05 January 2007

McCain and Biden Comments

I got these from http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com.

I simply fail to understand why so many otherwise reasonably progressive people give John McCain a pass. Here's what he said at the American Enterprise Insitute, a hard-right "think tank," yesterday:


Contrary to popular notions that U.S. troops are getting "caught in the cross-fire" between Sunni and Shia fighters, and are therefore ineffective in ceasing the smoldering civil war, the track record is that when U.S. troops stopping sectarian violence is excellent, where American soldiers have been deployed to areas in turmoil, including Baghdad neighborhoods, the violence has ceased almost immediately.

Similary, the marines in Anbar province report very positive effects in reducing the non-sectarian al qaeda based violence that is the predominant cause of instability there.

This is contrary to virtually all reported intelligence and news reports for the past three years. Either this man is so deluded in his hawkish mindset, or he's just as much of a fibber as Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld. Doesn't much matter which: he's obviously rushing headlong in the opposite direction from the clear desires of the large majority of Americans: to extricate us from this enormous, unproductive mess as soon as possible.

Contrast this with Joe Biden's remark in a WaPo interview, also from yesterday:

I have reached the tentative conclusion that a significant portion of this administration, maybe even including the vice president, believes Iraq is lost. They have no answer to deal with how badly they have screwed it up. I am not being facetious now. Therefore, the best thing to do is keep it from totally collapsing on your watch and hand it off to the next guy -- literally, not figuratively."

See http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/04/AR2007010401525.html.

04 January 2007

Buddhism and Science: Bodhicitta

From Choosing Reality by B. Alan Wallace:

In all of human experience two types of aspiration bear an integrity and nobility beyond all others: the yearning for understanding and spiritual awakening, and the longing to be of service to others, to dispel suffering and bring joy. Modern science, as developed and expressed by the greatest of its exponents, is motivated by both these aspirations. Intellectually and practically it stands, at its best, as a model of freedom and inquiry and ingenuity; and if put into active balance with religion and philosophy, it may well serve us long into the future.
[...]
It is possible to integrate one's yearing for truth with one's wish to help others so taht tehy become one's
abiding motivation in solitary and active life. This is achieved through a cultivation of a 'spirit of awakening' [bodhicitta]: the aspiration to attain full awakening in order to be of most effective service to others. This longing may lead one into the deepest states of contemplation as well as the most active ways of service. It implicitly acknowledges the interdependence of self and others and the kinship of all that lives, and is the sole motivation with which one can attain the full spiritual awakening of a Buddha. Just as it is the supreme motivation for spiritual practice, so is it the finest incentive for scientific research. As physics and Buddhism encounter one another in the modern world, it may in this spirit of awakening that they find their deepest affinity and sense of integration.

24 February 2006

Policy of Cruelty

The following is a quote from former Naval General Counsel Alberto Mora, featured in an article in the current New Yorker by Jane Mayer.

In my strongly held view, anyone who doesn’t wholeheartedly endorse this statement, and do everything in his or her power to see to it that every action taken by or under the authority of the government abides by its spirit, has no business serving in our government in any capacity.
“If cruelty is no longer declared unlawful, but instead is applied as a matter of policy, it alters the fundamental relationship of man to government. It destroys the whole notion of individual rights. The Constitution recognizes that man has an inherent right, not bestowed by the state or laws, to personal dignity, including the right to be free of cruelty. It applies to all human beings, not just in America—even those designated as ‘unlawful enemy combatants.’ If you make this exception the whole Constitution crumbles. It’s a transformative issue.”

17 February 2006

Pakistani Cleric solicits murder

ABC news reports that a Pakistani Muslim cleric has offered $1 million for the murder of one of the Danish cartoonists who drew cartoons of Muhammad. Every Western nation should demand of President Musharraf that this blatant solicitation of murder be immediately investigated and prosecuted, failing which diplomats should be withdrawn. This is just not acceptable conduct in countries claiming the privileges of membership in the International community.

02 February 2006

We cannot tolerate a government that deliberately breaks the law

I keep hearing on the media various citations of public opinion that the unwarranted wiretaps carried out by the Bush administration are necessary, might prevent a terrorist attack, we're at war, so it's OK, etc. But these all miss the essential point, as far as I'm concerned. The issue is not whether the wiretaps are a good idea. Maybe they are, I don't pretend to know for sure. The issue is whether this administration is constrained to abide by the rule of law. It claims it isn't... or rather that a grossly vague authorization to "use force" allows it to ignore the 4th amendment and particular statutory provisions wholesale.

There are two, in my opinion, inescapable realities here:

1. Any reasonable interpretation of FISA, which is the law of the land, prohibits this conduct. In conjunction with the 4th amendment, the conduct is unquestionably illegal. The rationalization offered by the administration is simply not a credible interpreation of the intent of the Congress to delegate powers to the presidency.

2. The administration opposed a bill in Congress in 2002, while it was carrying out this illegal acitvity, which would have made reforms to FISA to make the kind of wiretaps they want to conduct easier to authorize.

I don't see how any reasonable person can fail to draw the conclusion: the government deliberately concealed from the public and most of the Congress the fact that it was intentionally violating the law.

Impeachment is called for (even though it is probably not politically feasible, unless the House reverts to the Democrats this year). Not because the wiretaps weren't necessary... that's a separate issue. Because if we are to be a nation of laws not of men, we must not tolerate our government intentionally violating the law in so widespread, long-term, and flagrant a manner as this, or else we place the future of representative government in doubt.

20 December 2005

Emptiness and the Sublime ~ A Holiday Reflection

One of the wisest and most profound scholars and practitioners of the Buddhist tradition of Madhyamaka, the second-century master Nagarjuna, taught that the real meaning of the somewhat cryptic wisdom teachings on emptiness of our Founder, Shakyamuni, as, for example, in the Heart Sutra, mean that all form, all matter; even consciousness itself; are without inherent existence and have as their essential nature emptiness. There are elaborate and very involved logical and experiential bases for this doctrine, but I won't belabor the point. The conclusion from all of this (often omitted in glosses on Buddhism), however, is that far from there being simply nothing, i.e., no-existence (nihilism), the mere appearances to mind which those of us living in the World experience as suffering, transitory enjoyment, form, consciousness. . . the universe itself . . . are by their essential nature beyond conceptual thought; a genuine reality which is open, expansive, relaxed, and blissful.

Perhaps this points to the common ground between Western theological religion and Buddhist practice: The Western One-God and our Vajradhara are both representations of that which is so beyond human ordinary mental conception that all description, all words, all concepts fail us, and we can only revere it and seek to involve ourselves in its direct experience. And in so doing we discover that the sublime creates in our hearts potentially limitless lovingkindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, equanimity, purification, and wisdom.

May everyone's holidays be happy, and may they have a happy, productive, and healthy New Year!

More on Why Bush should be impeached and removed from office

Josh Marshall has an excellent analysis of why the right-wing apologists for this president's failure to uphold the constitution have it all wrong. Even if the argument that the president has extraordinary emergency powers has some merit, it is clearly and in my view inarguably incumbent upon the president to inform Congress of any such actions, as soon as practicable, and follow their legislative dictates on any further use of a particular power or application of a particular policy. Any other conduct is misdemeanor in office, and the president should be impeached. Including for failure to so consult with Congress. This president has been explicitly and quite blatantly violating the clear provisions of statutory law for years, without seeking Congressional approval. This is unacceptable, and the President should be impeached, convicted, and removed from office with all speed.

19 December 2005

The President has deliberately violated his oath to uphold the constitution and must be impeached

The New York Times reports this morning on Bush's explanation for why he violated the explicit terms of the law on surveillance of American citizens and the requirement for judicial review. His explanation is entirely unsatisfactory. There is no credible legal defense: when Congress speaks on a particular subject, and explicitly requires judicial review for a particular executive action, the president may not reply on vague "use of force" authorization or reliance on undefined additional executive powers to openly and deliberately violate the law. The conclusion is inescapable: this President has intentionally violated his oath to uphold the constitution. Impeachment forthwith is the only reasonable course of action, and those who fail to see this are facing the slippery slope of the end of American representative government (in the relatively near future), and facing it with frightening indifference.

13 December 2005

Global Warming: Rushing towards Catastrophe

The NYT has an editorial today about the shameful fiasco in Montreal, saying that the best that can be said about it is that the other countries struggling to work out a framework for dealing with the crisis of global warming refused to allow the US to blow the entire conference to smithereens.

Elizabeth Kolbert has a lead "Talk of the Town" piece in the current New Yorker too, in which she says it's no longer a question of putting off catastrophe; it's a question of rushing towards it. (No link currently available).

08 December 2005

Intolerable Shame, If True

I have no way of verifying the following, from Steve Clemons's The Washington Note, but I can say that Clemons is a generally reliable and sober person, who reports this as fact, so it carries a certain credibility to me. If this is true, it is so abominably shameful that a major shakeup at the CIA and the Administration is called for. This kind of unAmerican activity simply must stop. We Americans must not continue to tolerate this sort of thing being committed in our names.

Make it $100 million for Innocent Rendition Victim Khaled El-Masri
I just got off the phone with a prominent Arabic journalist producing a program on the politics and practice of rendition.This journalist,
Yosri Fouda, has interviewed at length Khaled El-Masri, the innocent victim of American kidnapping and rendition gone very wrong. I have not read extensively about El-Masri's case, so this may be public record, but what I did not know when I wrote last night's post were the details of how he was "dumped" after American authorities learned he was innocent.


Get this now. El-Masri, a German citizen of Lebanese descent, was kidnapped while vacationing by American intelligence agents. He was transported and "questioned" -- allegedly roughly -- by American authorities in Afghanistan. Along the way, these investigators finally figured out he was innocent and reported back to CIA Director George Tenet. Tenet had him held ANYWAY for another two months. And then. . .you might ask, could it get worse? Well, yes.
We dumped him blind-folded in the deep forest, mountainous triangle area between Albania, Serbia and Macedonia. He had to walk out with no money, no identification. He got to a border guard station -- and because of his inability to identify himself and because of how "outlandish" his story sounded to the border guards he met, he feared that the entire process would begin. We dumped him blindfolded in a forest in one of the toughest regions nearby. Were U.S. authorities hoping he'd just be shot by someone else? What were they thinking?Let's make sure that one of the journalists traveling with Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice asks about this detail of the story that had escaped me and others before. What is this about dumping a known-innocent guy in the Serbia-Kosovo-Macedonia triangle? More later.-- Steve Clemons

UPDATE: My friend, journalist Eli Lake, has suggested in the comments section that someone (including TWN) pose the question of how the El-Masri case occurred to the CIA, which handled this case. He has a good point, and we will follow up on it. But others in the press corps ought to also follow up with the CIA. SCC

02 December 2005

The Great Misleader

Krugman in today's Times (unfortunately behind Times Select Firewall) argues cogently that Bush's "major policy address" on Iraq was more of the same deliberate misleadership we've become accustomed to, and, at least up until now, the press has largely acquiesced in.

Among his chief examples are the completely misleading figures given on oil production. Of course oil production in Iraq increased from 2003 to 2004. During and just before the war in '03 there was effectively no oil production, so if it didn't increase in '04 it would really be a major drop. The truth is that oil production in Iraq, depsite rosy predictions by the neocons in Fantasyland, has never achieved in pre-war, Sanctions-in-effect levels.

He also points out that the statements about "progress" in Fallujah, Samara and Najaf are pretty blatantly just not borne out by the real facts.

I was impressed by the CBS News dialog between Bob Schieffer and Lara Logan on the day of Bush's speech. Schieffer asked her about the Airport Road, which Bush claimed was now under Iraqi control. Logan said, "That's just not true, Bob," and proceeded to describe the real situation. This is what the American people have a right to expect: a press that does its homework and fact-checks everything the Great Misleader says.

01 December 2005

Lieberman defends Bush Iraq Policy

This is a good example of why I've thought for some time now that Joe Lieberman should resign from the Democratic party -- like Sharon from Likud -- and join the Republicans. Of course, he should resign his Senate seat too, since he was elected as a Democrat. To continue to serve as a Republican is a fraud upon the electorate... and he's already doing it, in everything but name.

21 November 2005

Bamford on White House Prewar Deception Strategy

See James Bamford in Rolling Stone on the White House's outsourcing strategy to create the propaganda climate to sell a war to depose Saddam Hussein.

18 November 2005

My letter to my congressman about Medicare Rx Coverage

Dear Congressman Berman,
I am still in my 50s, so the Medicare Prescription Drug fiasco does not directly affect me personally, and my elderly father has a health plan that makes the choices simpler for him than for most.
Nonetheless, I feel impelled to write to you to urge you to sponsor and support IMMEDIATE REFORM to this very-ill-conceived plan. Seniors everywhere are very confused, and the "do-nut hole", prohibition against negotiated prices, and needless mandate of "gratuitous privatization," as Economist Paul Krugman puts it, are all hugely negative and badly thought-out features of this plan.


I believe a great political price will be paid by those who fail and refuse to radically overhaul this Republican boondoggle, and replace it with honest, government paid, and fair prescription drug coverage as part of Medicare. Such fairness must include a means-based formula for any premiums and humane considerations taken into account in any restrictons of coverage.


Thank you.

07 November 2005

Sullivan on Torture Policy: good questions

Andrew Sullivan has two very good posts on the Bush torture policy, asking some excellent questions.

BUSH DIGS IN DEEPER: Here's a fascinating quote:
"There's an enemy that lurks and plots and plans and wants to hurt America again. So you bet we will aggressively pursue them but we will do so under the law. We do not torture," -
President Bush, today. If that's the case, why threaten to veto a law that would simply codify what Bush alleges is already the current policy? If "we do not torture," how to account for the hundreds and hundreds of cases of abuse and torture by U.S. troops, documented by the government itself? If "we do not torture," why the memos that expanded exponentially the lee-way given to the military to abuse detainees in order to get intelligence? The president's only defense against being a liar is that he is defining "torture" in such a way that no other reasonable person on the planet, apart from Bush's own torture apologists (and they are now down to one who will say so publicly), would agree. The press must now ask the President: does he regard the repeated, forcible near-drowning of detainees to be torture? Does he believe that tying naked detainees up and leaving them outside all night to die of hypothermia is "torture"? Does he believe that beating the legs of a detainee until they are pulp and he dies is torture? Does he believe that beating detainees till they die is torture? Does he believe that using someone's religious faith against them in interrogations is "cruel, inhumane and degrading" treatment and thereby illegal? What is his definition of torture?

SOME MORE QUESTIONS: What does the president think of Ian Fishback's testimony that abuse and torture was routine and that no one in the military hierarchy would say they were not permitted during eighteen months of his trying to get an answer? What does the president make of the following quote from another servicemember of his time in Iraq: "I think our policies required abuse. There were freaking horrible things people were doing. I saw [detainees] who had feet smashed with hammers. One detainee told me he had been forced by Marines to sit on an exhaust pipe, and he had a softball-sized blister to prove it. The stuff I did was mainly torture lite: sleep deprivation, isolation, stress positions, hypothermia. We used dogs." Since the president signed the finding of September 17, setting up a series of secret CIA detention camps where 'waterboarding' is permitted, does he believe and will he state categorically that no torture has ever occurred at those camps?
Watching and listening to this man, it seems to me we have a few possible interpretations in front of us. Either the president simply does not know what is being done in his name in his own military or he is lying through his teeth to the American people and the world. I guess there is also a third possibility: that he is simply unable to acknowledge the enormity of what he has done to the honor of the United States, the success of the war and the safety of American servicemembers. And so he has gone into clinical denial. Or he is so ashamed he cannot bear to face the truth of what he has done. None of these options are, shall we say, encouraging. But there is, of course, an easy way forward for the president if this is truly what he believes: support the Congress in backing the president's own position. Pass the McCain Amendment. Given what he said today, why on earth would he not?


My response to Mr. Sullivan:

Excellent, excellent questions. The Gagglers should ask every one of them, every day, until they're answered. And the nightly news broadcasts should show Scotty trying to dodge the questions. "We don't torture," "We act within the law," are not answers to these very, very specific questions; not to mention the fact that the premise of the questions shows these kinds of answers to be lies.

What I would like to know is how can those responsible for congressional oversight justify not holding hearings to ask these questions of whoever they can from the administration, again, every day, until they are answered? The shame of such a process would force change of policy amounting to complete reversal.

You are absolutely right that this issue goes beyond ideology, and it goes beyond whether the prosecution of war in Iraq is worthwhile or not. America's reputation for "fair play" is already shot, but its very legitimacy as a "defender of freedom" is on the line, and about to go down in a way that will be very, very long and hard to recover.

01 November 2005

Lies and Conspiracy

Of course political reality is one thing. The government is completely controlled by the Republican Party. Nonetheless, we have to ask:

It's now clear that Bush and his administration waged a campaign of deliberate deception, in which the "mainstream media" was complicit, to justify involving America in a catastrophic war.
  • How is this not an impeachable offense?

It's equally clear that Cheney, Libby and Rove (and probably others) conspired to out to the press a covert CIA operative, during wartime, with serious consequences to American intelligence assets and effectively ending her career.

  • How is this not treason?

At the very least, there should be an unceasing drumbeat in the op-Eds and commentaries across the land, demanding that Bush explain and account for his actions, and for Cheney and Rove to resign now.

27 October 2005

Karma and Damnation

Whether or not the modern Westerner wishes to believe in the real existence of infernal realms is in a sense beside the point. Evil simply brings forth suffering; and it hardly matters whether one conceives of this in the picturesque terms of Dante’s Inferno or shares the view of Jean-Paul Sartre that “hell is other people.” Nevertheless, it is important to grasp that the idea of eternal damnation as a punishment for sin is foreign to Buddhist understanding. Suffering is a consequence of one’s own action, not a retribution inflicted by an external power. Infernal torments, moreover, though they may last for aeons, belong to samsara and are therefore not exempt from the law of impermanence. And even if the notion of a divine vengeance is regarded as an approximation, in mythological terms, to the concept of karmic consequences, it is perhaps worth suggesting that the impersonal view proposed by Buddhism should have the advantage of exorcising the paralyzing sense of guilt, or revolt, that can so often be the outcome of a too anthropomorphic theism. The doctrine of karma has only one message: the experience of states of being follows upon the perpetration of acts. We are the authors of our own destiny; and being the authors, we are ultimately, perhaps frighteningly, free.

--from the Padmakara Translation Group’s Introduction to Shantideva’s Bodhicharyavatara (Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life) (Shambhala Publications, 1996).

17 October 2005

End Gerrymandering: a Modest Proposal

The whole issue of Congressional redistricting has become central to any analysis of why representative government in the United States is so dysfunctional. In Texas, Republicans were able to strongarm an overturning of the traditional ten-year cycle to force through a grossly disproportional mid-decade reapportionment, resulting, by some accounts, in a pick-up of five seats by Republicans. This is not because of any change in the votes of the electorate; merely in the system which determines what those votes will determine. In California, the governor has proposed an initiative to change the constitution of the State to create a commission of un-elected retired judges to make the determination of congressional redistricting . . . with no guarantee that the new system will lead to districts which any more accurately represent the actual views of the people than the current system.

My proposal is relatively simple, and to my knowledge has not been widely discussed anywhere before. I am not a statistician or mathematician, but let’s take it as a given that there are a limited number of mathematical solutions to the following problem: with minimal adjustments to prevent districts from bisecting buildings, etc., require the drawing congressional districts in a given state so that each has the same number of registered voters, and the minimum possible perimeter. (Which translates to the most compact area). This should amount to essentially a mathematical problem, or algorithm, to be calculated by a computer from the census data and geographical data points.

If this idea were put into effect, “gerrymandering,” which is the drawing of weirdly contorted borders for congressional districts in order to guarantee the re-election of incumbents, would be effectively outlawed, and there would be no negotiation over or arbitrary designation of districts. In the random fallout of advantage and disadvantage from such a system, no party would be prejudiced and none unduly advantaged. Such redistricting could occur with each census, or, based on politics-proof government updated estimates, more often.

12 October 2005

Plamegate heating up

Plamegate timeline, for anyone interested, here.

This thing is really heating up. See this and this.


It causes one to wonder if total meltdown is avoidable. It appears that Rove at least may be doomed.

See this for one take on "Why this matters."

07 October 2005

Ain't no use arguin' about religion

My nephew, an evangelical Christian, suggested I read C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, I suppose to encourage me, whom he knows to subscribe to Buddhist teachings, to at least have a better idea where his faith comes from. I’d actually read the book, or part of it, years ago, but I dutifully went out and found an old copy and read it. I can’t say I found it particularly profound. Professor Lewis, in the first part of the book, The Case for Christianity, tries to prove the truth of his religion in six sentences or so, but this seemed like a series of non-sequiturs to me. The conclusion was foregone. The rest of the book presumes at least a degree of acceptance of the basic premises, i.e. that the World was created by God, that he sent his Son, begotten not made, to Earth to save us, etc. He seems to be trying to make a logical case for belief in his religion, but I think his task is impossible, so it’s not surprising that he doesn’t succeed. It isn’t that Christianity is any more difficult to prove logically, it’s just that religion, by practical definition, must transcend rational issues like real-world proof of its premises. Acceptance must be based on something other than… (more than, if you prefer) ... reason.

I suggested to my nephew nothing in return, not because there aren't useful commentaries on what I believe, but because I have no desire to try to convince him or any Christian of anything, or to question, or try to induce them to question, their beliefs. I’m perfectly content for to have different religious views from my friends and relatives, and only hope that they can be marked by mutual respect. Of course, no one follows, to any considerable extent, a religious tradition, without being convinced that it comes closer to Truth with a capital T than other traditions. That doesn’t mean, though, that he can’t respect those who have come to different conclusions, even if he believes they would be better off if they believed as he does, which of course is equally inevitable.

I think it is inherent in any religion, to at least some degree, that intuition, (or faith, if you prefer), is involved. Thus, the holding of belief or practice is in some degree dependent upon logically or factually indefensible acceptance of specific statements of belief taught or related by past spiritual teachers on whom one chooses to rely. Religious doctrine, again all but by definition, will necessarily contain that which is not falsifiable (or verifiable), and which is necessarily open to the charge, by those who choose not to believe in it, of being arbitrary. Were it otherwise, the doctrine under examination would be provably true, and would cross over from being religion to being science, and denial of such doctrine would go from being an intellectually defensible difference of choice to being mere stupidity. Yet most (not all) people find that if all they are willing to accept, or practice, must be derived from that which can be verified, i.e., that which is science, there is something missing, something important to their well-being. Thus, they make a conscious (or sometimes unconscious) choice to rely on intuition, or faith, and accept as true certain spiritual elements which they find irresistible, regardless of proof. In simpler terms, they choose to believe something not because it’s provably true, but because it seems to them that it just must be true; i.e. they feel it to be true. As an aside, the fact that many of these spiritual elements are in fact common to most spiritual traditions is at least suggestive of their universal truth.

Still, this lack of possibility of proof of spiritual belief is the uncrackable nut: just as the old saw says de gustibus non est disputandum, it is equally true that you can’t usefully argue logically about faith, or intuitive belief. These are ultimately personal matters, apart from the ethical and moral standards which we accept as societal conventions in the interests of public order, insisting not on belief in their truth but in obedience to their form, under compulsion, as the price of living in society. This is the borderland not between religion and science but between religion and law, which of course gives rise to a whole series of other disagreements, based on how people view ethics, but these cross the frontiers of religious categories as well.

Sometimes someone (usually a young person) is seeking something, and is open to suggestion about matters of intuition or faith. And sometimes people’s beliefs gradually evolve, or even spontaneously and suddenly change, in a process common enough that there’s a word for it: epiphany. But usually there are no logical arguments, and no amount of cajoling, short of brainwashing techniques, which will convince someone to change his mind about these essentially non-rational beliefs, on which all religions ultimately rely to at least some extent.