On The Difference Between Al Qaeda and ISIS

Most of us know almost nothing about ISIS.  There's a name, news reports, and photos and we each create our own story to explain them.  My friend Jeremy linked to an Atlantic article which gives us more.  Of course, we take the author's words with a grain of salt.  But it's evidence to put into the record to compare with the other evidence that is gathered.  I recommend reading it. 

Here's a snipped that contrasts Al Qaeda with ISIS, says one is  modern and corporate while the other is 7th Century:

We are misled in a second way, by a well-intentioned but dishonest campaign to deny the Islamic State’s medieval religious nature. Peter Bergen, who produced the first interview with bin Laden in 1997, titled his first book Holy War, Inc. in part to acknowledge bin Laden as a creature of the modern secular world. Bin Laden corporatized terror and franchised it out. He requested specific political concessions, such as the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Saudi Arabia. His foot soldiers navigated the modern world confidently. On Mohamd Atta’s last full day of life, he shopped at Walmart and ate dinner at Pizza Hut.

There is a temptation to rehearse this observation—that jihadists are modern secular people, with modern political concerns, wearing medieval religious disguise—and make it fit the Islamic State. In fact, much of what the group does looks nonsensical except in light of a sincere, carefully considered commitment to returning civilization to a seventh-century legal environment, and ultimately to bringing about the apocalypse.

Is this accurate?  Time will tell.   Meanwhile this article offers much to chew on.  More than the simplistic coverage we mostly get. 

If You Vote For Obama Are You Voting For A War Criminal?

Obama's continuation of many of the Bush administration's war on terrorism actions are troubling - torture, the right to kill American citizens who are terrorists, the continued war in Afghanistan, etc.

Shannyn Moore posted a loooong conversation between John Cusack (the actor, who is also, clearly someone who thinks) and Jonathon Turlock a law professor and expert for various media.

Basically, they ask the question - Can you really vote for a president who violates the constitution and commits war crimes because "he's better than Romney" or because "I like his social programs?"

My personal rational has been that if a Republican appoints the next two Supreme Court justices, the chance to save democracy will be postponed another generation. 

There is also the assumption they make that Obama is in fact a war criminal.  It seems that they are guilty of convicting him without a trial, the same crime they accuse him of with his powers to assassinate people like Osama bin Laden, and worse, American citizens.  It's seriously disturbing, and that's why the media should cover it so there can be a full blown debate and the facts and interpretations can be examined.

Crossing the Rubicon is the metaphor they use repeatedly - is there no point past which Obama could go before you wouldn't vote for him? 

The alternatives to voting for Obama aren't nearly as well developed as the argument that he is a war criminal.  

“Look, you’re not helping Obama by enabling him. If you want to help him, hold his feet to the fire.”
Turley: Exactly.

If, like me, you live in a strongly red state, you can vote for a third party candidate as a protest vote.  No matter how I vote, it won't cost Obama any electoral votes.  People in blue states run the risk of too many people protesting and giving electoral votes to Romney.  When people voted for Nader in 2000 they were blamed for losing the election and the mainstream Democrats didn't get the message that people were protesting Clinton's moving so far to the right. 

So, I guess now we need to be sending messages to Obama that we are voting for one of the third party candidates unless he pledges to change his ways.  USA Today reported that there would be five third parties that will be on the ballots in more than five states:

• Libertarian
• Green
• Constitution
• Party for Socialism and Liberation
• Justice Party

Here are some excerpts from the conversation between Turley and Cusack:

Some of the charges against Obama:

Turley: Well, President Obama outdid President Bush. He ordered the killing of two U.S. citizens as the primary targets and has then gone forward and put out a policy that allows him to kill any American citizen when he unilaterally determines them to be a terrorist threat. Where President Bush had a citizen killed as collateral damage, President Obama has actually a formal policy allowing him to kill any U.S. citizen. . .

Cusack: Does that order have to come directly from Obama, or can his underlings carry that out on his behalf as part of a generalized understanding? Or does he have to personally say, “You can get that guy and that guy?”
Turley: Well, he has delegated the authority to the so-called death panel, which is, of course, hilarious, since the Republicans keep talking about a nonexistent death panel in national healthcare. We actually do have a death panel, and it’s killing people who are healthy. . .

Turley: Well, the framers knew what it was like to have sovereigns kill citizens without due process. They did it all the time back in the 18th century. They wrote a constitution specifically to bar unilateral authority.
James Madison is often quoted for his observation that if all men were angels, no government would be necessary. And what he was saying is that you have to create a system of law that has checks and balances so that even imperfect human beings are restrained from doing much harm. Madison and other framers did not want to rely on the promises of good motivations or good intents from the government. They created a system where no branch had enough authority to govern alone — a system of shared and balanced powers.
So what Obama’s doing is to rewrite the most fundamental principle of the U.S. Constitution. The whole point of the Holder speech was that we’re really good guys who take this seriously, and you can trust us. That’s exactly the argument the framers rejected, the “trust me” principle of government. You’ll notice when Romney was asked about this, he said, “I would’ve signed the same law, because I trust Obama to do the right thing.” They’re both using the very argument that the framers warned citizens never to accept from their government. . .

On the lack of media coverage:

Cusack: Oscar Wilde said most journalists would fall under the category of those who couldn’t tell the difference between a bicycle accident and the end of civilization. But why is it that all the journalists that you see mostly on MSNBC or most of the progressives, or so-called progressives, who believe that under Bush and Cheney and Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzalez these were great and grave constitutional crises, the wars were an going moral fiasco’s — but now, since we have a friendly face in the White House, someone with kind of pleasing aesthetics and some new policies  we like, now all of a sudden these aren’t crimes, there’s no crisis. Because he’s our guy? Go, team, go? . . .

It seems to me that there was media coverage about the Bush administration because there were lots of Democrats opposed to what Bush was doing.  But there isn't any noticeable Republican opposition to torture or assassination so there is no opposition and the press doesn't cover it. 

Who Ya Gonna Vote For?

And so then it gets down to the question, “Well, are you going to vote for Obama?” And I say, “Well, I don’t really know. I couldn’t really vote for Hillary Clinton because of her Iraq War vote.” Because I felt like that was a line, a Rubicon line –
Turley: Right.
Cusack: — a Rubicon line that I couldn’t cross, right? I don’t know how to bring myself to vote for a constitutional law professor, or even a constitutional realist, who throws away due process and claims the authority that the executive branch can assassinate American citizens. I just don’t know if I can bring myself to do it.
If you want to make a protest vote against Romney, go ahead, but I would think we’d be better putting our energies into local and state politics — occupy Wall Street and organizations and movements outside the system, not national politics, not personalities. Not stadium rock politics. Not brands. That’s the only thing I can think of. What would you say?
Turley: Well, the question, I think, that people have got to ask themselves when they get into that booth is not what Obama has become, but what have we become? That is, what’s left of our values if we vote for a person that we believe has shielded war crimes or violated due process or implemented authoritarian powers. It’s not enough to say, “Yeah, he did all those things, but I really like what he did with the National Park System.”
Cusack: Yeah, or that he did a good job with the auto bailout.
Turley: Right. I think that people have to accept that they own this decision, that they can walk away. I realize that this is a tough decision for people but maybe, if enough people walked away, we could finally galvanize people into action to make serious changes. We have to recognize that our political system is fundamentally broken, it’s unresponsive. Only 11 percent of the public supports Congress, and yet nothing is changing — and so the question becomes, how do you jumpstart that system? How do you create an alternative? What we have learned from past elections is that you don’t create an alternative by yielding to this false dichotomy that only reinforces their monopoly on power.
Cusack: I think that even Howard Zinn/Chomsky progressives, would admit that there will be a difference in domestic policy between Obama and a Romney presidency.
But DUE PROCESS….I think about how we own it. We own it. Everybody’s sort of let it slip. There’s no immediacy in the day-to-day on and it’s just one of those things that unless they… when they start pulling kids off the street, like they did in Argentina a few years ago and other places, all of a sudden, it’s like, “How the hell did that happen?” I say, “Look, you’re not helping Obama by enabling him. If you want to help him, hold his feet to the fire.”
Turley: Exactly.
Cusack: The problem is, as I see it, is that regardless of goodwill and intent and people being tired of the status quo and everything else, the information outlets and the powers that be reconstruct or construct the government narrative only as an election game of ‘us versus them,’ Obama versus Romney, and if you do anything that will compromise that equation, you are picking one side versus the other. Because don’t you realize that’s going to hurt Obama? Don’t you know that’s going to help Obama? Don’t you know… and they’re not thinking through their own sort of self-interest or the community’s interest in just changing the way that this whole thing works to the benefit of the majority. We used to have some lines we wouldn’t cross–some people who said this is not what this country does …we don’t do this shit, you had to do the right thing. So it’s going to be a tough process getting our rights back, but you  know Frankie’s Law? Whoever stops fighting first – loses.
Turley: Right.

Looking at Bush and Obama as Pitchers

When a relief pitcher comes into a ballgame, his team behind 4-2, with runners on second and third, those two extra runs the opponents have, plus those two runners, if they score, belong to the starting pitcher.   If the team doesn't catch up and go ahead, the loss goes to the starting pitcher.  He can't get a win out of this game.

BUT, if the team catches up and goes ahead, his record isn't affected by the game.  The win or (if the lead changes again) the loss goes to the relief pitcher.  [That's the overview, you can get all the details at How Baseball Works.]

There are obvious differences between pitchers and presidents.  While there are two main political parties, there is only one team and we don't start a new game every election.  And baseball uses statistics - numbers based on the facts of what actually happened - while politics uses spin - whatever each party can get the voters to believe based on imagination and creativity, with facts appearing occasionally and usually out of context, and ability to use media to get the message out.

What if politics were captured with stats more like baseball?

Instead of runs, we could take national debt.  Since the national debt is so high, it is almost impossible for presidents to eliminate it.  And given that fiscal policy is used as a tool to impact the economy in different ways, eliminating might not even be a good idea.  Even in economic crisis like today, economists like Paul Krugman, who makes a lot of sense to me, believe that right now the government needs to spend to increase jobs MORE THAN it needs to reduce the national deficit.

So, instead of marking when the national debt becomes a surplus before a president gets a win, let's simply count whether a president gets the surplus down lower than it was when he took office.  But in doing that, we also have to remember the baserunner rule.  Whatever baserunners the last pitcher left get counted to that previous pitcher.

Using real numbers shows  the all Democratic presidents since Truman left office as winners and the Republican presidents all left office as losers.

Here's a Congressional Budgeting Office Chart of the National Debt Statistics I found on Wikipedia:

U.S. president	Party	Term years	Start debt/GDP	End debt/GDP	Increase debt ($T)	Increase debt/GDP (in percentage points)	House Control (with # if split during term)	Senate Control (with # if split during term)
Roosevelt/Truman	D	1945–1949	117.5%	93.1%	-0.01	-24.4%	79th D, 80th R	79th D, 80th R
Harry Truman	D	1949–1953	93.1%	71.4%	0.01	-21.7%	D	D
Dwight Eisenhower	R	1953–1957	71.4%	60.4%	0.01	-11.0%	83rd R, 84th D	83rd R, 84th D
Dwight Eisenhower	R	1957–1961	60.4%	55.2%	0.02	-5.2%	D	D
Kennedy/Johnson	D	1961–1965	55.2%	46.9%	0.03	-8.3%	D	D
Lyndon Johnson	D	1965–1969	46.9%	38.6%	0.04	-8.3%	D	D
Richard Nixon	R	1969–1973	38.6%	35.6%	0.10	-3.0%	D	D
Nixon/Ford	R	1973–1977	35.6%	35.8%	0.24	+0.2%	D	D
Jimmy Carter	D	1977–1981	35.8%	32.5%	0.29	-3.3%	D	D
Ronald Reagan	R	1981–1985	32.5%	43.8%	0.82	+11.3%	D	R
Ronald Reagan	R	1985–1989	43.8%	53.1%	1.05	+9.3%	D	99th R, 100th D
George H. W. Bush	R	1989–1993	53.1%	66.1%	1.48	+13.0%	D	D
Bill Clinton	D	1993–1997	66.1%	65.4%	1.02	-0.7%	103rd D, 104th R	103rd D, 104th R
Bill Clinton	D	1997–2001	65.4%	56.4%	0.40	-9.0%	R	R
George W. Bush	R	2001–2005	56.4%	63.5%	2.14	+7.1%	R	107th Split, 108 R
George W. Bush	R	2005–2009	63.5%	84.2%	3.97	+20.7%	109th R, 110th D	109th R, 110th D
Barack Obama	D	2009–	84.2%	93.2% (2010)	1.65 (2010)	+9.0% (2010)	111th D, 112th R	D

(Source: CBO Historical Budget Page and Whitehouse FY 2012 Budget - Table 7.1 Federal Debt at the End of Year PDF, Excel,Senate.gov)

The only Democrat on the list who increased the national debt is Obama.  But he's only been in office 2 years and 6 months, and more important, we have to count all the runners that Bush left on base - particularly the costs Obama needed to spend to deal with two wars,  the financial crisis, and tax cuts.

So, when the Republicans say things like,  "Stop Blaming Bush"  the Democrats need to stand firm and tell their story better.  "Bush left these guys on base, they go to him, not me,  that's where all this deficit comes from."  And in this case, it appears they don't have to even work too hard.  The voters are already there according to a July poll.

 A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 54% of Likely Voters say the nation’s current economic problems are due to the recession that began under the Bush administration.  Thirty-nine percent (39%) blame the policies of President Obama. (To see survey question wording, click here .)

OK Dems.  The facts are on your side.  The voters are even on your side on this one.  But the Republicans are telling and selling their stories a whole lot better than you are.  It's time to stop being nice guys.  While I believe that it's possible to turn an individual bully around under the right conditions, I don't think it's possible to turn a mob.

So, dammit, stop treating the brown-shirt* Republicans as though you can reason with them.  There is no reasoning with those Republicans with simplistic ideological beliefs about how the world works.  They're going to keep throwing punches (and grenades) until the Democrats fight back and it hurts the thugs* more to continue than to stop.

And with the voters, the Democrats need to take the facts, use them to tell the compelling stories of how  Obama has made health care possible for millions more people;  how Obama has done what Bush only talked about -  found and killed Bin Laden.   These are two huge home runs (pitchers get to bat too).  And that the main reason he can't fix the economy is the legislative violence of the Tea Party Republicans in the House.

I've only taken one metric - the one the Republicans are making the most noise about - but we can get them on a whole host of issues where the Democrats have made the world a better place for the average person and the Republicans have only made the world better for the rich.

When a new pitcher comes into a baseball game with bases loaded and ten runs behind, those ten runs and three baserunners are credited to the starting pitcher.  Unless the team gets enough runs to overcome the deficit, the loss goes to the starting pitcher.  The relief pitcher can’t ‘lose’ the game unless the team catches up and then goes behind again. 

GW Bush was president for eight innings/years, leaving relief president Obama many runs behind (a huge deficit), and with the bases loaded (Iraq, Afghanistan, the mortgage crisis, tax cuts.)  Although Obama has only been on the mound for two and a half innings, and most, if not all the runs he’s let in were the result of the baserunners he inherited, Republicans are insisting that whatever trouble the economy is in, should now be blamed on Obama.   Because in politics they use spin, not stats.

The Democrats have a compelling story.  It uses the language coach potato American males understand -sports.  It's way past time for the Dems to tell it like it really is.  No apologies, no prisoners, until the Republicans are ready to act like civilized people once more.

*I've used the words 'brown-shirts' and 'thugs' to label the more extreme Republicans in the House and their supporters.  I try not to call people names in this blog and I don't mean those terms as epithets.  I think they are accurate descriptions of people working from a black/white ideology which pushes either/or solutions and does not recognize any grey, any ambiguity, any subtlety.  They demand what they want and are not concerned about collateral damage.  We can just look at the damage they've cause with the FAA now.  In the name of cutting the deficit, they're costing the government tens of millions per day (possibly a billion by September if this continues). More than the programs they want to cut from FAA. Thugs are people who use physical or structural violence to get what they want without regard to the damage they cause.  [It turns out they have found a way around this and the partial FAA shut down is over as I post this.]

The German brownshirts came to power just this way.  Manipulating the German democracy and taking advantage of the traditional politicians who were trying to be reasonable with an unreasonable opposition.  We're moving closer to that every day.