Michelle: It doesn't look like you. By Geniusofdespair

Michelle Obama's bottom lip is bigger, her eyes are also larger, chin too broad in painting, amount of skin between eye and hair line too broad in painting, cheek bone almost goes to her mouth, not in painting, eyebrows lift at middle of eye then more sharply descend in the photo..... etc., there are other problems.

As a portrait painter I think a portrait should at least be recognizable of the one it portrays. I don't think it has to look exactly like the person you are painting but I think it is incredulous that likeness seems unimportant here, that this very important portrait doesn't look like the person it represents. If the painting weren't in the National Portrait gallery, I would not know it was our former First Lady.

Definition: a likeness of a person, especially of the face, as a painting, drawing, or photograph.

How To Protect Yourself From Trumpcare. By Geniusofdespair

Turn 65 and make sure you don't qualify for medicaid.

So far the Medicare voting block is so strong, the program has been left intact.

The rest of you, the rich politicians that you - and I mean YOU - voted in, they just don't care. It is a sad sad world out there. Beware of taking a pap smear twice. Who knows where that will lead. Your doctors notes, burn them. How can all these devout Christians lack compassion for the less fortunate, the sick. I guess I will say to them something that will resonate: May you burn in Hell you heartless Christians. May Jesus push you in the flames for your greed.

This is my favorite part "Allow employers to opt into the rules of any state for the purposes of determining annual and lifetime limits on coverage" - so New York companies can go by North Dakota's rules. Make sense in Trump's New World Order.

Meanwhile New Delphi is facing extreme heat.....a lot of death there.

Picture doing this at 111 degrees.

Remember, no air conditioning.... When are the 1,339  billion people of India going to start migrating because of weather? That will be the beginning of chaos. Forget border walls. Expect stampedes.

President Obama announces his choice for the Supreme Court: Merrick Garland

Republican promise not to move on the moderate choice. Mainly because they are dicks.

New York Times on Merrick Garland:

In choosing Judge Garland, a well-known moderate who has drawn bipartisan support over decades, Mr. Obama was essentially daring Republicans to press their election-year confirmation fight over a judge many of them have publicly praised and who would be difficult for them to reject, particularly if a Democrat were to win the November presidential election and they faced the prospect of a more liberal nominee in 2017.

Eye on Miami: Obama Nails Republicans. By Geniusofdespair

My picture/quote of the week. Truer words were never spoken. Let's face it, Racism is alive and well in the United States, especially embraced by the dumb at heart which would include the Republican Congress: Especially the ones who agreed to stonewall the President at every turn.

President Obama's Visit. By Geniusofdespair

Let's not forget Pinecrest Mayor Cindy Lerner who was also there. She said: "Glad to see the President in Everglades National Park, to see and hear for himself about the risks we are currently facing from climate change, from potential risks of expanding Turkey Point, and  critical importance of funding Restoration."

Obama Visits the Everglades for Earth Day Today. By Geniusofdespair

I wasn't invited.

I paid $20,000 a year for Health Insurance for Husband and Wife. By Geniusofdespair

I think all the people complaining better look at their previous bills and coverage. Give me the the skinny on your experience with the new affordable care. Is it affordable for you? Better coverage?

T Party people on Medicare and disability not welcome to comment.

Why are Republicans so afraid of people saving money? by Geniusofdespair

There is so much misinformation out there. Let me print some of my own.  Obama will pay your health insurance premium if you are a Democrat.

Michael Grunwald publishes, "The New New Deal: The Hidden Story of Change in the Obama Era" ... by gimleteye

From Slate: "Michael Grunwald, a Time magazine correspondent, this week publishes The New New Deal: The Hidden Story of Change in the Obama Era, a gripping account of President Obama’s stimulus bill. Grunwald writes that the stimulus has transformed America—and American politics—in ways that we have failed to recognize."

Buy "The New New Deal" from Books and Books here.

Grunwald documents how the GOP set out from Day One of the Obama administration to foil any stimulus plan for the economy, notwithstanding the fact -- acknowledged by the outgoing Bush team -- that the economy was on the verge of a second Great Depression.

Grunwald goes on to explain the significant political achievement -- only half of what economists believed could pull the economy out of a prolonged recession -- and explores how and why Obama, a brilliant campaigner, had so much difficulty communicating the positive role of the stimulus plan to the American people.

My view is that candidate Obama really wanted to bridge the divide and under-estimated the degree to which his opposition was willing to go, to destroy his presidency. Grunwald provides details for this scenario, and in doing so provides the reader with a clear picture of the playing field in the November 2012 presidential election.

I Just Donated to the Obama Campaign. By Geniusofdespair

Get your money out of your pocket and give to your favorite candidate.   My choice today was to help the President get reelected. 

Check out the Obama store, they have some nice T Shirts. Apparently Democrats have a sense of humor, you can buy a cup with Obama's picture on the front and his birth certificate on the back. How cool is that?

Looks like Obamacare is now a good thing...

You can also get an Obama IPhone case for $40...

Nearly three-quarters of Americans doubt Washington can repair the economy

----------------------------------------
News Alert: Poll: Nearly three-quarters of Americans doubt Washington can repair the economy
August 10, 2011 8:03:43 PM
----------------------------------------

A new Washington Post poll underscores the damage caused to President Obama and both political parties by the long standoff over the debt ceiling and the weakened economy, with a large majority agreeing that the policymaking process is unstable and ineffective. The results could have significant implications for both Republicans and Democrats, as record numbers of Americans now say they are interested in new congressional representation when they vote in November 2012.

Half the country agrees with the assessment of the nation's financial situation rendered by Standard & Poor's, which downgraded the U.S. credit rating for the first time in history.

http://link.email.washingtonpost.com/r/IKR2QE/OJTNTG/AM0IRL/UD27PV/SIIVS/AZ/h

For more information, visit washingtonpost.com

Even Dead...The Pubs Hate Obama. By Geiniusofdespair

This is why the Democrats can never win. Alive Democrats are not as dedicated as dead Republicans, take a look at this obit. Thank you David for this gem of Republicans taking their hatred to a new level in Georgia.

A view of the Mideast you won't read in The Miami Herald ... by gimleteye

With dimwits ruling the airwaves, who needs another headache? Like our wars. Here is a speech that came my way and well worth reading. It is from the former Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Chas Freeman: "Failed Interventions and What They Teach". It is long but worth the read.
http://www.mepc.org/articles-commentary/speeches/failed-interventions-and-what-they-teach

Failed Interventions and What They Teach

Remarks to the National Council on U.S.-Arab Relations

Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr., USFS (Ret.)

October 21, 2010 | Washington, DC

I feel honored to have been asked to open this conference on U.S.-Arab relations and America’s ties with the broader Middle East. But I confess that, as an American, the results of U.S. policies in the Middle East remind me of the T-shirt someone once gave me. It said: “Sinatra is dead. Elvis is dead. And me, I don’t feel so good.”

The Middle East is a constant reminder that a clear conscience is usually a sign of either a faulty memory or a severe case of arrogant amorality. It is not a badge of innocence. These days, we meticulously tally our own battlefield dead; we do not count the numbers of foreigners who perish at our hands or those of our allies. Yet each death is a tragedy that extinguishes one soul, wounds others, and diminishes the world. If we do not grieve for those we slay, we may justly be charged with inhumanity. If we cannot understand the consequences for ourselves of the manner in which they died, we are surely guilty of strategic ineptitude.

All that is required to be hated is to do something hateful. Apparent indifference to the pain and humiliation one has inflicted further outrages its victims, their families, and their friends. As the Golden Rule, which is common — in one phrasing or another — to all religions, implicitly warns, moral blindness is contagious. That is why warring parties engaged in tit for tat come in time to resemble each other rather than to sharpen their differences.

I want to speak to you today about three things. First, why militarized U.S. policies and the actions we are taking pursuant to them in the broader Middle East risk provoking terrorist retaliation against the United States and its citizens. Second, why our military and quasi-diplomatic interventions in the region have failed or are failing. And, third, how our current policy course is changing us for the worse without changing the Arab and Islamic worlds for the better. I will end with a thought or two on the prospects for changed policies that could produce better results.

War is not the spectator sport that the fans who watch it here on television imagine. Nor is it the “cakewalk” that its armchair advocates like to suggest it could be. War is traumatic for all its participants. Recent experience suggests that 30 percent of troops develop serious mental health problems that dog them after they leave the battlefield. But what of the peoples soldiers seek to punish or pacify? To understand the hatreds war unleashes and its lasting psychological and political consequences, one has only to translate foreign casualty figures into terms we Americans can relate to. You can do this by imagining that the same percentages of Americans might die or suffer injury as foreigners have. Then think about the impact that level of physical and moral insult would have on us.

Consider, for example, the two sides of the Israel-Palestine struggle. So far in this century — since September 29, 2000, when Ariel Sharon marched into Al Aqsa and ignited the Intifada of that name — about 850 Israeli Jews have died at the hands of Palestinians, 125 or so of them children. In proportion to population, that’s equivalent to 45,000 dead Americans, including about 6,800 children. It’s a level of mayhem we Americans cannot begin to understand. But, over the same period, Israeli soldiers and settlers have killed 6,600 or so Palestinians, at least 1,315 of whom were children. In American terms, that’s equivalent to 460,000 U.S. dead, including 95,000 children. Meanwhile, the American equivalent of almost 500,000 Israelis and 2.9 million Palestinians have been injured. To put it mildly, the human experiences these figures enumerate are not conducive to peace or goodwill among men and women in the Holy Land or anywhere with emotional ties to them.

We all know that events in the Holy Land have an impact far beyond it. American sympathy for Israel and kinship with Jewish settlers assure that Jewish deaths there arouse anti-Arab and anti-Muslim passions here, even as the toll on Palestinians is seldom, if ever, mentioned. But, among the world’s 340 million Arabs and 1.6 billion Muslims, all eyes are on the resistance of Palestinians to continuing ethnic cleansing and the American subsidies and political support for Israel that facilitate their suffering. The chief planner of 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, testified under oath that a primary purpose of that criminal assault on the United States was to focus "the American people . . . on the atrocities that America is committing by supporting Israel against the Palestinian people . . . .” The occupation and attempted pacification of other Muslim lands like Iraq and Afghanistan as well as the shocking hate speech about Islam that now pervades American politics lend credence to deepening Muslim perception of an escalating U.S. crusade against Islam and its believers.

No one knows how many Iraqis have died as a direct or indirect result of the U.S. invasion and the anarchy that followed it. Estimates range between a low of something over 100,000 to a high of well over 1 million. Translated to American proportions, that equates to somewhere between 1 and 13 million dead Americans. Over 2.25 million Iraqis fled to neighboring countries to escape this bloodbath. Only 5 percent have returned. An equal number sought temporary refuge inside Iraq. Most of them also remain displaced. In our terms, this equals a flight to Canada and Mexico of 24 million Americans, with another 24 million still here but homeless. I think you will agree that, had this kind of thing happened to Americans, religious scruples would not deter many of us from seeking revenge and engaging in reprisal against whoever had done it to us.

The numbers in Afghanistan aren’t quite as frightful but they make the same point. We’re accumulating a critical mass of enemies with personal as well as religious and nationalistic reasons to seek retribution against us. As our violence against foreign civilians has escalated, our enemies have multiplied. The logic of this progression is best understood anecdotally.

I am grateful to Bruce Fein (whom some of you may know as a noted constitutional scholar here in Washington) for calling attention to the colloquy of convicted Times Square car bomber Faisal Shahzad with United States District Judge Miriam Cederbaum. She challenged Shahzad's self-description as a ‘Muslim soldier’ because his contemplated violence targeted civilians,

"Did you look around to see who they were?," she asked.

"Well, the people select the government," Shahzad retorted. "We consider them all the same. The drones, when they hit ..."

Judge Cedarbaum interrupted: "Including the children?"

Shahzad countered: "Well, the drone hits in Afghanistan and Iraq, they don't see children, they don't see anybody. They kill women, children, they kill everybody. It's a war, and in war, they kill people. They're killing all Muslims."

Later, he added: "I am part of the answer to the U.S. terrorizing the Muslim nations and the Muslim people. And, on behalf of that, I'm avenging the attack. Living in the United States, Americans only care about their own people, but they don't care about the people elsewhere in the world when they die."

No amount of public diplomacy, no matter how cleverly conducted, can prevail over the bitterness of personal and collective experience. The only way to reverse trends supporting anti-American violence by the aggrieved is to reverse the policies that feed it.

We are now a nation with unmatched military capabilities. Perhaps that is why we are the only country in the world to have proclaimed that our conflict with terrorists is a “war” or to have dismissed civilian victims of our violence as “collateral damage.” Few allies joined us in Iraq. Those that joined us in Afghanistan did so to demonstrate their solidarity with us, not because they see the piecemeal pacification of the Muslim world as the answer to the extremist non-state actors in its midst. They seem to know, even if we do not, that terrorism is a tactic, not a cause against which one can wage war. Weapons are tools with which to change men’s minds, but the inappropriate use of them can entrench animosity and justify reprisal against the citizens of the nations that wield them. No other people has so powerful a military establishment that it could even begin to persuade itself, as many Americans have, that guns can cure grudges or missiles erase militancy.

If you view the world through a bombsight, everything looks like a target. Yet the lesson of 9/11 is that if you drop bombs on enough people — even peoples with no air forces — the most offended amongst them will do their best to bomb you back. Thus our destabilization of places remote from our shores has already blown back to challenge our own domestic tranquility. There is no reason to doubt that it could do so again. Then, too, one of the main lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan is that there are some problems for which invasion and occupation are inappropriate and ineffective responses. Far from demonstrating the irresistible might of the United States, as their neo-conservative champions intended, these wars have revealed the considerable limits of American power.

As a case in point, the use of force in Iraq has neither shaped that country to our will nor vindicated our values. We have so far given 4,500 American lives, suffered the maiming of 32,000 American bodies, accepted the disordering of the minds of tens of thousands of other young Americans, and spent at least $900 billion in Iraq. Our one clear achievement — the removal from power of Saddam Hussein — culminated in a tragicomic trial and execution that mocked rather than celebrated the rule of law. We will leave behind a traumatized society, brutalized by anarchy, sectarian violence, and terrorism spawned by resentment of foreign occupation. Iraq’s constitutional order, prospects for domestic tranquility, relations with its neighbors, and international orientation all remain in doubt.

The Iranian-influenced, Arab Shiite-dominated regime we brought to power in Baghdad is — for now, at least — at peace with Iraq’s Kurds. But this regime has not shown that it can coexist peacefully with the country’s Sunni Arab minority. More than half a year after national elections, no new government has been formed. Many in the region suspect that the army we Americans are training and equipping may in time emerge, like its predecessors, as the principal institution of government in Iraq as well as the violent enforcer of its national unity under Shiite Arab majority rule. Will Iraq once again balance Iran or will it collude with it? We do not know.

What does seem clear is that neither the Iraqi nor the American people will remember Iraq’s close encounter with the United States proudly or fondly. The years to come are more likely to produce intermittent reminders of Iraq’s agonies and America’s witlessness as this century began than to furnish reasons for nostalgia about shared experience. Nor is the U.S. record in Iraq of much value to the formulation of campaign plans for pacifying other countries.

The “surge” of more troops into Iraq is now presented by some as a model for plucking impasse from the maw of military disgrace in Afghanistan too. But that “success,” such as it was, cannot be translated to Afghanistan. The concentration of U.S. forces in Baghdad froze the pattern of sectarian urban enclaves that had emerged from four years of savage confessional cleansing. It allowed warring Iraqi religious groups to barricade the Baghdad neighborhoods into which they had retreated. This both reduced the level of mayhem and fixed sectarian divisions in place. But Afghanistan cannot be stabilized by such religious apartheid, which is irrelevant to it. Afghan divisions have always been primarily rural, ethnic, and regional, rather than confessional.

In parts of Iraq, a surge of U.S. cash helped Iraq’s conservative Sunni tribesmen to recognize the U.S. Marines as allies against the murderous, foreign jihadis in their midst. Tribes and localities in Afghanistan are also fond of cash, but the context is very different. The foreign jihadis who were in Afghanistan have withdrawn to neighboring Pakistan, and no one wants or expects them to return. The Taliban are Afghans and traditionalists, not foreigners or radicals.

Afghanistan has always defined itself as a confederation of tribes and localities that cooperate for limited purposes while resisting central or foreign control. The only alien presence in Afghanistan at present is U.S. and NATO forces and associated aid agencies and NGOs. But they are there to impose allegiance to Kabul and to challenge tribal customs, not to make common cause with the tribal and local authorities on these matters. Many at the local level see their presence as a nuisance that attracts unwanted attention from home-grown, not foreign guerrillas, and that disturbs, not preserves, the peace.

Counterinsurgency doctrine is an implausible answer to the situation in Afghanistan. It was developed to defend post-colonial governments in newly independent states modeled on those of their erstwhile colonial masters. It was never intended to emulate colonialism by building such states in traditional societies that lack and don’t much want them. It presumes that foreign forces are assisting a national government to defeat rebels attempting to overthrow it or secede from it. In Afghanistan, the national government is a barely established creature of foreign intervention that is attempting to extend central authority in unprecedented ways. The Karzai regime has been happy to leave the task of imposing its rule on the country at large to Americans and other foreigners, while profiting as best it can from our efforts. By all accounts, it hasn’t done at all badly at such profiteering.

Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries on earth. Its nearly thirty million people have a GDP of about $10 billion. Over the past nine years, we have put $350 billion into making war there, and spent another $54 billion on developing the place. Not surprisingly, some Afghans, including not a few in positions of authority, have seen no reason to restrain their enthusiasm about the opportunities for rake-offs this level of spending sustains.

Nine years after it began, the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan has strayed far from its original objectives of suppressing al Qa`ida and punishing the Taliban to deter them from ever again accommodating anti-American “terrorists with global reach.” Our war now seems to be mostly about suppressing reactionary Islam and securing some measure of deference for feminist values. In practice, our primary enemy is no longer al Qa`ida but the Taliban and other Islamists — in both Afghanistan and adjacent areas of Pakistan. Pakistan remains very wary of long-standing Indian ties to the Northern Alliance from which the current Kabul regime emerged. For Islamabad, the war in Afghanistan has come to be as much about forestalling Indian encirclement and destabilization of Pakistan’s strategic rear as it is about appeasing the United States, controlling Pashtun and Baluchi nationalism, and preventing destabilization by Islamic militants. To Pakistanis, we now seem to be part of these problems, not part of their solutions.

Meanwhile, the growing U.S. focus on combating Muslim extremism, broadly defined, is drawing our covert warriors and armed forces into military operations in an ever-lengthening list of countries. The American “Dar al Harb” has already grown beyond Afghanistan, Iraq, south Lebanon, and Palestine to embrace Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen. Nowhere in the domain of Islam are we succeeding in dividing or reducing our enemies, still less diminishing the threat they represent to us and our homeland.

As if this were not enough, the very same people who neo-conned us into war with Iraq seven years ago are working hard to get the United States into yet another war — this one with Iran. Their reasoning mixes bluff with blackmail. They insist that the U.S. must risk regional or even global catastrophe by launching our own war with Iran. Otherwise, Israel will drag us into an even more catastrophic one. For their part, Israel’s military planners quite rationally worry about the limits the loss of their nuclear monopoly would place on their freedom of action against Arab neighbors like Lebanon and Syria. But they know there is nothing much they can do to prevent this. Military frustration plus popular hysteria about Iran in Israel produces repeated threats by Israeli politicians to bomb Iran. Their supporters here faithfully echo these threats. This, of course, increases Iran’s perceived need to develop a nuclear deterrent to such attack. And so it goes.

Ironically, the primary strategic effect of the policies these neo-conservative warmongers advocated in the past was to eliminate Iran’s enemies in Afghanistan and Iraq, while greatly enhancing Iranian influence in Iraq, Lebanon, and Palestine and cementing Iran’s alliance with Syria. As a result, while the United States remains focused on Iran’s nuclear program, it is becoming apparent to countries in the region that Iranian cooperation or acquiescence is essential to address a lengthening list of problems of concern to them. These include issues relating to Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria, as well as Palestine.

The self-defeating actions and statements of both sides over the course of the 30-year impasse in Iranian-American relations prove many basic rules of diplomacy. Unilateral suspensions of international law and comity (whether through hostage-taking or demands that rights conferred by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty regime be set aside) are quite naturally resented as inherently illegitimate by the affected side. Neither humiliation nor invective induce reflection; both inspire brooding about how to show unyielding determination, indirectly hurt the other side, or retaliate directly against it. Sanctions that are not in support of a negotiating process constitute mindless pressure rather than leverage and invite defiance rather than compromise. Offers of talks premised on the need to check the diplomatic box before proceeding to coercive measures understandably meet with rebuff. (As a case in point: why should Iran cooperate in legitimizing the use of force against it on the spurious grounds that measures short of war have been exhausted?) And so forth. (I’m tempted to go on, but this is not the occasion for a lecture on strategic self-frustration through diplomatic mis-maneuver.)

In sum, our military interventions in the greater Middle East have been both unproductive and counterproductive. And we have hardly tried diplomacy. That is no less true in the context of the Israel-Palestine conflict than with other issues. The political pantomime on the Potomac known as the “peace process” bears the same relationship to diplomacy that Bernie Madoff’s operations did to wealth management. The hopes invested in the transaction alter neither its hollowness nor its cynical insincerity. It seems to serve the interests of its participants but does not lead to anything real — just more of the same. For Israel the so-called “peace process” provides cover for more land grabs. For the Palestinian Authority, it earns international aid to make up for the lack of legitimacy at home. For the United States, it gives the illusion of activism on behalf of peace while avoiding the politically costly decisions necessary actually to produce it.

Israel has yet to attempt an answer to the question Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion asked Nahum Goldman in 1956. "Why should the Arabs make peace? If I were an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country. Sure, God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel, it's true, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been antisemitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that?" We have no answer to that question either. But we need one. If no peaceful path to justice and dignity is available to Palestinians, they will see no reason not to return to violence. There is a mounting danger that many elsewhere will support them if they do so.

Americans seem to sense the growing risk of violent blowback from the Arab world and the broader Middle East. What else can explain our willingness to surrender the very values that have defined us as a society and that we claim to be defending? Our violent interaction with the Arab and Muslim worlds is clearly changing us much more than it is changing Arabs and Muslims. Our obsession with homeland security is corroding our values at home while increasing enmity and disregard for us abroad. If this makes us safer in the short term, it makes us both less free and less safe in the long term. It is also a prescription for diminished international prestige and support amidst continuing worsening of our country’s relations with Arabs and Muslims. It neither preserves our liberties nor advances our security.

The Founding Fathers knew that acceptance of a measure of risk is the prerequisite for freedom. The checks and balances of the American Constitution were instituted to prevent attempts by our government to make us less free in order to make us safer. Yet, not quite 210 years after we enacted the Bill of Rights, we Americans are setting aside the protections enshrined in it. In our pursuit of a zero-risk security environment, we are slowly but steadily substituting the elements of a garrison state for constitutionally ordained freedoms. Increasingly, we seek to achieve national security by impairing the security of individual Americans. Our citizens and foreign residents may take comfort from the thought that foreign terrorists are under American military pressure. But they can no longer feel secure from arbitrary and capricious actions by government agencies and officials here.

Let me be specific. The Fourth Amendment’s ban on searches and seizures of persons, houses, papers, and effects without probable cause has been vitiated by universal electronic eavesdropping, warrantless seizure of paper and electronic records at the border, and intrusive inspection of anything and everything in the possession of passengers using public transportation. The Eighth Amendment’s ban on “cruel and unusual punishments” has yielded to the expediencies of torture and the officially contrived disappearances of “extraordinary rendition.”

The Fifth Amendment’s protections against deprivation “of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law” have not prevented the suspension of habeas corpus or executive branch assertions of a right to detain American citizens as well as foreigners indefinitely without charge or trial.

The Sixth Amendment’s guarantee of the right of anyone accused of a crime to be informed of the charges and confronted with the witnesses against him has given way to trials based on “secret evidence” and sequestered witnesses.

The president now claims the right to act as judge, jury, and executioner of anyone abroad, including Americans, whom he thinks may be aiding or abetting individuals or organizations our political process has listed as “terrorists.”

Meanwhile, talk itself is being criminalized. Advocacy of causes also espoused by so-called “terrorists” risks prosecution for conspiracy to abet terrorism. Lawyers who defend people charged with connections to allegedly terrorist movements can themselves be charged with aiding terrorism. And, as any American Muslim can attest, the neutrality of the government with respect to religion is everywhere under attack. Whatever happened to the First Amendment’s guarantees of freedom of speech and religious belief or the Sixth Amendment’s right to be represented by a lawyer when detained or on trial?

These are the domestic effects of an approach to international affairs that is fundamentally at odds with the philosophy on which American constitutional practices and foreign policy were long based. Our original idea was that we could best secure our own sovereignty and freedom by respecting the sovereignty and diverse ways of life of other nations. This view was best stated by John Quincy Adams in his speech to the U.S. House of Representatives of July 4, 1821.

Adams said, with pride, that: “America . . . has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, [even] when the conflict has been for principles to which she clings, as to the last vital drop that visits the heart . . . She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. . . . She might become the dictatress of the world: she would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.”

In my view, Adams was right in both his prescription and his prognosis. We would be far better off, were we to return to the course he advocated. This is an appropriate time to ponder that possibility. Like it or not, the United States cannot avoid changing course in the Middle East.

We are at an unsustainable dead end with Iran. We are increasingly at cross purposes with Turkey. Our relations with Lebanon are strained. Ties with Syria are stalemated. We are leaving the shambles we made of Iraq without having crafted an approach to Persian Gulf security that deals with the consequences of either our intervention or our withdrawal. We are arming our friends in Gulf Cooperation Council countries but have yet to find strategic consensus with them.

Our efforts to promote a “two-state solution” in Palestine — such as they were — have lost all credibility. They cannot continue on the same basis. Israel is more isolated regionally and globally than ever before. Our relations with it are increasingly turbulent. I have spoken to previous gatherings here and elsewhere about the imperative of an Israeli-Palestinian peace for Israel, the Palestinians, and ourselves. I will not repeat myself today.

Most Americans now want out of Afghanistan. They yearn for an Afghan solution to Afghan problems that will allow us to exit gracefully from our frustratingly unsuccessful military intervention there. We do not know what to do about Pakistan’s surging anti-Americanism or its continuing use as a safe haven for terrorists with global reach.

And, looming over all of our foreign policies — and our exceedingly expensive reliance on the use of force rather than measures short of war for their execution — is the possibility of an American fiscal heart attack. Our fiscal difficulties promise — among other things — to force major retrenchment in the American military presence and operations abroad. The only question is whether this will happen abruptly or with all deliberate speed. The certainty of a forthcoming U.S. pullback from military adventurism abroad is illustrated by some simple math.

Our federal government’s revenue from all sources — like income, corporate, excise, social security, and medicare taxes — will total $2.2 trillion this year. Outlays for transfer payments to individuals for unemployment, social security, medicare, and the like will come to $2.4 trillion. We must borrow the $200 billion necessary to make up the shortfall. This is before we pay for all the other functions of government, none of which is now funded by tax revenue. We will borrow another $1.3 trillion to keep our government in business. We take in $2.2 trillion. We spend $3.9 trillion. We are running our government entirely on credit rollovers.

The roughly $1 trillion we spend on military and related activities in the budgets for defense, veterans affairs, intelligence, military assistance programs, homeland security, nuclear weapons and propulsion, and the like is two-thirds of government operations. It is all — every cent of it — borrowed from future taxpayers and current trading partners abroad. A lot of this escalating debt for military expenditures is attributable to the Middle East. Even if our military operations there were achieving their objectives — which they are not — they are fiscally unsustainable in the long term. As Herb Stein’s mother famously observed, “if something can’t go on forever, sooner or later it will stop.”

There’s a lot of unrealism out there that denies this. I wouldn’t be surprised if you heard a farim amount of it today and tomorrow. One way or another, however, change is coming to U.S. policies in the greater Middle East. If properly anticipated and correctly managed, change represents an opportunity, not a setback. This, I hope, not the straight-line projection of a spurious present into the future, will be the spirit with which attendees at this conference will address the many issues now before Americans and Arabs.

An end to military intervention abroad except for decisive action for precise purposes and over a limited time would go a long way toward curbing the further growth of the terrorist threat to our country. A serious effort by our government and public intellectuals to counter and reverse the bigotry of current discourse about Islam and the Arabs in this country could lay a basis for enhanced cooperation with Arab and Muslim governments against Islamist extremists who practice violent politics. After all, they are the enemies of Americans and Muslims alike.

Peace in the Holy Land is essential to secure the safety and prosperity of both Israelis and Palestinians. It is equally essential to the United States. It would eliminate a key driver of anti-American terrorism throughout the Muslim world. Measures short of war to mitigate or eliminate other points of tension between the United States and the peoples of the Middle East would further reduce this threat. A serious dialogue with our partners in the Persian Gulf region as well as Egypt and Turkey could help to identify more effective ways of dealing with the challenges Iran poses to regional security and stability.

In a less fearful atmosphere, Americans could restore civil liberties based on renewed respect for our constitutional traditions and the rule of law. This is the prerequisite for recovery of our status and reputation as a uniquely tolerant society, open to people and their ideas. It is the key to regaining the prestige and influence the United States formerly enjoyed in the Middle East and elsewhere. It is the essential condition for rebuilding relations of mutual trust and confidence with our Arab and Muslim allies and friends. It is the way to make America once again “the ruler of her own spirit.”

In hope that this conference will contribute to these ends, I wish it and all of you every success.

Former Miami TV exec Dick Lobo sworn in as Director of the International Broadcasting Bureau ... by gimleteye

Dick Lobo, former Miami NBC affiliate general manager and recently CEO of Tampa PBS affiliate WEDU, was sworn in today as Director of the IBB, which oversees the Voice of America, Radio Marti/TV Marti, as well as other broadcast outlets bringing the United States to the world. Lobo was confirmed by the US Senate last month, among many senior Obama confirmations held up by the Senate. He was confirmed, at long last, unanimously. Lobo brings to public service a distinguished career in journalism, broadcasting, and management; his is a model of experience and professionalism showing how senior administration positions should be filled.

Gulf Oil Spill: advice for the Obama White House ... by gimleteye

It is frustrating to listen to the Obama White House and top political appointees on the Gulf Oil Spill. The "all hands on deck" approach-- ie. sending Cabinet officials and advisors like Carol Browner-- to the Gulf for first hand visits, and the president visiting himself, has failed to capitalize on this teachable moment.

The message I'm missing most is how regulatory failure lead to the BP Deepwater Horizon catastrophe. I want to hear the Obama administration explain that American politics has made no room for tough, effective regulation of polluters and pollution. The tragedy of the Gulf is the exact result of foxes running the hen house.

Carol Browner, in particular, knows this because she is from Miami and passionate about the Everglades. Although the pollution of the Everglades occurs in parts per billion and the Gulf Oil spill is measured in tens of millions of gallons of oil; the cause is the same: ineffective regulators, bad regulations, and poor enforcement. That's part one of the message.

Obama could add: here is what I am going to do. I am going to prioritize a system-wide improvement of environmental regulation at the federal level including the effect of pollution on public health. In Florida, the record of enforcement by federal regulatory agencies on the environment is pitiful. The enforcement arms of the US Army Corps of Engineers, US Fish and Wildlife Service and EPA stand out as desperately needing reform. (What most people don't understand, is that the federal judiciary gives very wide berth to federal agencies. It takes almost an act of God for the judiciary to come down hard on these agencies and on the side of the public. The assumption is that government serves the public interest.)

There is a further point: the environment protects the economy and not the other way around. I'd like to hear Obama say: it is time to stop treating the environment as something we can endlessly exploit. The days of cost accounting that fail to include the true price of protecting our air and water have come to an end. The Gulf Oil catastrophe happened because fake book keeping helped Big Oil dictate how much money they would spend on contingency and backup systems in the case of a deep sea blowout. And if I were president I would go further. I'd say, Big Oil earns tens of billions per quarter. It is time to chase the money changers from the temple.

Surely the Obama White House can embrace some part of this message?(For an interesting blog on science going on now in the Gulf of Mexico related to the oil spill, click on this site run by a University of Georgia researcher.)

Gulf Oil Spill: anxious about Obama ... by gimleteye

Residents of the Gulf Coast have not necessarily been card-carrying members of Sierra Club. But now that 25 percent of the Gulf of Mexico is off limits to fishing, there are a lot more people who will be questioning whether the environment is how critics have spun it: only something rich people can afford.

It is terrible that a catastrophe persuades the way logic never could: that the environment is what protects the economy of the Gulf states and not the other way around. The other way around, by the way, is how Republican leaders like Jeb Bush treated environmental policy: let the 'free' market do better for people than government. The BP Deepwater Horizon catastrophe is a radical event in US history, unleashed by radicals. Not conservatives. Now, for a subset of the population who never self-identified as "environmentalists", that anger is going off the charts. It is new territory where damage from a hurricane like Katrina would be a lesser order of destruction than what Big Oil has unleashed on the Gulf. How did this happen?

Obama inherited a Bush shitstorm through which key lieutenants dismantled enforcement and regulatory capacity of environmental agencies across the board. Obama could have done more in his first year to prioritize reform of the Minerals Management Service by immediately rooting out the inefficiency and lax performances that had become standard, from EPA to the DOI and, especially, the MMS.

It is clear today--after the implosion of the financial and insurance industries and environmental disaster--that trillions of taxpayer dollars could have been saved if government had invested in professionalizing and raising up the status of service in government agencies, building competence and high standards, instead of enabling insider dealing, the revolving door between the lobbyists and government staff, and 'regulatory capture' by industry. There is no profit or glee in saying, "I told you so". The genie is out of the bottle, and the Obama presidency will never be the same.

Deepwater Horizon and conservative values: polluters pay ... by gimleteye

The proof that politicians who claim to be conservatives -- mostly Republican-- aren't really who they say they are is that they support laws and policies that don't require full cost accounting for pollution. This is true of Big Sugar's pollution of the Everglades as it is of Big Oil's destruction in the Gulf of Mexico or Big Chem's pollution of the Mississippi River basin. When it comes to pollution, ours is a nation of avoidance.

The reason so many environmentalists "just say no" to offshore oil drilling is because there is no cost accounting that incorporates what happens when catastrophe hits. See, what we mean? But it is not just oil production where the evasion of cost accounting is standard procedure: the same is true of coal generating power facilities that pour carbon dioxide into the atmosphere or nuclear power facilities, like Turkey Point, that fail to protect groundwater despite legal agreements or safe storage of spent fuel rods. When disaster strikes, the true costs of these "takings" are never fully paid by the polluter. Instead they are judged to be acceptable costs and pushed onto consumers in our modern, industrialized society.

These costs are weighed according to rotten assessments of risk that permit them. What have we learned from these "conservatives" -- like Wall Street for example-- in recent years? The wealth of the nation has been stripped as cleanly as a car in a chop shop. While Democrats bear their share of blame, the biggest portion goes to conservatives who ran the economy into the ground. Take the SEC under former Congressman Chris Cox, or the USFWS, or the EPA. Whether synthetic derivatives or wetlands in Florida, these federal agencies weren't in business to enforce "polluter pays": they were meant to keep their mitts off regulation and enforcement. They sat surfing porn on the internet while the real pornography was layed out across the American landscape watching risk analyses of CDO's and biological opinions dressed up like painted whores. (I'm not making this stuff up!)

There was a good reason Floridians opposed offshore oil for decades. It is not just the cormorants and herons and other birds that need to be cleansed, we need to be bathed to wash off the ridiculous logic, the bloviators and the media circus tag teams and think tanks funded by so-called conservatives. No more "drill, baby, drill". Insist on energy reform that brings the big electric utilities into line. Remember, when it is time to vote next November, how during this legislative session Florida Republicans failed to approve qualified appointees to the Public Service Commission. It was pay back against Charlie Crist who led the way, rejecting the FPL base rate increase in January that would have paid for twenty billion in new nuclear reactors without adequate safeguards to the public interest in South Dade.

These "conservatives" are not conservative at all. And don't let President Obama off the hook, either, on his continued support for unacceptably dangerous offshore oil exploration. Of all people, he should know better.

President Obama: welcome to Miami, the EPA deserves your contempt! ... by gimleteye

While on Air Force One to Miami, President Obama should take fifteen minutes to read yesterday's decision by US District Judge Alan S. Gold. Then he should make a single phone call: to EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson. Heads should roll at EPA.

In a contempt ruling against the State of Florida and the EPA on failing to clean up the Everglades according to provisions of the Clean Water Act, there is only contempt, no accountability. Accountability is the one place where President Obama could actually do some good for the Everglades, right now, with that call from Air Force One. Order Lisa Jackson, EPA Administrator, to clean house and remove regional officials who are responsible for the Everglades mess detailed by Judge Gold. Do it now. Do not delay. Fire the SOB's. Now.

I won't go into a lengthy diatribe about the EPA and its sham hearings around the state that will likely end up as more and more delay for numeric standards for nutrient pollution. The EPA problems and "politics" didn't start yesterday or even the day before: former EPA Administrator Carol Browner and former Senator Bob Graham bear their share of historical mistakes in the Everglades. What came later, under Bush appointees, was truly horrendous: the EPA surrendered wholesale to the State of Florida and the nonsense that industries self-regulate better than regulations. (For that, thank Jeb Bush.)

Today, under a president who had the full support of the nation's environmental community, the abuses of the EPA are still institutionalized. That's unforgiveable. Read Judge Gold's decision, Mr. President. Heads should roll at EPA. The White House can make that happen with a single phone call; and it would do more than any other single act to signal change we can believe in Florida.

Republican Vision Quest. By Geniusofdespair

It could have been Kabbalah, but I chose for my rite of passage to the Republican Party to find the actual, rarely seen Obama African Birth Certificate and I found it! The problem plaguing this issue? There is actually a hamlet Honolulu, in the State of Hawaii in Kenya, Continent of Africa. Now what were the odds? See for yourself, hit on birth certificate to enlarge it. Mystery solved. I am not only a Republican in word, I am one in deed!

Dreaming Big: FPL CEO, other execs dine at White House

FPL Group CEO Lew Hay and three other chief executives had a private White House luncheon with President Barack Obama yesterday. Hay was joined by the top executives of Amazon.com, Kraft and Eastman Kodak.

Obama questioned FPL's intent to build new nuclear reactors at sea level, on the edge of Biscayne National Park and why key issues like wetlands, water supply and environmental protection had been inadequately addressed despite the fact that the company was already charging rate payers for planning.

The CEO’s paid for their own lunch as part of the Obama White House’s policy to remove the appearance of too cozy relationship with big business. This policy has not made an impact in Florida, where the wife of Republican chair of the Senate Energy Committee, Miamian Alex Diaz de la Portilla, is a registered lobbyist for energy companies seeking to repeal the ban against drilling for oil in near shore waters. Diaz de la Portilla says neither his wife’s employment or compensation from big energy companies will affect his leadership on bringing oil drilling to Florida or anything else.