The Vanguard

As Janice Turner put it in the Times (UK) today, one of the mysteries of the last few weeks of the economic crisis has been Where's the Rage? Perhaps the answer to the question comes in the energy sector wildcat strikes in the UK and the Waterford Crystal sit-in in the Republic.

One interesting aspect of these actions is the causes that attach themselves to them. British unions are understandably concerned that the wildcat strikes have attracted a BNP element, but Brian at Slugger makes the point that will have occurred to people with long memories, the role of the power strikes in the collapse of the Sunningdale government in Northern Ireland in 1974.

Anyway, in the Waterford sit-in, the workers are flying the Starry Plough. It's run up the pole about 1m40s into this RTE story (or here, 1st item). Note a couple of things. First, their flag is the original 1916 version, and not the later and more usual flag which essentially abstracts to the constellation. Second, if you look closely at RTE's footage, the flag appears to be upside down. That may be an insight into why the version based on the plough went out of style. Most people have never seen one.

UPDATE: In Brian Cowen's hypocritical tribute to Tony Gregory, he said --

Tony Gregory had a strong interest in Irish history and he had a deep affinity for James Connolly who was a central figure in the republican and labour tradition from which Tony hailed.

Connolly's Irish Citizen Army had championed the cause of Dublin's working class during the 1913 Lock-Out. At Tony's funeral, the blue and white of the Starry Plough flag - the same flag which is synonymous with the Citizen Army - draped Tony Gregory's coffin on his final journey to Balgriffen Cemetery.

Here's Tony's coffin. Note that it's the "modern" plough and stars flag, not the Irish Citizen Army flag as above. This is what happens when the Soldiers of Developers pretend to be real socialists.

Backing the right horse

Pittsburgh Steelers owner Dan Rooney presenting then candidate Obama with a Steelers jersey. There is now speculation that Obama will name Rooney as US Ambassador to Ireland. It'll also be interesting to see how Obama handles the St Patrick's Day festivities, as it's a ritual in dire need of new thinking. For one thing, the obligatory bowl of shamrock is Waterford Crystal, where things are not so good these days. Maybe the White House could roll the shamrock, the naming of the ambassador, and the Superbowl team visit to the White House into one.

UPDATE: Dan Rooney thanked President Obama first in his victory speech.

Photo by Jason Reed, Reuters

Blowback

The New York Times has a very interesting story which tries to figure out who in the Bush administration made the decision to withhold a US-funded exit poll that showed challenger Raila Odinga winning the December 2007 Kenyan presidential election over incumbent Mwai Kibaki. The disputed election led to riots and an eventual power-sharing government.

One possibility not explored is that the Bushies were reluctant to acknowledge that exit polls could be used as part of the evidence against a declared election outcome. Because of course, that's part of the case against George Bush's declared victory in the 2000 Florida vote.

Reading is stimulating

Powerline's "Hindrocket" --

The International Monetary Fund projects that the U.S. GDP will contract by 1.6% in 2009, canceling out a modest 1.1% growth in 2008. That's not good, but it's better than the IMF predicts for any developed country other than Canada. The IMF projects Germany's GDP to be down 2.5% this year, France's 1.9%, the U.K.'s 2.8% and Japan's 2.6% ... If the IMF is right, one effect of the current global downturn will be to increase the economic gap between the U.S. and rivals among the developed countries. At the same time, the IMF projects less developed economies (like China's and India's) to continue to gain on the developed world.

All of which offers more evidence that the hysteria currently being whipped up in Washington over the alleged need to add another trillion dollars in federal debt is overstated, at best.

This is a case where one needs to read the actual IMF forecast --

Consequently, unlike the November WEO Update, the new projections incorporate a substantial fiscal expansion. Specifically, fiscal stimulus in G-20 countries in 2009 is projected to be 1.5 percent of GDP. Deficits are also expected to be boosted by the operation of automatic stabilizers and the impact on revenues of sharp asset price declines, as well as the costs of financial sector rescues.

In other words, the Fund assumed a discretionary package of 1.5% of GDP for all of the world's large economies in addition to a lot of budget deterioration due to the crisis. US GDP is about $14.4 trillion, so the assumed stimulus for 2009 is about $216 billion. The consensus Congressional Budget Office estimate is that the US stimulus will amount to $169 billion up to 1st October 2009, and a chunk of $356 billion that would come in the following 12 months. If we guess that one-quarter of that $356 billion is coming at the end of 2009, then the total 2009 stimulus is $258 billion.

Thus the IMF forecast that he uses as proof that the Democratic package isn't needed assumes that something very like the Democratic package passes -- and soon! Among the mistakes he's making is using multi-year cost estimates in the context of the IMF's one year forecast. It's the type of mistake one makes when politics is trumping analytical motivation.

The Popular Front for the Liberation of America

An emerging trend in the early stages of the conservative opposition to Barack Obama is an apparent proliferation of news-release-ready organizations ready to take on the administration in name of Catholic teaching.

Here's National Review's Maggie Gallagher alerting everyone to a new group called Moral Accountability (.com). It's spearheaded by Princeton professor Robert ("Robby") George, recipient of a Presidential Citizens Medal from George W. Bush. The apparent goal of the group is to create rhetorical and intellectual pressure around prominent Catholics (and other Christians) who aren't so keen on the rendering unto Caesar element of what Jesus taught about church-state relations i.e. Catholics who lack enthusiasm for legislating Catholic moral teachings.

And here's K-Lo alerting everyone to the "outrage" of a Catholic college inviting Bill Ayers to speak, courtesy of a press release from the "Cardinal Newman Society" whose apparent mission is to protect the Catholic character, as they see it, of Catholic educational institutions around the USA. One might have thought that the idea of a university, if you will, would be to be open to all forms of intellectual engagement, but of course Bill Ayers is not just any "outrageous" visitor, but one who can be linked to Barack Obama.

So anyway, do the two instances above herald a wave of Catholic-themed astroturf groups pursuing a thinly disguised political agenda? While it's too soon to tell, it's not too soon to note that despite these groups' focus on moral clarity, they have no opinion on Pope Benedict de-excommunicating the Holocaust-denying bishop. Speaking of which, what would Michael Rubin say if Mahmoud Ahmadinejad endorsed the bishop?

Outreach

That Barack Obama did his first Presidential interview with al-Arabiya (transcript) has attracted a lot of attention and reignited speculation about the specific site implicit in his campaign promise to give a major speech from a "Muslim capital" within the first 100 days of his Presidency. In the realm of probably useless speculation, it's worth noting that the only Muslim leader mentioned in the interview was Saudi King Abdullah in the specific context of the King Abdullah peace proposal to Israel.

As Matthew Yglesias has noted, this is the same peace offer that New York based Max Boot has ridiculed as unworkable, while Israeli President Shimon Peres says it has potential.

But anyway, it's worth paying more attention to the speech King Abdullah delivered at the Arab League summit in Kuwait a couple of weeks ago. The speech is unusual for its blunt criticism of the state of Palestinian and Arab unity and even the inevitable denunciation of Israel managed an interesting twist on the debate about proportionality --

The murderers and their accomplices have forgotten that the Torah says: “an eye for an eye”; it never says an entire city for an eye.

So don't rule out that in a Rovian gambit of taking on the opposition on their territory, Obama decides to make his big speech in Riyadh. He could then send the rightwingers crazy with speculation that he's en route to Mecca!

UPDATE: Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Fouad Ajami interprets the interview as reassuring to Arab autocracies and claims that Obama has dumped the Bush of Arabia idea that externally imposed power can bring liberty. Ajami attributes intellectual support for the Bush idea to Sam Huntington. But here's the FT's Christopher Caldwell arguing that Huntington didn't believe that.

Time to get back to making stuff

A few days ago National Review's Mark Steyn highlighted a section from a Matthew Parris op-ed in the Times (UK) --

This recession is not a failure of market economics. It is a reassertion of market economics after a decade in which we paid ourselves more than we were producing, and funded it precariously and temporarily by complicated credit instruments that it took a while for the market to rumble.

Others also took note. The full Parris column is a good read and heaps deserving ridicule on Gordon Brown in particular. But Steyn is back today taking note of another Times (UK) article --

Across the UK as a whole, government spending now accounts for 49% of the economy. And look at these regional variations:

Southern England: a mere 36% of the economy is government spending;
Northeast England: 66.4%;
Wales: 71.6%;
Northern Ireland: 77.6%.

As The Times notes:

"The state now looms far larger in many parts of Britain than it did in former Soviet satellite states such as Hungary and Slovakia as they emerged from communism in the 1990s, when state spending accounted for about 60% of their economies."

Big government is where once successful nations go to die.

It's worthwhile considering the link between these observations. Where is the share of government spending in the UK economy smallest? In the part of the country which was devoted to most fiendishly creating that debt mountain that Parris was complaining about. And while Northern Ireland has a special factor i.e. The Troubles accounting for the high share of government, the other parts of the UK were not helped by being priced out of the things they used to do by the financial boom.

Priced out specifically by the exchange rate, jacked up to high levels in the early 1980s by Maggie Thatcher partly in the belief that export manufacturing was a unionised dinosaur, and then maintained there by the ability of London's financial services machine to pay the bills even as many of the industries that the UK used to have went into decline. Necessitating an increased role for government. Recall also that the "strong dollar" obsession, likewise detrimental to manufacturing, was a hallmark of the Reagan era adopted enthusiastically (although with less credibility) by his successors.

There's a broader point here. Many of the crisis response critiques, such as those from Parris, are interpreted as saying that the problem is that government got too big. But the clear reading of the last two years is that it was the financial sector that got too big. That's where some real crowding out was happening.

UPDATE: Martin Wolf sheds more light on how it was the US and UK financial sectors that got so large.

It's not like the movies

Former George Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen got called on his assertions about the efficacy of Bush's intelligence policies (in which he referred as Barack Obama as the most dangerous man to occupy the Oval Office) by the Washington Post's Dan Froomkin. Consider just one aspect of Thiessen's responding claims --

Zubair then provided information that led to the capture of a JI [Jemaah Islamiah] terrorist leader named Hambali—KSM's [Khalid Sheikh Mohammed] partner in developing the West Coast plot. Their strategy was to used Southeast Asian operatives, since KSM knew we would be on the lookout for Arab men.

Told of Hambali's capture, KSM identified Hambali's brother "Gun Gun" as his successor and provided information that led to his capture.

Hambali's brother then gave us information that led us to a cell of 17 JI operatives that were going to carry out the West Coast plot.

The "West Coast" plot was the intended use of Richard Reid style shoe-bombs to blast open cabin doors and then fly the planes into buildings. No discussion of the feasibility of flying a plane after an explosion, let alone who would do the flying. Note that he never explains how many of the 17 JI operatives were pilots. Likely because the answer is 0.

While Hambali stays in Gitmo because of the Executive Decision style fantasies of people like Thiessen, he could have been tried for the very real crime of the Bali bombing by Indonesia or Australia. Is the unstated logic for keeping him locked up that letting him out would be too embarrassing?

Because he doesn't have enough outlets

At National Review's The Corner, Peter Wehner with an apparent scoop --

Bill Kristol will be heard from again and again, above all, of course, from his current perch at The Weekly Standard, but also, I gather, from a new perch at the Washington Post (where he will have a monthly column), as well as from his seat at Fox News and in other venues. He is easily among the most intelligent, creative, and articulate conservative voices in America—a fact, upon which I would be willing to bet a large sum of money, is what troubled the Times ... That is a tribute to both the rightness of Kristol’s views and his unwillingness to temper them for the sake of the Times. Unlike, say, the Washington Post under the leadership of Fred Hiatt, at the Times, real intellectual diversity is something to be avoided.

UPDATE: Politico also has the unsourced story.

Who's the daddy?

Gordon Brown today will apparently return to an atrocious metaphor --

LONDON (AFP) – Prime Minister Gordon Brown said Monday the financial crisis must not be an excuse to retreat into protectionism and instead be viewed as the "difficult birth-pangs of a new global order".

In a speech, he will urge countries to avoid "muddling through as pessimists" and "make the necessary adjustment to a better future and setting the new rules for this new global order", according to his office.

At least the speechwriters had the sense to avoid New World Order. The cool bloggers have had fun with "neo-Hooverite" interpretations of the financial crisis and related ideas that the crisis is a response to excess and requires liquidation to repent for the past sins. But is it any more sensible to view the crisis as a necessary and perhaps even, eventually joyous, pathway to a better future?

The crisis was avoidable. Gordon Brown was around the top policymaking tables for the last 10 years while it was not being avoided. The output of the birth pangs carries his DNA.

UPDATE: Brown, apparently sensitive to the charge that he had 10 years to do something about the crisis, claims that he warned about it 10 years ago! Of course, any good speechwriter puts in a few CYA paragraphs to cover various eventualities. The question is not what Brown said, but what he did (see also Guido's quote establishing that what Brown meant was spreading the UK approach to regulation everywhere else).

FINAL UPDATE: David Cameron confronted Brown on the "birth pangs" quote in Questions to the PM. He got in a line about "death throes" but as usual with Gordon's bluster, couldn't make much headway otherwise.

The blow-ins

This business about Pope Benedict de-excommunicating the Holocaust denier bishop Richard Williamson is one of those strings that when pulled, produces a tug in the most interesting places. Here's the Times (UK) religion correspondent Ruth Gledhill (who's been all over this story from the start) --

Williamson is a former Anglican who went to Winchester and Cambridge. He is thought to have been influenced in his conversion to Catholicism by the late Malcolm Muggeridge and he was received into the Catholic church by the Irish missionary priest, Father John Flanagan.

Muggeridge plays an important role in the recent intellectual history of the American right, and in particular in the emergence of a Catholic wing of the neocons. His trajectory from left to right mirrored that of the original 1930s neocons (Trotskyites as they were then) and his conversion to Catholicism also had parallels in the USA -- not least to Fr. Richard John Neuhaus who died recently, a death taken sufficiently seriously by the Bush White House to merit a special statement (the only other bereavements during the recent period getting such statements involved another priest and a cat).

Note in particular the role of National Review's William F. Buckley in triangulating this socio-cultural scene. Note also these interesting remarks from Christopher Hitchens about the possibility that Muggeridge was anti-Semitic. And if you haven't had enough noting, note the link between Neuhaus and the attempts to market the Iraq invasion as a Catholic just war.

So anyway, the Williamson affair is going to be very awkward for the conservatives. It's a reminder that for all the attempts to assert a natural right-wing alliance of Catholics, Jews, and Evangelicals, each of the participants in such an alliance bring some baggage. There hasn't been a word so far from National Review on the Benedict decision, and yet Kathryn Jean Lopez found time a few days ago to suggest that Washington DC's Catholic Cardinal shouldn't have been at the Barack Obama National Prayer Service given Obama's views on abortion.

If anything requires the Catholic hierarchy taking a stand, shouldn't it be the Holocaust?

UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan is immersed in the debate.

FINAL UPDATE: After several Catholics-bash-Obama posts, K-Lo realized she'd better say something about the Holocaust denying bishop. With the help of a few quotes from a source in Rome -- it's all legalisms and technicalities. Moral clarity, how are ya? The conclusion from her Rome source is remarkable --

The atrocities of the Third Reich are not a matter of theological opinion but of historical record. A bishop has no special competence to opine on these matters

Culture of life, indeed.

Note for Bush bloggers

All the links to the White House website during the Bush years don't work anymore. But they can be saved. In the web address, replace www.whitehouse with georgewbush-whitehouse.archives and the links will work. Example: if you're looking for the quote where Bush said he'd leave town with his head held high, it used to be [http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2009/01/20090113-1.html] and now it's here. Three cheers for the US National Archives. Now, if only there was a Blogger utility that can do a find-replace for the links on every post at once?

Once a Yes man, always a Yes man

New York Times analysis of the leadership crisis at Bank of America following its disastrous takeover of Merrill Lynch --

Still, the Bank of America board, whose ranks include the mayor of Spartanburg, S.C.; a retired general, Tommy R. Franks; and the former chairman and chief executive of Lowe’s, has offered up no signals that it has lost confidence in its leader.

Tommy Franks was George Bush's top general for the invasion of Iraq, got a Presidential Medal of Freedom early on in the still unwon war, and felt strongly enough about George Bush's leadership skills to campaign for his reeelection in 2004, barely out of his uniform. And whatever experience his career gave him in invading countries, it's didn't give him much in finance.

Could it be that his never-disagree-with-the-boss approach to Iraq was his single qualification to be on the board of Bank of America?

A loan by any other name

Ideas for nationalizing banks are all the rage. One question though: after a nationalization of banks, what would be the rationale for not nationalizing insurance companies? The balance sheet of a company like Aflac doesn't look much better than some of the banks being identified as candidates for government takeovers: thin on capital relative to all the things that could go wrong with their assets. Without a convincing rule for where to draw a line, bank takeovers would just be more of the ad hockery whose track record is already not so good.

True colours

An excerpt from The Corner that speaks for itself --

It’s not even the end of inauguration week, and Obama is already proving to be the most dangerous man ever to occupy the Oval Office.

— Marc Thiessen was chief speechwriter for President George W. Bush.

Getting to the truth

Here's an interesting Associated Press report on reaction in Europe to Barack Obama's order to close the Guantanamo Bay detention centre and the secret CIA facilities; note the perspective from Ireland (and Joe Costello of the Labour Party) as to whether the move will dislodge any secrets about Shannon's role in the rendition-detention regime. It probably seems like a low priority now with the economic crisis in Ireland, but the alternative candidates for the Fianna Fail leadership have stints on their CVs as Minister for Foreign Affairs, which is where the three monkeys approach to Shannon dominates.

Barack Obama doesn't need economic advisers

Because apparently all he has to do is follow Gordon Brown. Here's Gordon to David Cameron during PM's questions today --

I believe that the indication that President Obama has given in the past few days that he will take the fiscal stimulus action that we have taken, and action in relation to banks in the way that we have done, shows that the world can work together to deal with the problem.

It's an especially amazing claim given that Gordon's initial approach to the banking crisis -- although praised to high heaven by Paul Krugman -- was just capital without any asset resolution or day-to-day managerial control, and the equally vaunted fiscal package in the Pre-Budget Report already looks like a dead duck. Maybe President Obama might want to take up these claims of Gordon when they meet in London in April.

Make him listen

It seems that one effect of the Obama presidency is already apparent: better punditry. Here's Maureen Dowd making exactly the right comparison of Obama's blistering but implicit criticisms of George Bush in his inauguration speech --

After thanking President Bush "for his service to our nation," Mr. Obama executed a high-level version of Stephen Colbert’s share-the-stage smackdown of W. at the White House correspondents’ dinner in 2006.

With W. looking on, and probably gradually realizing with irritation, as he did with Colbert, who Mr. Obama’s target was — (Is he talking about me? Is 44 saying I messed everything up?) — the newly minted president let him have it

Indeed, Obama's speech has triggered outrage at National Review's The Corner (Jay Nordlinger, Yuval Levin), which raises the question: when do these people think that it's OK for George Bush to have heard criticism of himself?

He was not a Prime Minister, so there was no parliamentary gauntlet. He did the bare minimum of news conferences, which in any case are a stilted Q&A format that can be easily filibustered (the same problem with the 2004 debates). All his set-piece speeches were before selected audiences. There've been so few times when he's had to directly confront a sustained critique -- and his lousy body language when it was happening shows that he's not good at it.

So in the glorious US constitutional system, two people got to the situation of George Bush sitting down and listening to how bad he was: a comedian (transcript), and the guy who took over from him 8 years after he started the job.

Heckuva job, Founding Fathers!

Never live for the sake of another man

Over at National Review's The Corner, Jonah Goldberg's critique of the Obama inauguration speech is strange ---

the line that grated on me most came from the bit about service and sacrifice. He said:

For us, they packed up their few worldly possessions and traveled across oceans in search of a new life.

For us, they toiled in sweatshops and settled the West; endured the lash of the whip and plowed the hard earth.

No, “they” didn’t. Slaves certainly didn’t endure the lash of the of the whip out of a sense of service and sacrifice for us. That is one of the reasons slavery is so evil; it isn't voluntary. Suffice it to say that if that line had come out of a different man’s mouth it would not be nearly so well-received. Nor did those immigrants make their sacrifices for “us.” They made them for themselves, for their own pursuit of happiness, for their families.

This thinking allows no room for the possibility that people act for the benefit (or indeed the preservation) of the next generation. Everyone is just out for themselves, even the slaves. George Bush's fiscal policy -- with its massive debt dump onto future generations -- makes a lot of sense from that perspective.

Fantasy Life

From a Pentagon news story about the departure ceremony for George Bush at Andrews Air Force Base --

The crowd roared as the former president and vice president made their dramatic entrance into the hangar. The rousing sounds of the “Air Force One” movie theme rung out as the huge hangar slowly opened, revealing the huge blue-and-white presidential aircraft glistening in the sunlight.

As the article later quietly explains, Bush's days with an actual AF1 were done by that point.

UPDATE: Bush wore an Air Force One jacket on the final flight.

The Inauguration

[more recent posts 1st]

11. The final update: video of Rev. Joseph Lowery's benediction [transcript]. Slowly building to a radical close. Superb stuff.

10. Heh: Some Republicans, of course, stayed in Washington. John Feehery, a strategist and former top congressional aide, said he and his wife planned to walk from their Capitol Hill home to the ceremony if they could find a baby sitter for their young son. "I accepted the will of the American people and I'm willing to work with this administration," he said.

A frequent political commentator on CNN and MSNBC, Feehery seemed not in great demand on this day of Democratic celebration. "I might be doing Irish TV," he said a bit sheepishly.

9. Bush at Andrews Air Force Base: he saluted the guard who met him at the helicopter steps. The salute made no sense all the times he did it as President: a salute is given to a higher ranking officer, and he was the commander-in-chief. But now it's just an idiotic leftover stunt.

8. The Bush White House website is already down! They need to save that material. Bush did a lot of his misdeeds in plain sight.

7. There's the Hussein!

6. No that's not Lord of the Dance. It's a Shaker hymn.

5. The more important oath - the one that got Biden in and therefore Cheney out.

4. Barack H. Obama. H?

3. Why does Bush still have the beady-eyed look after 8 years?

2. Hey George -- how does it feel that the new guy's wife is taller than you?

1. There couldn't be a better comic lead-in to the event than the news that Dick Cheney pulled a muscle in his back while lifting a moving box at his new home in McLean Virginia and so will attend the ceremony in a wheelchair as a precautionary measure. Two things in particular -- the somewhat Freudian nature of the mishap and the way it puts into stark relief the gulf between the Republican fetishisation of manual labour and their own lives. Dick Cheney hasn't done a day's work that didn't involve paper-pushing in 40 years. But he doesn't trust anyone else with his stuff (wasn't Joe the Plumber available?). He also appears to have no plans to move back to his "home state" of Wyoming.

How the Irish became black

Remarks of Bono at "We are One" Lincoln Memorial Inaugural concert

Introduced by Sam Jackson

Let Freedom Ring! On this spot where we are standing, 43 years, 46 years ago, Dr King had a dream. On Tuesday that dream comes to pass. [Pride, including black power salute]

Not just an American dream, also an Irish dream, a European dream, an African dream, an Israeli dream, also a Palestinian dream

Let Freedom Ring (x3), every village, every hamlet, every city, Let Freedom Ring!

What a thrill for 4 Irish boys from the Northside of Dublin to honour you sir the next President of the United States, Barack Obama in choosing this song to be part of the soundtrack to your campaign and more besides [City of blinding lights]

Luckily, blessings not just for the ones who kneel, Luckily.

Thank you America

Barack Obama remarks.

Sunday thinking cap

Why was Paul Krugman against capital injections for banks when Japan was doing it but for it when Gordon Brown was doing it?

UPDATE: Prof. Krugman spells out his opposition to the "bad bank" idea here and here, but the same arguments would apply against capital injections and asset insurance.

It's in the culture

N.E.R.D. - New Music - More Music Videos

Proving that at least one musical genre responds to current events, N.E.R.D. with a stock market crash-themed video.

The deception sprints to the finish

Amid of flurry of Friday news dumps (with more expected this weekend), the US Treasury has issued an announcement of financial sanctions which makes it sound like it has struck the neocon mother lode: an alliance between al-Qaeda and Iran.

It's headlined "Treasury Targets Al Qaida Operatives in Iran" and it names 4 such operatives: Mustafa Hamid, Muhammad Rab'a al-Sayid al-Bahtiyti, Ali Saleh Husain, and Sa'ad bin Laden (yes, one of those bin Ladens). There's a brief bio for each person and then an extensive description of their alleged activities. But here's the thing. Each section ends the same way --

In mid-2003, Mustafa Hamid was arrested in Iran along with other al Qaida members and associates ... Bahtiyti reportedly was arrested by Iranian authorities in mid-2003 ... Husain was detained by the Government of Iran in early 2003 .. He was arrested by Iranian authorities in early 2003. As of September 2008, it was possible that Sa'ad bin Laden was no longer in Iranian custody.

So that's it. 4 operatives, all with histories in Pakistan or Afghanistan, who wound up in a country with long borders with Pakistan or Afghanistan, and then were detained by the Iranians. Only the bin Laden son (of which there are many) might be on the loose, and if so, might not even be in Iran. The entire exercise seems to have the sole purpose of getting "al Qaeda" and "Iran" into the same press release, and so provide fodder for the pundits to claim that there is a link. One minor point: the Treasury official in charge of this charade, Stuart Levey, will apparently be acting Treasury Secretary until Tim Geithner is confirmed. God forbid that mistakes on tax returns interfere with the marketing of the War on Terror.

End of the world: new details available

Iran in general and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in particular have featured prominently in neocon obsessions about their plans to bring about the revelation of the Hidden Iman via a global apocalypse.

So the neocons should be freaking out about this photo of Ahmadinejad taken in Doha, Qatar, today Tehran yesterday before heading to Doha Qatar today where he was a surprise guest at an emergency Arab summit called to discuss the crisis in Gaza. Behind him is a sentence from the Old Testament and the Koran: "is not the morning nigh?". The sentence comes from the section of the holy books that deals with the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah and the escape of Lot's family from it, except of course for Lot's wife who looks back at the city and is turned into a pillar of salt.

In an additional twist, given Ahmadinejad's claim that there are no gay people in Iran, those events are also critical to the Islamic perception of homosexuality, since a mob that shows up outside Lot's house the night before the destruction shows no interest in his virgin daughters. Strangely enough, with all this imminent doom, George Bush is on a 4 day vacation.

AP Photo/Vahid Salemi

Was 9/11 God's will?

George Bush might think so. Early on in his widely ignored farewell address (given with 5 days in a tumultuous world still left in his Presidency) --

Fellow citizens: For eight years, it has been my honor to serve as your President. The first decade of this new century has been a period of consequence -- a time set apart.

Those last four words stand out as a bit precious for a political speech and sure enough, they have a history. He used them before in his 2004 State of the Union --

in a subtle reference to religious texts that refer to divine service as a time “set apart,” he said: “Having come this far, we sense that we live in a time set apart.”

So maybe the nation was in divine service the last 8 years, or more likely, he was. There's also an echo of one of the strangest right wing talking points about 9/11, that it was an Epiphany. Bush always speaks about his confidence in the judgment of history. But it's God's judgment that he's surest about.

Florida 2000 still hurts

Dick Cheney, during a lie-packed interview with Jim Lehrer on PBS (which others will debunk more carefully) --

And I think there were some people out there who questioned the legitimacy of our administration, given the way the Florida recount ultimately turned out.

There was no Florida recount. That was the problem.

UPDATE: Another Cheney interview, for the semi-official Fox News Agency, seems to lay the rhetorical groundwork for some torture and surveillance pardons, as well as for Scooter Libby.

He is the decider

The White House won't comment on the latest -- and fairly definitive -- accusation of torture in Guantanamo Bay. The reason is laughable --

Q I had a question about Gaza -- but on the issue of [Mohammed al-]Qahtani, can you just define the term "command influence" -- what the issue --

MS. PERINO: I'm sure there is a legal definition of it, but as I understand it, the Commander-in-Chief should not be commenting on cases where the government is bringing a case against a detainee. It would be inappropriate to do so from the White House. DOD is running the interrogations and the detainee trials -- tribunals, as we call them, military tribunals -- and so it's appropriate that we keep that over there. And Geoff Morrell* put out a statement last night and I'd refer you to that.

The claimed logic being that since George Bush is, as he constantly reminds us, Commander-in-Chief of the US Armed Forces, he should be commenting on a "trial" in which those armed forces are judge, jury, and executioner. But how does a policy of no comment change the fact that George Bush is, as he constantly reminds us, Commander-in-Chief of the US Armed Forces which is running trials in which those armed forces are judge, jury, and executioner? An imaginary wall between the White House and Pentagon doesn't do much. That's precisely the reason not to be running these tribunals in the first place.

*She seems to mean Bryan Whitman.

Entropa - Ireland

Here's an annotated image of the Ireland element of the Entropa installation in Brussels; other country depictions have been a source of controversy but the Irish one seems faithful to the self-assigned mission of the artists to mock national stereotypes (it appears to be sheepskin with bagpipe attachments).

The brochure attributes the Irish piece to John O'Connell, but news accounts claim that the entire installation was done by a 3-man Czech team led by David Černý and not 27 artists as originally claimed.

UPDATE: It's not clear from a photo of the actual installation whether the Ireland element is the same as in the brochure (from where the image above comes). Which calls into question whether the Czechs ever verified that what was being hung in Brussels corresponded to what their brochure said.