Burris exerts authorial agency

Ezra Klein on Burris' tomb:

A Senate seat is a prize, no doubt, but it's rather less of one if you secured it by abetting a political criminal's desire to obscure his guilt by sparking a racial showdown. Burris, however, is taking the long view. The mausoleum view. Eventually, "United States Senator" will be etched beneath "Trail Blazer." And there will be no asterisk, no explanation of the conditions. Burris will see to that. He'll write it down himself.

Might make for interesting link for week on authorship and authority.

cost of the bailout

From the author of the upcoming book Bailout Nation. The bailout -- so far -- costs more than:

• Marshall Plan: Cost: $12.7 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $115.3 billion
• Louisiana Purchase: Cost: $15 million, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $217 billion
• Race to the Moon: Cost: $36.4 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $237 billion
• S&L Crisis: Cost: $153 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $256 billion
• Korean War: Cost: $54 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $454 billion
• The New Deal: Cost: $32 billion (Est), Inflation Adjusted Cost: $500 billion (Est)
• Invasion of Iraq: Cost: $551b, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $597 billion
• Vietnam War: Cost: $111 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $698 billion
• NASA: Cost: $416.7 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $851.2 billion

COMBINED.

media whores exposed

Big story this week is the NYT's "Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon's Hidden Hand," which finally reveals that all those talking military heads on teevee selling us this lovely war are -- surprise, surprise -- in the tank for military contractors, and coordinate their talking points with the Pentagon ministry of information. The bit that everyone is quoting:

To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as “military analysts” whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world.

Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found.

The effort, which began with the buildup to the Iraq war and continues to this day, has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air.

Those business relationships are hardly ever disclosed to the viewers, and sometimes not even to the networks themselves. But collectively, the men on the plane and several dozen other military analysts represent more than 150 military contractors either as lobbyists, senior executives, board members or consultants. ....

Records and interviews show how the Bush administration has used its control over access and information in an effort to transform the analysts into a kind of media Trojan horse — an instrument intended to shape terrorism coverage from inside the major TV and radio networks.

Also, they include a cool visual video thingie with it. Neat.

Blackwater hijinks

More on Blackwater from Dailykos, including the fun little fact that they busted a corrupt Iraqi minister out of jail and spirited him to affluent exile in Chicago. Sweet!

Iraq for Sale

The depth of corruption and depravity the Bushies unleashed in Iraq knows no bounds. The whole war was basically an unsupervised giveaway to any corporation with Republican ties. These were then given millions - billions, total - of taxpayer money with no means of accounting for it. The waste and fraud have been document in the film Iraq for Sale. But new reports are coming out all the time, including a new Rolling Stone article that details the incompetence and contempt these people display:

Operation Iraqi Freedom, it turns out, was never a war against Saddam ­Hussein's Iraq. It was an invasion of the federal budget, and no occupying force in history has ever been this efficient. George W. Bush's war in the Mesopotamian desert was an experiment of sorts, a crude first take at his vision of a fully privatized American government. In Iraq the lines between essential government services and for-profit enterprises have been blurred to the point of absurdity -- to the point where wounded soldiers have to pay retail prices for fresh underwear, where modern-day chattel are imported from the Third World at slave wages to peel the potatoes we once assigned to grunts in KP, where private companies are guaranteed huge profits no matter how badly they fuck things up.

OK, I'm gonna stop reading this morning because I'm getting really angry.

insane.

This is just insane. Madness. Evil. WHAT THE FUCK:

One after another, the men and women who have stepped forward to report corruption in the massive effort to rebuild Iraq have been vilified, fired and demoted. Or worse.

For daring to report illegal arms sales, Navy veteran Donald Vance says he was imprisoned by the American military in a security compound outside Baghdad and subjected to harsh interrogation methods.

There were times, huddled on the floor in solitary confinement with that head-banging music blaring dawn to dusk and interrogators yelling the same questions over and over, that Vance began to wish he had just kept his mouth shut.