 for the pleasure of their company and in the past has squired such well-known names like Pamela Anderson, Paris Hilton, Sophia Loren, Raquel Welch, and Andie MacDowell. Apparently there are complicated financial negotiations that have to be gone through by representatives of both parties before the deals are finalized and contracts signed. It all seems a bit much for a few hours of socializing.
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Veteran political observer Sam Smith tries to provides some guidance as we enter the fairy tale period known as the presidential election season where desperate people pin their hopes on some leader to take us out of the mess we are in, not realizing that the game is rigged and that wars, assaults on civil liberties, and giveaways to the rich will continue whoever wins.

There has been over the past few decades a steady deterioration of the political difference between national Democratic and Republican politics, most notably with Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Today it is hard to define that difference given the strong bipartisan support for several illegal wars, the unconstitutional Patriot Act, and a bottomless desire to bail out Wall Street, and a stunning indifference to the financial problems of everyone else.
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It’s more sensible to regard the two major parties as Mafia mobs fighting for control of a region known as the United States.

This isn’t to say that there isn’t a difference between them. But it’s about survival, however, not politics. The Demos tend to do less damage to our lives than the Repubs. Both mobs may beat the shit out your father, but the Demos are less likely to harm your children or your grandmother.
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If America is to be saved, it will because of movements outside the mainstream political game. It’s always been like that and will continue to be so.

So enjoy the fairy tale that is bubbling up around us. Vote for the bastards who will be do us the least harm. But if you want to be part of the story – and you are whether you desire it or not – then that only thing that will really matter is what you do outside the voting booth.

There are so many people running for the Republican nomination that it is hard to keep track of them all, so I decided to make it easier by classifying them according to what I thought their intentions are. The asterisk is for those who are being coy and have not yet declared that they intend to run.

1. Those who are serious about the 2012 election: Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty, Mike Huckabee*
2. Those who are using this as a dry run for 2016: Jon Huntsman, Rick Perry*
3. Those who are using this to gain visibility and promote ideas: Ron Paul, Gary Johnson
4. Those who are using the election to promote/enrich themselves: Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin*
5. Those who think that god wants them to be president or have otherwise lost touch with reality: Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum, Herman Cain, Rudy Giuliani*

Some people may belong in more than one category. Palin, for example, could easily be put in 1, 2 and 5 as well but I limited myself to just one. Feel free to argue with my sorting. I may have also overlooked someone, the field is so crowded.

But where is my favorite candidate Alan Keyes? No major election is complete without the man who set the standard for the crazification factor. Run, Alan, run! God is calling you to save the nation!

This famous cartoon from 1993 in the early days of the internet has gained new relevance with the recent revelation that a supposedly lesbian blogger in Syria who had reportedly been kidnapped was actually an American man living in Scotland. What is more, the supposedly lesbian co-owner of the website on which this fake Syrian lesbian posted has also been revealed to be a (different) American man, a US military veteran no less. They say that they were doing this to raise the awareness of gay and lesbian issues and of the troubled situation in Syria.

What is the matter with these people? Don’t they realize that by creating these fake identities, they actually diminish the causes they supposedly support, not to mention the credibility of real people who might be in danger and needing help?

The Daily Show comments on this weird story.

Glenn Greenwald captures precisely my own feelings on the Anthony Wiener episode and what it tells us about the state of politics and the media in the US.

There are few things more sickening — or revealing — to behold than a D.C. sex scandal. Huge numbers of people prance around flamboyantly condemning behavior in which they themselves routinely engage. Media stars contrive all sorts of high-minded justifications for luxuriating in every last dirty detail, when nothing is more obvious than that their only real interest is vicarious titillation. Reporters who would never dare challenge powerful political figures who torture, illegally eavesdrop, wage illegal wars or feed at the trough of sleazy legalized bribery suddenly walk upright — like proud peacocks with their feathers extended — pretending to be hard-core adversarial journalists as they collectively kick a sexually humiliated figure stripped of all importance. The ritual is as nauseating as it is predictable.

I am as titillated as the next person by salacious gossip about people I know either personally or as public figures. I won’t pretend that I turn away in high-minded purity from such stories. But I wonder about the health of a society in which the private lives of people escape from the gossip columns of the tabloids (which is where they belong, if at all) and become a major obsession. It seems to indicate a society that seeks distractions because it does not have the stomach to confront the far more serious issues it faces.

As Greenwald says:

Can one even imagine how much different — and better — our political culture would be if our establishment media devoted even a fraction of the critical scrutiny and adversarial energy it devoted to the Weiner matter to things that actually matter? But that won’t happen, because the people who comprise that press corps, with rare exception, are both incapable of focusing on things that matter and uninterested in doing so. Talking about shirtless pictures and expressing outrage about private sexual behavior — like some angry, chattering soap opera fan furious that one of their best-known characters cheated — is about the limit of their abilities and their function.

Greenwald’s whole post is, as usual, well worth reading.

Glenn Greenwald says that the war on Libya should dispel any doubts that what we have is a pro-war one party state that does not care about legality.

M. J. Rosenberg relates a first hand account of what he experienced in 1988 when, as an aide to a US senator, he was at the receiving end of the intimidation that is delivered to anyone who crosses the lobby.

Stephen M. Walt has more on the nature of the ‘special relationship’ between the US and Israel.

Surely all freedom and justice loving people have to welcome the rise of ordinary people in revolt against autocratic rulers that we have seen in the Middle East. The events of Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Syria, and Yemen have shown that ordinary people are able to overcome fear and dare their governments to crack down on them, while being unarmed to a large degree. Libya is the one country where the line between an unnamed popular uprising and an armed civil war became blurred and with NATO now fighting on behalf of one faction it is no longer clear where popular sentiment lies.

Veteran political analyst Tom Englehardt argues that it is hard to find precedents in history for this level of mass uprising. (Note that this was written back in February before the US and NATO got involved in Libya.)

Never in memory have so many unjust or simply despicable rulers felt quite so nervous — or possibly quite so helpless (despite being armed to the teeth) — in the presence of unarmed humanity. And there has to be joy and hope in that alone.

Even now, without understanding what it is we face, watching staggering numbers of people, many young and dissatisfied, take to the streets in Morocco, Mauritania, Djibouti, Oman, Algeria, Jordan, Iraq, Iran, Sudan, Yemen, and Libya, not to mention Bahrain, Tunisia, and Egypt, would be inspirational. Watching them face security forces using batons, tear gas, rubber bullets, and in all too many cases, real bullets (in Libya, even helicopters and planes) and somehow grow stronger is little short of unbelievable. Seeing Arabs demanding something we were convinced was the birthright and property of the West, of the United States in particular, has to send a shiver down anyone’s spine.
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The nature of this potentially world-shaking phenomenon remains unknown and probably, at this point, unknowable… That the future remains — always — the land of the unknown should offer us hope, not least because that’s the bane of ruling elites who want to, but never can, take possession of it.

Nonetheless, you would expect that a ruling elite, observing such earth-shaking developments, might rethink its situation, as should the rest of us. After all, if humanity can suddenly rouse itself this way in the face of the armed power of state after state, then what’s really possible on this planet of ours?

Another veteran journalist John Pilger writing on the same day has this to add:

The revolt in the Arab world is not merely against a resident dictator but a worldwide economic tyranny designed by the US Treasury and imposed by the US Agency for International Development, the IMF and World Bank, which have ensured that rich countries like Egypt are reduced to vast sweatshops, with half the population earning less than $2 a day. The people’s triumph in Cairo was the first blow against what Benito Mussolini called corporatism, a word that appears in his definition of fascism.

How did such extremism take hold in the liberal West? “It is necessary to destroy hope, idealism, solidarity, and concern for the poor and oppressed,” observed Noam Chomsky a generation ago, “[and] to replace these dangerous feelings with self-centred egoism, a pervasive cynicism that holds that [an order of] inequities and oppression is the best that can be achieved. In fact, a great international propaganda campaign is under way to convince people – particularly young people – that this not only is what they should feel but that it’s what they do feel.”

Like the European revolutions of 1848 and the uprising against Stalinism in 1989, the Arab revolt has rejected fear. An insurrection of suppressed ideas, hope and solidarity has begun.

In the US fear has been successfully used to keep people docile and accepting of the most atrocious violations of their constitutional rights. The oligarchy will be viewing the fearless uprisings in the Arab world with some concern and you can be sure that there will strenuous efforts to make sure that those feelings of hope and courage do not spread to the US.

If, as is possible, the UN General Assembly in September recognizes a Palestinian state based at least somewhat on the 1967 borders, what happens next? In the short run, nothing much. The Palestinians have little power and the US will exert all its influence to make sure that nothing changes significantly. But that could change if non-violent protests in the region against Israeli policies become a mass movement.
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