Vladimir (the Great) Putin left the American Secretaries of Defense and State waiting forty minutes for an interview in which he harangued them for eight minutes.  The 'queen' was not amused. No report yet on Gates's response.  

In all seriousness, this is probably the biggest diplomatic slap in the face the United States has suffered since the Jefferson administration.  

The worm has turned.  We will have to start learning to live with it.

The widely reported story in La Republicca raises a question concerning the complicity of Blair's government in passing on the forgeries.  Blair's intelligence service surely knew it was a forgery, just as the CIA did.  It is hard to believe that Blair was not informed of this.  Yet, the Blair government supported the forgeries, and their support was cited as independent confirmation of the charge that Iraq was making efforts to acquire yellowcake.

My question: can the Blair government survive the revelation of this information?  

AP reports that the government of Iraq signed a new agreement with Iran to train its army.
Asked if this might anger the Shi'ite-led Iraqi government's sponsors in Washington, Iraqi Defense Minister Dulaimi said: `Nobody can dictate to Iraq its relations with other countries.'

It's seems redundant to add any further comment.  Nice going, Mr. Bush.

The New York Times reports today that 'An outspoken supporter of the war, Representative Walter B. Jones, a Republican from North Carolina, said in an interview today on the ABC news program, 'This Week', that he had changed his position and called for a fixed timetable for withdrawal of troops there.'

e should shortly see more purple fingers held up to see which way the wind is blowing.  People are realizing that Bush botched it up big time.  This is the beginning of the end for the worst government in American history.

Except among economists, John Taylor is not a householde name.  He ought to be.   He invented the 'Taylor Rule', an analytical device commonly employed to assess and guide monetary policy.  As the unique top-flight macroeconomist in the upper echelons of the Bush administration, his resignation from the position of Undersecretary of the Treasury for International Affairs sends a terrible signal to the international financial community. It means that in the event of a dollar dump, there will be nobody in charge at Treasury who knows what he or she is doing.

This is really bad news.  It means that like the diplomacy, American international financial policy is not controlled by ideologues with no technical expertise in matters that demand them.  Taylor's departure could not come at a worse moment.

I'm careful about going into debt.  I'm a son of depression parents and I remember our familyi's fear family that my father might lose his job and we would lose all the little we had.  When I got my first academic job, my first financial goal was to save a year's income so that if I didn't get tenure I wouldn't have to beg for my next position.  I still don't have any debt not secured by a 3:1 equity position.  (O.K., I'm an anti-debt obsessive. You aren't raised by Depression-period parents without being that way).  

I remember as a kid growing up in the Northwest.  I knew this other kid whose dad had a pharmacy.  He was a nice kid; played pretty good piano in our jazz band -- he had a kind of long-faced Rachmaninoff visage.  When he was a junior in high school his dad went bankrupt and committed suicide.  I haven't the faintest idea where the debt came from.  Maybe he was playing the ponies, maybe something else.  But he killed himself, and his son was shattered.

I've been looking at the popular vote, which I think tells us more about what has happened than the electoral, even though the latter determines the outcome.  The popular vote gives Bush a 2.5 percent advantage; I was thinking Kerry by 4 to 6. All this suggests that the cultural gap and the fear gap are far deeper than we Kossacks believed it could be.  It bodes terrible ill for our country, whoever wins.  You can't make good policies on the basis of fear and ideology.  We've experienced this truth in the past four years, and may well experience it again, though it will be worse, because we've run through our financial, moral, and diplomatic credit as a nation.

This is the worst possible outcome.  I'm not discouraged; I'm dismayed.

There are somethings that propaganda can't alter -- like the law of gravity or the speed of light.  One of those things is the the way individuals respond to perceived costs and benefits.  This morning's NYT article on the shortfall in sign-ups to the National Guard is a case in point.  It has been obvious since this time last year that we were going to run out of troops to staff the Iraq venture.  Reliance on National Guardsmen to do the work of full-time soldiers inevitably causes young men and women on the margin to rethink their potential committment; some decline to re-enlist; others decline to enlist.  As the inflow subsides and the outflow swells, the stock of soldiers declines.

That is what has happened.  It was predictable, just like the disastrous budget effects of the Bush tax bills were predictble.  Unlike the question whether our troops would be greeted with a shower of flowers when they marched into Baghdad, these are not (questionable) judgment calls.  This is arithmetic, not politics.  

This diary entry is provoked by Chavez' victory in Venezuela, and his response to it.  My guess is that most of the readers and posters on Kos hoped that Chavez would win the recall referendum.  I certainly did.  It prevented a Berlusconi (or worse) takeover of Venezuelan politics, and most probably a civil war.  Plus for good measure, a stick in the Bush administration's eye.

But the other side of the coin is always there (politics is not a mobius strip).  A good proportion of the people who voted for Chavez's removal were probably like most of the readers of this site: middle class, educated, bourgeois in the generic, not pejorative, sense.  They worry about about the security of their own property, about the chances for their children; in other words, about what most people worry about who are not worrying about mere survival. According to the filing from AP, Chavez has interpreted his victory as a mandate to change the courts, take over the media (too concentrated, and too biassed, to be sure), and in brief, to protect his government.  Now, we know from experience that governments eventually change, and that what protects the losers from the winners is the laws and the courts, and the general ambiance that accepts that losers are part of society.  Let's hope that Chavez doesen't take the next step.

These thoughts lead me to consider the Relpublicans, who in the embodiment of the Bush administration, seem to have adopted many of Chavez's attitudes.  As a man of the 1960s, I was always impatient with the proceduralists.  In my older (not old) age, I begin to accept that the hackneyed phrase, 'rule of law' really does mean something, and is something that we need to secure before we begin to secure the necessary social and economic rights we all believe a part of a civilized society.

I just reviewed the slate site and read Saleton on the stem-cell issue.  I usually like his columns, don't always agree with them, but generally consider them to be honestly written, and I don't think this one is dishonestly written.  I just disagree.  To turn to the stem-cell issue -- and the larger issue issue of scientific integrity (read peer-reviewed work) into a he-said, she-said article is a journalistic travesty.  I'm an economist, and I know nothing next to beans about the in's and out's of stem-cell biology.  But what I do know from my own field is that the Bush administration politicizes everything.  I found Saleton's piece below his usual performance -- should I say disgusting? Yes, I will.  

When will journalists learn how hard it is to achieve a scientific result?  How much hard work is required to produce a tested fact?  These guys are lightweights.  Sad to say.  They know their commas and periods, and apostrophes, but not much else.

The Guardian has an article which a poster linked on Atrios giving an eye-witness account of what happened in the desert. Apparently most of the wedding party had gone to bed when the AC-130s and the troops arrived shooting them all up. According to the witness, a woman who lost a couple of children there, the soldiers were deliberately targetting everyone.  She says she escaped by pretending to be dead.  Sorry I can't give the link. I'm a tech doofus, but its on today's Guardian website.

Geraldine Sealey has an interesting post at Salon in the War Room on how the national media have almost completely ignored Kerry's policy pronouncements.  According to Mark Halperin, political director for ABC News it isn't news 'if he isn't saying anything bold, different, or particularly relevant to that day's story.' Apparently, well thought out policy proposals just aren't relevant.  Only conflict is relevant.

In brief, if it can't sell, it won't be shown.  I think this points up a big piece of the structural problem.  TV news is in the business of selling ads, not informing the public.  I hope that if the Dems get back in, and if they can take Congress, they take another look at what we get for handing out public frequency bandwidth to private corporations.  

The NYT is running a story on Colonel Pappas who is fingered in the long Taguba report as having instructed the guards in how to extract information from detainees by torture.  This is the first piece of quasi-investigative reporting on Iraq the Times has done in a long time (if ever). They smell blood, and don't want to be out of the running.  Memories of Watergate.