First snowfall of the year. First of a lifetime.

Is it right to ask for US warriors to fight and die to prop up the administration of Hamid Karzai?

Juan Cole is the quintessential man who can pose the one overriding question.

If I had access to only four blogs each day they would be:
o Juan Cole on the world.
o Digby on U.S. politics.
o Illusory Tenant on the state of the State of Wisconsin politics and law.
o Jim Rowen's Political Environment on the state of Wisconsin's politics and the environment.

Just off the top of your head: what do we have little need for more of?

How about furniture, mattresses, light fixtures and loans, just to name a few?

How about what we could easily do without? How about exotic foreign travel, shopping excursions to N.Y., L.A. or S.F., ice cream, frappucinos, "fine dining" of the sort where main courses for $35 are considered "reasonable," hundreds of specialty wineries producing $40-$50 bottles of wine, artsy programs paid for by tax dollars, non-profits doing nice things with donations, gew-gaws for pets, spa treatments, lawsuits with unknown odds of success involving plaintiffs with no money, cosmetic surgery, "financial services," having your nails done, costly haircuts, house cleaning services, dog walkers, travel consultants, kitchen remodels, Mercedes vehicles, or indeed, any new vehicles, now that any decent vehicle lasts 10 years with minimal maintenance, 6-foot long BBQs, "entertainment centers," more iPods, kids' toys, or clothing of any sort or type or style, given that you can buy heaps of clothing for a few dollars at garage sales or thrift stores?

This is a tiny selection of literally thousands of goods and services we can easily do without, and indeed, did do without a mere generation ago, when now-commonplace luxuries like $100 per person dinners and hip surgeries for pets would have been reserved for flamboyant millionaires.

(Lifted entirely from Charles Hugh Smith, blogger and polymath at Of Two Minds.)

A journalist questions Mr Gandhi....

Mumbai, India (CNN) -- For a man who used to hang a framed picture of Mohandas K. Gandhi in his Senate office, President Obama declared that checking out a museum honoring the Indian independence hero's legacy was "pretty cool" Saturday.
Shortly after landing here for his first stop on a 10-day tour of Asia, the president and first lady Michelle Obama quickly headed over to this city's Gandhi Museum, a three-story home where Gandhi stayed when he was in Mumbai. It's now full of historic photos and posters as well as a library with about 50,000 Gandhi-related works.
The president spent several minutes in the library, which has Gandhi quotations on the walls, such as, "Freedom is like a birth." 

(The President apparently did not see, nor comment on this quotation:)

Journalist:

"Mr. Gandhi, what is your thinking on Western Civilization?"

Mr. Gandhi:

"I think it would be a good idea."

World Series always flashes me back to September-into-October, 1954

A Clevelander, 11 years old. All those years of Yankee hatred (even the Sisters at St Colman School taught us that there was a "good hatred"--something we'd gotten with our mothers' milk, something to be nurtured, worked-up, passed around, promoted, shouted about. YANKEE HATRED.


So we'd creamed the hated Yankees and everybody else. And hunkered down for a series with a formidable--and, actually, respectable--group of New Yorkers.

The Giants.

Boom!
Boom! (helluva catch, unbelievable throw)
Boom!
What?  You're starting Lemon again? With Rapid Robert on the bench?
Boom!

The only question we had, as we threw our gloves on the ground, wandered about in shocked silence: "Should Al Lopez be allowed to continue living on this earth?"

Go, Giants!

There's this one thing that never works with me....

Inspirational messaging:

Speaking of inspirational messaging, Vice President Joe Biden yesterday said we must "remind our base constituency to stop whining."  Last week, Obama condemned "Democrats griping and groaning," and the day before he mocked Democrats who "just congenitally, tend to get -- to see the glass as half empty."  That was preceded by Robert Gibbs announcing that liberal critics of the President who complain about continuation of Bush policies "need to get drug tested," while Rahm Emanuel had previously shared his view that dissatisfied liberals are "fucking retarded".  Glenn Greenwald

 David Dayen has an excellent post on all of this:




I would just add that I've never seen a politician run an election with the message "Don’t be stupid, quit your bitching and vote for me."  This goes orders of magnitude beyond "Here are the stakes, my opponent would vote against everything you care about."  That at least has a certain time-tested quality.  That would make the election a choice and not a referendum.  But "vote for me, you simpletons"? 

There's a reason that strategy has never been employed: because it's so insane to think that open berating would inspire a voter to action.

Badgers Win big (embarrassingly BIG) against CYO team. Bucky in ICU.

Grandpa, now that I'm a year old (almost) and walking, do you think I could get a unicycle?

Kiddo, no matter that things look a bit grim from time to time.
Checking in with you makes everything just peachy.

I like my credit union, have liked it (them) since I joined in 1954

I've been, happily, a Credit Union member continuously since 1954.  The St. Colman Parish Federal Credit Union on the near west side of Cleveland was my CU home for 46 years.  That's where I put my paper route earnings starting at age 11.  And I kept my share account active long after I'd moved away.
Now, I've been with Educators Credit Union since 1992.  I  recently mentioned to a bank officer at a Waukesha bank (that I was forced to deal with because my employer used their payroll service) that I am a strong partisan of credit unions and a long-time member.
This bank officer got a sour and censorious look as she lectured me on the fundamental inequity that had  her institution paying taxes, while ours is granted special and undeserved privileges and tax exemptions.  "All we want is a level playing field".
So, I lectured back:
    "My parents, my uncles and aunts never found a level playing field in the dark days of the Great Depression.  Bankers didn't want to hear from little people, didn't want to see them.  Bankers fought every decent and humane thing that the New Deal stood for.  That is your heritage.  You may claim the slogan of  'The Bank of Friendly Service', but there's no denying your heritage.
   "Credit Unions arose because banks didn't care about the financial needs/plight of ordinary working people and farmers.  They are remembered by that generation as heartless foreclosure machines.  Working class people did what we had to, elected FDR and supported the New Deal.  We welcomed the legislation that allowed federally chartered member-owned cooperative savings and lending institutions.
  "Do not, please, lecture me about level playing fields, unless you are willing to propose that we--credit union people--work with you, bank people, on a critical issue in banking.  Let's agree to demand with joined voices the re-establishment of the sensible principles of bank regulation underlying the Glass-Steagall Act that flowed out the New Deal's response to the Great Depression.  How about if we also agree to insist that "too big to fail" means "too big to exist" and "never too big for jail"?
    "Once we get that victory (and a few more) behind us, perhaps we can discuss your grievances and work together on level playing fields".

The Waukesha Council needs to think long and hard about who should lead the Water Utility Commission

The President of the Waukesha Water Utility Commission is ALSO the President of the Waukesha School Board.  He was nominated to serve on the Commission seven times by mayors of Waukesha.  And each time he was nominated, the Waukesha Council voted (I never heard a "nay" or an "abstain," in all those votes over the past 21 years).  And he has dutifully served each of those three year terms.  And he's angling to get another term.  As a citizen who has watched for all those decades, I thank him for his service--unpaid service.

But he should go.

The voters of the Waukesha School District (including a few who live outside the city limits) have elected Mr. Warren to be a member of the School Board six times. And for the school years '09-'10 and "10-'11 his fellow board members have elected him President of the School Board.

President of two of the largest and, arguably, most controversial enterprises in government in Waukesha County.

• Waukesha School '09-'10 Budget:  $185.3 Million.

• Water Utility 2010 Budget              $9.1 Million  But with plans to borrow/beg $165 Million for a major capital commitment and a daunting procedural mountain to climb.

Warren has been elected by his fellow board members to lead both of these crucial enterprises.

Is the talent pool so thin in Waukesha that one guy is needed at the top of the heap in both enterprises?  For decades?

Maybe, he's a genius?

Then, again, maybe he is a small town hustler with Madoff-sized ego, who thinks he has so much finesse and charisma and knowledge that he is needed for both these jobs, that nobody else can do them?

Maybe he's a genius?

Was it genius that led him, as the School Board's Chairman of the Finance/Facilities Committee to bring to the rest of the School Board a bright idea to get something for nothing by jumping blind into a nifty new kind of investment.  Shortly after the Board's Finance Chairman Warren led the group into this huge financial commitment, the investments turned out to be practically worthless, a turd in the punchbowl?

Some genius.

Giant Puffball. Is there a consulting mycologist out there?

Dave Wagner--"Wags"--moved off to Arizona decades back. He was my authoritative source for mushroom advice. It was "eat" or "don't eat". Never a hint of equivocation.

This is the 44 Oz, Slurpee of mushrooms. Found it on the edge of an old railroad right-of-way this morning. Took a bit of bushwhacking to get to it, as it was down a slippery slope covered with thorny brush in a thicket that allowed for no sunlight. There it was, glowing like last night's waxing gibbous moon.

I think it is safe. Wonder whether it'll be tasty as a pot of mushroom soup.

UPDATE:  Consensus mycologist/gourmand opinion is that bigger is seldom better.  Edible is not equal to tasty.  It might or might not improve the compost pile.  We shall see.

Extortion

State offers $25 million in tax incentives to Harley

By Rick Barrett of the Journal Sentinel

Updated: Sept. 17, 2010 11:25 a.m. |(167) COMMENTS

Harley-Davidson Inc. (HOG) will get $25 million in state tax credits for keeping its factories in Wisconsin, the Department of Commerce said Friday.

The incentives are aimed at preserving more than 1,000 blue-collar jobs in the Milwaukee area and Tomahawk. They come four days after Harley employees ratified seven-year labor agreements laden with concessions but meant to keep production work in Wisconsin.

Harley had threatened to pull production out of the state if it could not get favorable labor contracts.

Other states lobbied to get the company's factories, offering generous incentives and lower labor costs.

Extortion.

It is an odyssey only if it ends with return to the place it started...

It started last Wednesday at 10:00 am in Waukesha and reached the farthest point--ancestral home on the near west side of Cleveland--in just about nine hours. Tolls were about $38. Gas for the Pontiac-that's-actually-a-Toyota was about $33. Seventy-one bucks divided by 454 miles comes to just under sixteen cents/mile.

This cost is, of course, understated. I haven't included insurance, interest payments, license/registration fees and depreciation on the car. And the cost of all that frenetic widening and cyclical re-paving of the roadway ustimately figures into cost-per-mile.

Whatever the cost, it was pure pleasure to visit the family and introduce the new grandchild to lots of friends and relatives.

But here's the odyssey part. Most of our group of travelers were intent on Drang nach Osten, onward to  Dutchy country and the Jersey Shore to introduce the the little squirt to the anabaptist side of the family. I planned to return to the place from which we started. They were going farther;  I was heading back to Waukesha.

I got dropped off in downtown Cleveland, near the Jake, at the Megabus stop at midnight CDT. Gave my Bro. the bro-hug and hopped on a new double decker bus.  Found a seat and went promptly to sleep.

Woke up at 5:30, as we were approaching the Skyway in Chicago, caught the free Wi-Fi on the bus and checked my mail. Three hundred eighty miles. Had a 40 minute layover at Chicago Union Station. 

Boarded the next Megabus leg of the trip--to Milwaukee. Eighty minutes later I was at the Amtrak/Intermodal terminal on St. Paul Av. in Milwaukee.

Walked four blocks to 4th and Wisconsin and caught (fifteen minute wait at 8:20 am) the #10 Milwaukee County Transit System bus to Brookfield Square ($2.25).

Arrived at Brookfield Square about 9:00 am. The MCTS bus pulled up at the transfer point at just the moment the Waukesha Transit System bus also arrived (That's called articulated scheduling). I had a transfer that got me on the Waukesha bus for no extra dough for a thirty minute ride to Waukesha's downtown terminal.

Caught, immediately, the #9 Waukesha Transit Bus to my neighborhood, with a transfer and a quarter in the farebox.

Dropped off at the bus stop sixty paces from my front door at 10:15 AM.

Odyssey complete; (refer to the title of this post.).

o A little over ten hours--door to door.

o Five buses. Each of them spotless and comfortable.

o Fares ( Megabus pricing scheme: the earlier you buy a ticket, the cheaper it is; overnight travel cheaper than daytime)

• Cleveland to Chicago--$15.00;
• Chicago to Milwaukee--$16.00;
• Milwaukee to Waukesha--$2.50

o Six hours of sleep on the trip.

o Three stimulating conversations with seat-mates.

o Wi-Fi for most of the trip,

o Total cost: $33.50.

The reason so many people hate and riducule and demand the end of mass transit is that they have no experience with it, NONE.

I'm lucky. I got used to having it when I was young. I still love its convenience, low-cost and conviviality.

The Reverend Lucius Walker, Jr. died this morning at age 80 in New York.

God rest his noble soul.

Waukesha Freeman is a running joke; the editor's work is a sick joke...

This was the story 20 months ago:

WAUKESHA - The Freeman has again been honored as among the best newspapers in Wisconsin.

The Freeman won the second-place award for general excellence in the Wisconsin Newspaper Association’s 2008 Better Newspaper Contest. In last year’s contest, The Freeman won first place for general excellence, the highest honor the paper can receive in the state...

First-place awards went to Lee Fensin for Sports pages, Jenny Sharp and Bill Yorth for Opinion pages.

Makes me happy to know that I live in a city that has such a highly regarded newspaper. And an award-winning editor.

Here's something Bill Yorth decided belonged on the opinion pages of the Waukesha Freeman on Wed., September 1, 2010.

Americans
Three hundred years ago and later, when people came to America, they never called themselves European-Americans. They were proud to be called Americans. About 30 years ago, some people (were) not proud to be called Americans and wanted to be called Native Americans and African-Americans. They were painting all blacks Africans. Well, the people from Colombia, South America, don't want to be called African Americans. Same goes for people from the Caribbean, or Panama, or Central America. The whites from South Africa don't want to be called African Americans. Now, what if all the kids that graduate from high school and go to a college, let's say, Madison, should they call themselves Eisenhower Wisconsin or any other high school name in Wisconsin at Madison? No. They are proud of the college that they are going to and don't want to change the name.

Thanks, Mr. Editor. We residents of Waukesha are pleased to see you upholding the performance that so recently earned you a First Place in General Excellence, "the highest honor the paper can receive in the state..." for your superlative presentation of the Waukesha Freeman Opinion Pages.

The opinion was unsigned. The transcription of the opinion had to be the work of someone willing to stenographically get it into shape so that it could be set in type and printed. But, the final look and Imprimatur (the precise translation from the Latin is : "Let it be printed") came from the editor.

This opinion is entirely the product of the editor's judgment. Yorth decided this needed to be published. And he had to say "Let's run this".

A typical week at the Freeman finds Bill O'Reilly, Owen Robinsin, Ann Coulter, Mark Belling, Victor Davis Hanson, Thomas Sowell, Jessica McBride, Cal Thomas and Pat Buchanan featured. In the interest of balance, there are offerings from time to time by noted flaming left-wingers Maureen Dowd and Tom Friedman.

The Freeman is a running joke. Yorth's editing is a sick joke.

This is Waukesha. The guy who wrote "Americans" fits in perfectly on Yorth's opinion pages.

The President speaks

Why do we bother with this guy?

Here is the speech that I wish President Obama would give about the Iraq War, but which neither he nor any other president ever will.

Posted on August 31, 2010 by Juan Cole

Fellow Americans, and Iraqis who are watching this speech, I have come here this evening not to declare a victory or to mourn a defeat on the battlefield, but to apologize from the bottom of my heart for a series of illegal actions and grossly incompetent policies pursued by the government of the United States of America, in defiance of domestic US law, international treaty obligations, and both American and Iraqi public opinion.

The United Nations was established in 1945 in the wake of a series of aggressive wars of conquest and the response to them, in which over 60 million people perished. Its purpose was to forbid such unjustified attacks, and its charter specified that in future wars could only be launched on two grounds. One is clear self-defense, when a country has been attacked. The other is with the authorization of the United Nations Security Council.

It was because the French, British and Israeli attack on Egypt in 1956 contravened these provisions of the United Nations Charter that President Dwight D. Eisenhower condemned that war and forced the belligerents to withdraw. When Israel looked as though it might try to hang on to its ill-gotten spoils, the Sinai Peninsula, President Eisenhower went on television on February 21, 1957 and addressed the nation. These words have largely been suppressed and forgotten in the United States of today, but they should ring through the decades and centuries:

“If the United Nations once admits that international dispute can be settled by using force, then we will have destroyed the very foundation of the organization, and our best hope of establishing a real world order. That would be a disaster for us all . . .

[Referring to Israeli demands that certain conditions be met before it relinquished the Sinai, the president said that he] “would be untrue to the standards of the high office to which you have chosen me if I were to lend the influence of the United States to the proposition that a nation which invades another should be permitted to exact conditions for withdrawal . . .”

“If it [the United Nations Security Council] does nothing, if it accepts the ignoring of its repeated resolutions calling for the withdrawal of the invading forces, then it will have admitted failure. That failure would be a blow to the authority and influence of the United Nations in the world and to the hopes which humanity has placed in the United Nations as the means of achieving peace with justice.”

In March of 2003, it was the United States government itself that contravened the charter of the United Nations, aggressively invading a country that had not attacked it and against the will of the UN Security Council. The war was preceded by a summit in the Azores of the US, Britain, Spain and Portugal, for all the world as though it were the sixteenth century and a confusion between empire and piracy still prevailed.

Link to The whole speech

AP and Waukesha Freeman know how to set the tone to mark Hiroshima Day

CARRIER-KILLING MISSILE BEING DEVELOPED

Eric Talmadge August 5, 2010, 5:43 PM

ABOARD THE USS GEORGE WASHINGTON (AP)

Nothing projects U.S. global air and sea power more vividly than supercarriers. Bristling with fighter jets that can reach deep into even landlocked trouble zones, America's virtually invincible carrier fleet has long enforced its dominance of the high sea.

China may put an end to that...

Read the rest of this witless, jingo bombast here.

Nothing projects the American spirit of Miles Gloriosus as much as this sort of chest thumping.

And nothing misreads what the next--perhaps the ultimate--Sino-American confrontation is going to look like. The Chinese need not risk the dangers inherent in blowing up the U.S. military-industrial complex's favorite toy.

They merely need to keep the Renminbi pegged to the U.S. Buck and steadily decline to roll over the proceeds of their U.S. Bond holdings as they come due.

.

The myths about the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Every August, upon the anniversaries of the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, comments resume about American decisions at the end of World War II. Despite the passage of 65 years, heated opinions are repeated as fact and myths become immortalized as truths. Beyond distorting the historical record, wishful thinking leads us to repeat past mistakes in new ways against new enemies.

Among the inaccuracies :

1. Japan was ready to fight to the end.

Facts: In an intercepted cable of July 12, 1945, Japanese Emperor Hirohito revealed his decision to intervene to end the war. In Harry S. Truman’s journal, the U.S. president characterized the message as “telegram from Jap Emperor asking for peace.” Tokyo was prepared to surrender unconditionally if the monarchy would be retained, the very position the Allies accepted after Hiroshima.

Five days later, Truman predicted that Stalin would “be in the Jap war by August 15. Fini Japs when that comes about.” Nevertheless, he ordered the bombing of Hiroshima on Aug. 6. The USSR entered the war on Aug. 8. Truman ordered the Aug. 9 bombing of Nagasaki anyway.

2. Dropping the bomb was necessary to prevent an American invasion.

Facts: In 1946, a U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey report based on intelligence available to the White House concluded: “Certainly prior to Dec. 31, 1945, and in all probability prior to Nov. 1, 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russian had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.”

3. Dropping the bomb saved lives.

Facts: Stanford historian Barton Bernstein’s study of declassified documents found that the worst-case scenario by military planners was 46,000 deaths if the U.S. invaded both Kyushu and Honshu islands. Since Hiroshima, these estimates have grown exponentially as if to justify using the bomb. In notes, Truman cites 250,000 casualties (dead, wounded, missing). His published memoir raises the number to 500,000 dead. Still later, he referred to saving a million lives. In 1991, President H.W. Bush claimed that the bomb saved “millions.”

Since both presidents, among countless others, ignored the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey conclusion that an invasion was unnecessary, it is no wonder average Americans do the same. All of these morbid calculations ignore the stark fact that more than 187,000 humans died at Hiroshima.

Read the rest

Russell Vandenbroucke, professor and chair of theatre arts at the University of Louisville, is the author of “Atomic Bombers,” a play that was broadcast on public radio to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Hiroshima. This column was provided by the PeaceVoice Program of the Oregon Peace Institute.

Who ya gonna believe, Tim Geithner or your own lying bank statements?

The devastation wrought by the great recession is still all too real for millions of Americans who lost their jobs, businesses and homes. The scars of the crisis are fresh, and every new economic report brings another wave of anxiety. That uncertainty is understandable, but a review of recent data on the American economy shows that we are on a path back to growth.
[...]
While the economy has a long way to go before reaching its full potential, last week’s data on economic growth show that large parts of the private sector continue to strengthen. Business investment and consumption — the two keys to private demand — are getting stronger, better than last year and better than last quarter. Uncertainty is still inhibiting investment, but business capital spending increased at a solid annual rate of about 17 percent.

Together, private consumption and fixed investment contributed about 3.25 percent to growth. Even the surge in imports, which lowered the rate of increase of G.D.P., actually reflects healthy and growing American demand.

Omigod! We've turned the corner. Happy Days are Here Agai.... What's that? There's still a little downside?

We have a long way to go to address the fiscal trauma and damage across the country, and we will need to monitor the ups and downs in the economy month by month. The share of workers who have been unemployed for six months or more is at its highest level since 1948, when the data was first recorded, and we must do more to ensure that they have the skills they need to re-enter the 21st-century economy. Small businesses are still battling a tough climate. State and local governments are still hurting.

Train millions of 45-year olds to take jobs in the service sector at half their former income? Is this what you mean Mr. Geithner?

And while making smart, targeted investments in our future, we must also cut the deficit over the next few years and make sure that America once again lives within its means.

Yah! We're talking about cutting Social Security; making sure that your new job as an on-line customer service rep (which you stole back from some guy in Mumbai or Manila by undercutting his wages) will be still there for you until you're 75, and finally eligible for a pension.

h/t: Digby

.

.

The Conway and the Clifton....Home, Sweet Home

A little research today confirmed a suspicion. I have lived about 60% of my years in Sears Kit Homes.

Something about "Kit" doesn't sound solid or long-lasting. But my research yields a fascinating story about how the Sears Roebuck Company, from 1908 through 1945 manufactured (In Cairo, Illinois and several other locations) more than seventy thousand solid, well-designed houses that arrived in one (sometimes two) railroad boxcars with complete blueprints and and an 80 page leather-bound book of instructions on assembly.

For 17 years I lived in The Conway on Madison Street in Waukesha. Twenty years ago I moved into The Clifton on Easy Street in the same city. Both were (are) solidly-built, enduring (one built in 1928, the other in 1931) residences (homes, nests, what else can I call them?) that will last another 80 years--with just a little attention to maintenance.

There's something very appealing about a house that you could buy from a catalog, from a company that offered you a mortgage on that house based on ONE condition: that you had a job.

And--best of all--the goods were delivered quickly, efficiently and cheaply on a Choo-Choo train.