Charlie Cook on How Democrats Squandered Election 2010

Washington's best political analyst, Charlie Cook, says that if the Democrats lose control of Congress in November, it's their own fault:

Running against former President George W. Bush worked for the first few months of 2009 in special elections but doesn't work so well now. While voters are happy to blame him for the beginning of the recession, he no longer seems to be terribly relevant; attacking him doesn't seem to get much traction these days. Candidates have found that running on the effectiveness and success of their economic stewardship doesn't work, nor on efforts to address climate change or on the new health care law.

Since voters aren't happy at all with Washington or anything that has happened in Washington in years, Democrats don't have much to brag about. Therefore, they have to run against their challengers, just in the same way that Republicans were advised to run by their equally astute advisers in 2006.

So Democrats are now trying to portray the field of Republican challengers and open seat candidates as the most sordid group since "Gov. William J. Lepetomaine" and "Attorney General Hedley Lamarr" put together their group of ax murderers, cattle thieves, and other miscreants to go after Sheriff Bart and the idyllic town of Rock Ridge in Mel Brooks' Blazing Saddles.

For those with young children, it may be a good time to make sure the Disney Channel is paid up on your cable and the DVD player is in good working order. You really don't want your kids watching commercial television these days, given the negative ads that are already running by candidates on both sides.

There is no question that Democrats have their backs to the wall. It's unprecedented to see so many incumbents running behind their challengers.

While the Cook Political Report has a general policy of not putting unindicted incumbents in categories worse than our "Toss Up" column, which is akin to the critical ward of a hospital, we are now looking at moving a dozen or so Democratic House incumbents into the Lean Republican column (Sen. Blanche Lincoln is already there).

Furthermore, only one GOP incumbent today seems to be a candidate for moving into Lean Democratic. With less than a month to go to the election, something could obviously happen that would change the trajectory of this election -- but it would have to be something pretty dramatic, and I don't see that happening.

The Coming Ice Age by Elaine Jarvik

Forgive the plug, but I just have to add a link to the website for Salt Lake City's Pygmalion Theatre's production of my cousin Elaine Jarvik's new play, The Coming Ice Age.

It's about someone's difficult transition from the family home to "senior living." The show runs from October 21st through November 6th. Golden Girls is off the air, so if you happen to find yourself in Utah, you might want to buy a ticket...

UPDATE: Salt Lake Tribune article, here.

Pam Geller on the Trial of Geert Wilders

From BigJournalism.com:

The real hero of freedom is not Daisy Khan, but Geert Wilders and others who stand with him. The real ones under threat are not Daisy Khan and the Imam Rauf, but people who have spoken out, even accidentally like Molly Norris, and those who are opposing their Islamic supremacist plan to put a mosque at Ground Zero.

Geert Wilders is our proxy. We are all on trial. Our freedom of speech is on trial. The Organization of the Islamic Conference means to shut us all up. That’s what they were doing in Chicago last week.

Wilders is us. If you value your freedom, stand with him.

Nat Hentoff on Justice Brandeis and the Fourth Amendment

From Jewish World Review:

As Sen. Frank Church said long ago when he was the first to discover the omnipresent spying on us of the National Security Agency (NSA), eventually, "no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything. … There would be no place to hide."
Not at all surprisingly, President Obama has extended the reach -- and just about total lack of accountability -- of the NSA.

But if the Republicans take control of Congress after the midterm elections -- and then under a new Republican president in 2012 -- is there any certainty that we may begin to be under the protection of the Fourth Amendment again?

Insofar as the tea partiers will continue to be an influence on the Republicans -- having already been instrumental this year in re-electing some -- I have not, as I've reported, seen much concern among them about our vanishing privacy (though I admire the tea partiers declared devotion to the Constitution).

As of this writing, I have no idea who will be the Republican presidential candidate in 2012, but I'm not aware that any of the potential leading Republican candidates are impassioned about the Fourth Amendment.

Even if she's not a candidate, the perennial newsmaker Sarah Palin will be an influence on the 2012 elections. She probably doesn't remember, but I was the first national columnist to recommend to John McCain that she be on his ticket, having read of her independence of party orthodoxy in Michael Barone's invaluable "Almanac of American Politics," as governor of Alaska. Anyway, I strongly recommend to firebrand Palin what Justice Louis Brandeis wrote in his dissent in the first Supreme Court wiretapping case, Olmstead vs. United States (1928):

"Discovery and invention have made it possible for the Government, with means far more effective than stretching upon the rack, to obtain disclosure in court of what is whispered in the closet. … The progress of science in furnishing the Government with means of espionage (on American citizens) is not likely to stop with wiretapping." Was he ever right!

"Ways may some day be developed," Brandeis continued, "by which the Government, without removing papers from secret drawers, can reproduce them in court." (He didn't foresee the Patriot Act's giving the FBI permission to sneak into our homes when we aren't there and photograph those papers.)

The time did come, as Brandeis prophesied, when the Government "will be enabled to expose to a jury the intimate occurrences of the home" -- and any of our communications in almost any form, if this Obama legislation becomes and remains law.

What Brandeis also warned -- and this should be remembered during the midterm and 2012 elections: "The makers of our Constitution undertook to secure conditions favorable to the pursuit of happiness. They recognized the significance of man's spiritual nature, of his feelings, and of his intellect. … They sought to protect Americans in their beliefs, their thoughts, their emotions and their sensations. They conferred, as against the Government, the right to be let alone -- the most comprehensive of rights, and the right most valued by civilized men. To protect that right, every unjustifiable intrusion by the Government upon the privacy of the individual, whatever the means employed, must be deemed a violation of the Fourth Amendment."

And must be deemed as being at the core of what Barack Obama continuously subverts in "the liberties we cherish."

I deeply hope the tea partiers will add Justice Louis Brandeis to their reading as they work to restore the Constitution's separation of powers. Consider the effect on new generations growing up under government insisting on back doors into what we say, feel and think. Sending Obama -- and any Democrat or Republican who supports his "big brother" mentality -- back into private life is the change we must believe in to get our basic freedoms back.

Bob (Trach) Trachinger, 1924-2010

Professor Robert Trachinger, aka "Trach," died last month. I was his teaching assistant for three semesters at UCLA, for "Issues in Broadcasting." He chose me again and again to work for him. It was an honor.

Trach was a great teacher, a great guy, and a great inspiration. He taught me how to teach. He had been a network vice-president, as well as a television engineer and technical director for ABC Sports, and ABC News, and KABC, where he worked on network football and the Olympics. He developed slow motion video for sports replays as well as an underwater television camera. Working for him was a delight. He had a twinkle in his eye. His classes were packed, and always had a waiting list. I was lucky to have known him. Here's an excerpt from his UCLA obituary:

Robert Trachinger, innovative ABC television executive and TFT professor, passed away Sunday, September 19, in Rancho Santa Fe, CA, at the age 86.

Trachinger's work in broadcasting began in 1950, at ABC, where he worked on a broad spectrum of programming, including the early live serial “Space Patrol”, innovative documentaries such as “Decision to Die" and on live coverage of the Kennedy-Nixon debates and the Academy Awards.

He worked side by side with Roone Arledge, then President of ABC Sports on “Wide World of Sports” and the Olympic Games telecasts, beginning with the Winter Games in Innsbruck in 1964 and concluding with the landmark Summer Games in Los Angeles in 1984.

“The Hollywood Reporter” recently called Trachinger “a technical wizard,” acclaimed in engineering circles for his innovative thinking and for his contributions to broadcast technology. He was responsible for developing the first hand-held TV camera, the first underwater TV camera (field-tested in his own swimming pool) and slow-motion videotape for replay at sports events, introduced on-air in 1961.

The winner of three Emmy Awards, Trachinger retired from ABC as a vice president in 1985.

In addition to his professional career, Trachinger had a deep commitment to education and to mentoring young people. At his death he was a Professor Emeritus of the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television, having taught courses in production and ethics in media from 1968 to 1998.

He was instrumental in introducing classes in live TV production into the TFT curriculum. The van for remote production that is still parked at the School, between Melnitz and East Melnitz, was acquired for the School by Trachinger through his many industry connections.

Here's a link to his Hollywood Reporter obituary.

Philippa Foot, 1920-2010

I was saddened to learn of the death of British moral philosopher Philippa Foot, at the age of 90.

She had been my landlady at Oxford, when I moved to England to try to produce documentary films (and considered studying philosophy there). Her house at 15 Walton Street was just as one would imagine the home of an Oxford don. Books, velour chairs, velour curtains, lovely views of the hills.  I found it through a listing in the New York Review of Books, to which she had been a regular contributor--until, she explained to me, the clique that ran NYRB decided she wasn't to appear in it anymore.  She was the granddaughter of President Gover Cleveland. She was the daughter of "Baby Ruth," of candy-bar fame. Her father was a British coal baron. Once, she told me she did not like the horsey, doggy, hunting British country life in which she had grown up. She preferred the life of the mind, and she managed to live in it, as an Oxford philosopher, author, and intellectual.

More than that, Philippa Foot a kind soul, and a generous one.  In England, she took me under her wing, introduced me to her sister Marion, who introduced me to London Society at the Garrick Club (at a dinner with pillar Anthony Howard), had me as a guest at Cleveland Hill (there introduced to classicist M.I. Finley, known as "Finley of Harvard" and uncle George Cleveland, son of the American President, who ran a summer stock theatre in Tamworth, New Hampshire), and variously extended unsolicited kindnesses. When Professor Foot came to teach at UCLA, where I was in film school, she invited me to a party at her home, at which my father met Christopher Isherwood--an evening he talked about for years.

All my memories of Professor Foot are good ones. She not only taught "virtue philosophy," she lived it.

Here is an excerpt from her obituary in The Telegraph:

In a key article, Moral Arguments (1958), Philippa Foot challenged this relativistic stance, suggesting that anyone who uses moral terms at all (bad, good and the like), whether to assert or deny a moral proposition, must abide by certain agreed rules for their use . The only recourse of someone who fails to accept the rules, she wrote, would be “to abjure altogether the use of moral terms”.

In her view the distinction between statements of fact and value is based on two false assumptions: first, that any individual may, properly, base his beliefs about matters of value on premises which no one else would recognise as valid; secondly, he may refuse to accept another’s evaluation because their standards are not ones he accepts.

The first assumption is refuted, she argued, by an appeal to the basic idea that words, while they may not have an intrinsic meaning, do have a proper use: “It is surely clear that moral virtues must be connected with human good or harm, and that it is quite impossible to call anything you like good or harm.” Against the second assumption, she put forward the tentative idea that a moral question can be argued down to a point which reveals an “ultimate end” beyond which it is ridiculous to inquire, as it does not make sense to ask: “Why do you hate pain?” or “Why do you want to feel happy?”

In her book Natural Goodness (2001) Philippa Foot rebutted the philosophical distinction between descriptive meaning (which deals with facts) and evaluative meaning (dealing with moral qualities). In the case of living things — plants, animals and humans — she argued that evaluations simply state a special class of fact. Natural goodness can apply as well to physical parts of living beings as to their actions: to say that a tree has good roots, in her analysis, is logically the same as to say that a person performs a good deed. The underlying logic has to do with the assumption that good roots or good actions are those that are necessary in the lives of individuals of that species. Moral goodness should therefore be understood as the natural flourishing of humans as living beings.

And here is an excerpt from her obituary in The Guardian:

Foot pooh-poohed what she called the "rigoristic, prissy, moralistic tone" so frequent in moral philosophy, and the way it had lost touch with real life. "I do not know what could be meant by saying that it was someone's duty to do something," she said, "unless there was an attempt to show why it mattered if this sort of thing was not done."

Non-cognitivist theories (Hare's prescriptivism, Ayer's emotivism, more recently Allan Gibbard's expressivism), which variously deny that moral statements can be true or false, render moral judgment so subjective and capricious that, strictly speaking, it might just as well extend to "the wrongness of running round trees right-handed or looking at hedgehogs in the light of the moon".

But she opposed such theories not just because they were too wide, but because they were too narrow. In the 1950s she had begun, along with Anscombe, to shift the focus away from what makes an isolated action good or bad, to the Aristotelian concentration on what makes a person good or bad in the long-term. Morality, she argued, is about how to live – not so much a series of logically consistent, well-calculated decisions as a lifetime endeavour to become the sort of person who habitually and happily does virtuous things. And "virtuous", for Foot, meant well-rounded and human. She condemned as moral faults "the kind of timidity, conventionality and wilful self-abnegation that may spoil no one's life but one's own", advocating "hope and a readiness to accept good things".

Foot continued, and modified, her onslaught on subjectivism in ethics throughout her life. She also attacked utilitarian theories, which see goodness as a matter of actions' consequences, and tend to equate the badness of failing to prevent an evil outcome with perpetrating it. In a paper on abortion (The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of Double Effect, 1967), she used what became a much-cited example to pinpoint fine distinctions in moral permissibility where an action has both good and bad results – the dilemma facing the driver of a suddenly brakeless trolley-bus that would hit five people unless he steered it on to another track into only one person.

Unlike many philosophers, Foot never strained our basic intuitions in the interests of pursuing some wild theory to its (il)logical conclusion. She said that, in doing philosophy, she felt like a geologist tapping away with a tiny hammer on a huge cliff. But her resolute tapping hit many fault-lines and reduced several inflated edifices. "Very tender and adorable, yet morally tough and subtle, and with lots of will and self-control," was how Murdoch described her.

In Human Goodness (a paper included in the book Natural Goodness, 2001), Foot wrote that wisdom and temperance are important virtues, but that often we revere those who lack them and live chaotic lives, which, she added, is probably not "just romantic nonsense". "Of course what is best is to live boldly, yet without imprudence or intemperance, but the fact is that rather few can manage that." She, however, was one of those few.

Here's an excerpt from the NY Times obituary by William Grimes:

In her early work, notably in the essays “Moral Beliefs” and “Moral Arguments,” published in the late 1950s, Ms. Foot took issue with philosophers like R. M. Hare and Charles L. Stevenson, who maintained that moral statements were ultimately expressions of attitude or emotion, because they could not be judged true or false in the same way factual statements could be.

Ms. Foot countered this “private-enterprise theory,” as she called it, by arguing the interconnectedness of facts and moral interpretations. Further, she insisted that virtues like courage, wisdom and temperance are indispensable to human life and the foundation stones of morality. Her writing on the subject helped establish virtue ethics as a leading approach to the study of moral problems.

“She’s going to be remembered not for a particular view or position, but for changing the way people think about topics,” said Lawrence Solum, who teaches the philosophy of law at the University of Illinois and studied under Ms. Foot. “She made the moves that made people see things in a fundamentally new way. Very few people do that in philosophy.”

Robert Spencer on the Plight of Molly Norris

From Human Events:

Molly Norris’s cause should be taken up by all free people – not least the President of the United States. Obama could have explained that human beings control their own reactions to things. If Muslims chose yet again to riot and murder because of Terry Jones or Molly Norris, that would be a choice they would be making out of an unlimited array of other choices. Instead, Western authorities have fallen into the Islamic supremacists' trap and are starting to behave in just the way they want them to: thinking that they must not do certain things, because if they do, there will be violence from Muslims. Yet that violence is in every case solely the responsibility of the perpetrator, not of anyone else.

Obama could have said that the idea that Molly Norris would have to give up her career and live in hiding because of cartoons is unconscionable. He could have told the Islamic world that cartoons depicting Muhammad did not harm Muslims, and that the willingness of some Muslims to commit murder over such depictions was the only thing that made people care to draw Muhammad in the first place.

Obama could also have said that to threaten people with death because of cartoons was destructive to free speech and hence to free societies — and as such, it was something that the U.S. would do everything it could to resist. He could have announced that Molly Norris and others who were threatened for exercising their freedom of speech would be given full round-the-clock protection — and that if violent protests and riots over cartoons broke out in areas where American troops were deployed, those troops would put down those riots and protect the innocent to the fullest possible extent.

Apparently when Muslims behave with violent irrationality, Obama thinks that it is entirely the responsibility of non-Muslims to clean up the mess they make. In these dark days we don’t have any leaders who will stand up for the freedom of expression, explaining its importance as a bulwark against tyranny. Molly Norris, wherever she is, and the embattled free people of the United States, deserve better.

Who is Franklin Graham?

After seeing his impressive performance with Christiane Amanpour on ABC This Week, I took a look at his website for Samaritan's Purse, where I found this biography:

William Franklin Graham, III, born July 14, 1952, is the fourth of five children born to evangelist Billy Graham and his wife, Ruth Bell Graham. Raised in a log home in the Appalachian Mountains outside Asheville, North Carolina, Franklin now lives in the mountains of Boone, North Carolina.

He was born into a heritage rich in Christian ministry. By the time of Franklin's birth, Billy Graham was already known around the world as a spiritual leader, but he wasn't the only spiritual giant in the family. Franklin's maternal grandfather, Lemuel Nelson Bell, was a medical missionary to China for more than 20 years, a respected moderator of his denomination, the Presbyterian Church in the United States, and a co-founder and executive editor of Christianity Today.

At age 22, after a period of rebellion and traveling the world, Franklin committed his life to Jesus Christ while alone in a hotel room in Jerusalem. Soon after that, Dr. Bob Pierce, founder of Samaritan's Purse (and World Vision), invited Franklin to join him on a six-week mission to Asia. It was during that time that Franklin felt a calling to work with hurting people in areas of the world affected by war, famine, disease, and natural disasters..

(Note the log cabin reference...I wonder if he has considered running for President?)

FOIA Failures Continue in Obama Administration

From The Daily Caller: (ht FOIABlog):

To find out if other groups — including news outlets, commercial interests, individuals, and other nonprofits — were experiencing the same problems with their FOIA requests, CREW created a survey, which was distributed by the American Society of Access Professionals on the group’s private list-serve. Because CREW did not have access to the list-serve, and thus cannot quantify the list’s demographics, the organization wrote in its report that the results are “not scientific or statistically valid, [but] are definitive on at least some topics.”

Here are some of CREW’s more notable findings:

- “Two of the touted reforms – creation of agency chief FOIA officers (CFOs) and agency FOIA public liaisons – have had virtually no influence on the work of agency FOIA professionals,” the report says. According to the survey results, more than 60% of respondents said that the CFO position had no effect on their job, did not make processing requests clearer, and did not make their overall jobs easier. Comments on the position included, “Chief FOIA Officer? Seriously, there is no position description for FOIA, it’s everybody do everything,” and “Did not know this position existed.”

- Roughly 63% of respondents said the fact that FOIA is “not an administration priority,” was a problem.

- While “the vast majority of respondents are aware of Attorney General Holder’s FOIA guidelines,” which President Obama and the DOJ announced in 2009, “the majority reported no change at their agencies as a result of those guidelines.”

Document of the Week: Judge Ricardo M. Urbina's Decision in Jarvik v CIA

I've posted the decision in this FOIA case on Scribd. After some four years, and two lawsuits, I have received precisely zero documents from a Freedom of Information Act request for information about American involvement, alleged by the Uzbek government during show trials following violence in Andijan, blamed on Islamist extremist terrorists, in May, 2005--an event that led to the closure of a US air base supporting the war effort in Afghanistan and expulsion of US military and NGO personnel. IMHO, it is continuing secrecy around this fiasco that has harmed US national security and prolonged the Afghan war. However, under current FOIA law, an Exemption 1 claim on the basis of national security permits a court to make a decision in secret, on the basis of secret evidence, after hearing from only one side. The plaintiff is neither permitted to see the evidence, nor to respond to claims made to the judge.

Well, IMHO the outcome of such an Alice-in-Wonderland process can't be termed a surprise. I'll be dealing with the issue of the unfairness of the concept of ex parte secret evidence in my book: Jarvik v CIA: The Story of A FOIA Case for Edward Mellen Press.  I think that public trials are the best way to fight against extremism and terrorism--not through secret military action or secret court procedures. The reason that the United States has failed to prevail since 9/11 is that our government has pursued a strategy of secrecy, that has--as in the case of Wall Street's "black box" hedge funds--incentivized corruption, incompetence, bankruptcy and failure.

It has also given rise to conspiracy theories, since even the facts of 9/11 have never been laid out in a court of law, as part of an open and public adversarial process. Secrecy breeds distrust.

The time has come for the American government to abandon secrecy, militarism and police-state tactics, and instead to try to the prescription of Justice Brandeis for dealing with international terrorism: "Sunlight is the best disinfectant." Urbina Decision 20100928[1]; Jarvik v. CIA; 9-28-2010; FOIA Case

Charlie Cook's Election Forecast

From the Cook Political Report, based on latest polling data:

HOUSE: The Cook Political Report's current outlook is for a Republican net gain of at least 40 seats. A turnover of 39 seats would tip majority status into Republican hands....

SENATE: ...In the Senate, there is equal uncertainty. We could see Republican gains of seven or eight seats, but they could be as high as nine or 10. A GOP gain of 10 seats would flip control of that chamber.

Dutch Put Geert Wilders on Trial...

From the Financial Times:

The 47-year-old bleached-blond Mr Wilders is answering charges relating to his claims in a 2007 newspaper column that the Koran is “fascist”, and for encouraging Muslims to tear out pages of their holy book in a 2008 film. “Geert Wilders is convinced he has said nothing that is reprehensible,” Bram Moszkowicz, his lawyer, said.

The trial is expected to last a month and could result in a fine and a prison term of up to two years.

Analysts say Mr Wilders will use the trial, which has faced repeated delays, as a platform to reinforce his credentials as a political outsider, despite his new role in support of the government.

“He has established himself as the anti-status quo figure, so he will try to turn the trial into a political event, to try to prove that indeed he is correct that there is no freedom of speech in the Netherlands,” says Dick Houtman, professor of cultural sociology at Erasmus University in Rotterdam.

Here's the schedule, from the website Wilders On Trial:

The provisional planning of the proceedings will be as follows:

October 4th, 6th and 8th: trial proceedings
October 12th: indictment
October 15th: defence
October 19th: replication and rejoinder
November 2nd: verdict

Christiane Amanpour on ABC This Week: Holy War: Should Americans Fear Islam?

Full transcript on the ABC News website...

Secrecy News on Pentagon's Operation Dark Heart Censorship

Steven Aftergood's conclusion:

By censoring Anthony Shaffer’s new book “Operation Dark Heart” even though uncensored review copies are already available in the public domain, the Department of Defense has produced a genuinely unique product: a revealing snapshot of the way that the Obama Administration classifies national security information in 2010.

With both versions before them (excerpts), readers can see for themselves exactly what the Pentagon classifiers wanted to withhold, and can judge for themselves whether the secrecy they tried to impose can be justified on valid national security grounds. In the majority of instances, the results of such an inspection seem disappointing, if not very surprising, and they tend to confirm the most skeptical view of the operation of the classification system.

The most commonly repeated “redaction” in Operation Dark Heart is the author’s cover name, “Christopher Stryker,” that he used while serving in Afghanistan. Probably the second most common redactions are references to the National Security Agency, its heaquarters location at Fort Meade, Maryland, the familiar abbreviation SIGINT (referring to “signals intelligence”), and offhand remarks like “Guys on phones were always great sources of intel,” which is blacked out on the bottom of page 56.

Also frequently redacted are mentions of the term TAREX or “Target Exploitation,” referring to intelligence collection gathered at a sensitive site, and all references to low-profile organizations such as the Air Force Special Activities Center and the Joint Special Operations Command, as well as to foreign intelligence partners such as New Zealand. Task Force 121 gets renamed Task Force 1099. The code name Copper Green, referring to an “enhanced” interrogation program, is deleted.

Perhaps 10% of the redacted passages do have some conceivable security sensitivity, including the identity of the CIA chief of station in Kabul, who has been renamed “Jacob Walker” in the new version, and a physical description of the location and appearance of the CIA station itself, which has been censored.

Many other redactions are extremely tenuous. The name of character actor Ned Beatty is not properly classified in any known universe, yet it has been blacked out on page 15 of the book. (It still appears intact in the Index.)

In short, the book embodies the practice of national security classification as it exists in the United States today. It does not exactly command respect.

UPDATE: Meanwhile, David Swanson writes on Op-Ed News:

Shaffer and others in the military-spying complex knew about U.S. al Qaeda cells and leaders before 9-11 and were prevented from pursuing the matter. Shaffer believes they could have prevented 9-11. He so informed the 9-11 Commission, which ignored him. The Defense Intelligence Agency retaliated against Shaffer for having spoken up. We knew this, but the book adds context and details, and names names.

Russian TV Highlights Pentagon Book-Burning...(Heck of a PR Job, Sec. Gates!)

Meanwhile, Federal News Radio reports author Army Reserve Lieutenant Colonel Tony Shaffer believes that the Pentagon's book burning had more to do with revenge, Wikileaks, and General McChrystal than protection of US National Security...

Joshua Foust: In Defense of Hamid Karzai

From Foreign Policy's AfPak Channel blog:

It’s not hard to imagine ousting Karzai; it’s much harder to conceive of anyone better at the moment. Gul Agha Sherzai, the current governor of Nangarhar and former governor of Kandahar; Abdul Rashid Dostum, an Uzbek militia commander from the North; and Ismail Khan, the former potentate of Herat, all command constituencies, though none with the same degree of multi-ethnic support as Karzai. Abdullah Abdullah, who contested the election last year, also has many supporters, though again, not as many as Karzai.

But even if one of these men were to unseat the Afghan president, there’s no guarantee that they would be any better. In fact, they could be worse. Imagine if Ismail Khan were president – could he exercise any real control outside of Herat? Similarly, Gul Agha Sherzai, the prominent government of Nangarhar, was hyped last year as a presidential contender… but if Karzai’s relationship to the narcotics industry is a problem, Sherzai is worse (he’s also much more violent, and allegedly has a large harem of “dancing boys” at his mansion -- surely not the man the U.S. would want in Kabul). Additionally, Sherzai’s tenure of Kandahar was so bad the Taliban were welcomed in 1994 as liberators from his violent, capricious style of rule. Western pundits also fawned over Dostum and Ashraf Ghani -- but neither has been able to secure more than scattered, occasional support from Afghan voters. Each one of these men face a critical shortcoming: they represent their communities, but not Afghanistan. Only Hamid Karzai and Abdullah Abdullah enjoyed broad support in the last election.

Complaints about Karzai are focused too much on the man and not enough on the presidency. Good man or no, having an office as poorly situated as the Afghan presidency makes any officeholder destined for failure. Were another president to step into the post, he would be faced by the same pressures -- forced to manage the same perilous balancing acts. So maybe it’s less a question about Karzai than about U.S. expectations. If those can’t be met, Washington has a much bigger problem on its hands.

Huffington Post Compares Censored Operation Dark Heart to Original

Marcus Baram based his story of Pentagon censorship on a Federation of American Scientists report by Steven Aftergood:

The most common redaction in the entire book is Shaffer's cover name, "Christopher Stryker," and other popular redactions are references to the National Security Agency, the abbreviation SIGINT (signals intelligence) and comments like "Guys on phones were always great sources of intel," notes Aftergood.

He also reports that only about 10% of the redacted passages, such as the identity of the CIA station chief in Kabul and a physical description of that station, have "some conceivable security sensitivity."

Among the more unnecessary redactions: the name of "Deliverance" star Ned Beatty -- "which is not properly classified in any known universe" -- but is blacked out on page 15 of the book. Overall, the national security classification exemplified in the new book "does not exactly command respect," writes Aftergood.

Here's a link to the FAS website's article:http://www.fas.org/sgp/news/2010/09/dark-contrast.pdf.

Pentagon Burns Books in Name of National Security...

The book is called Operation Dark Heart: Spycraft and Special Ops on the Frontlines of Afghanistan -- and the Path to Victory
by Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, and the Pentagon has bought the initial press run to burn before reading, according to this article in Digital Journal.

I just have one question: Has anyone considered the public diplomacy implications of this story for US credibility in relation to freedom of the press, freedom of speech, and so forth in the struggle against Islamist extremism?

IMHO, I'd say that after the handling of Abu Gharib torture pictures, this is the second worst P/R move I've seen since 9/11 from the United States government.

The author has been quoted as saying: "The whole premise smacks of retaliation. Someone buying 10,000 books to suppress a story in this digital age is ludicrous."

So is a publisher like St. Martin's for agreeing to such a repugnant deal. Of course, the story has already been picked up by Iran's Tehran Times...

PBS NewsHour Debates Obama Administration Internet Surveillance

Pamela Geller on 60 Minutes' Coverage of Bloomberg Ground Zero Mosque

From Atlas Shrugs:

Considering it's CBS, yes it could have been worse, but it was pretty bad. I am called a "conspiracy theorist" for speaking the truth and investigating the stealth jihadists behind the mosque. You can write to CBS here.

Thug devleoper Sharif El- Gamal is treated with kid gloves. No mention of his rap sheet, his bullying of moderate Muslims against the mosque, or of the fact that he was just evicted from his office. He was a waiter a couple of years ago, and suddenly became a BSD developer on the medicare fraudster's dime: his financier, Hisham Elzanaty, was a large funder of Hamas (exposed in the Holy Land terror funding trial) while defrauding medicaid out of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Worse still, Imam Feisal Rauf was packaged like a big fuzzy teddy bear. Nothing about his previous first performance on 60 minutes. It was right after 911, and Rauf blamed America for the 911 attacks. "Osama Bin Laden is made in the USA." Watch that video here.

He, too, was given a free pass. Nothing on his sanction of Hamas or his role in the jihad warship flotilla. Imam Rauf, the self-described "head coach" of the global strategic initiative -- audio here (his "players" include "the President of the United States, or the President of Malaysia, or the President of England" [sic]), said the following in tonight's 60 minutes episode:

"It's my duty as an American Muslim to stand between you, the American non-Muslim and the radicals trying to attack you."

More threats from this snake. He is going to save us ..... from jihadists? Who is going to save us from him? Please, Rauf, get out of the way, we'll save ourselves, thankyouverymuch.

His motive to build a mega mosque on Ground Zero was made painfully clear in this quote in the NY Times back in December 2009, announcing the Ground Zero mosque, and subsequently scrubbed from the article.

“New York is the capital of the world, and this location close to 9/11 is iconic,” Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf

A presence so close to the World Trade Center, “where a piece of the wreckage fell,” Imam Feisal added, “sends the opposite statement to what happened on 9/11.”

How's that?

“Building so close is owning the tragedy."

Rauf is the self-described "head coach" of the global strategic initiative and I'm the "conspiracy theorist?"

Then again, CBS minutes thinks Oliver Stone is a ......... genius. So much for investigative journalism.