Anastasia Baburova, Stanislav Markelov, R.I.P.

Another Russian journalist, this time a mere 25-year old "cub" reporter, Anastasia Baburova, is murdered by a masked gunman just blocks from the Kremlin, as is human rights lawyer Stanislav Markelov.

Another Long Island Sentinel Contribution

Another modest contribution today to the Long Island Sentinel, this time about signs of weakness in the Obama presidency.

Let the Overreach Begin

Prior to Barack Obama's inauguration, a number of pundits predicted that Obama would need to triangulate to some degree away from his Democratic colleagues in the Congress, lest they overreach and cause the chief executive to waste valuable political capital, as happened in the early days of the Clinton presidency.

As this trenchant political analysis by my old colleague Larry Kudlow demonstrates, Mr. Obama has indeed allowed himself to become identified with a Democratic House pork-barrel bill -- usually the ordinary disgraceful business of Congress -- masquerading today as emergency "stimulus."

As Kudlow notes, criticism is now coming from all sides, including former Clinton budget honcho Alice Rivlin.

One wonders if Obama will now try a charm offensive to put lipstick on this pig, or cut his losses. Either way, this is no First 100 Days FDR for sure.

Today's Contribution to Long Island Sentinel

I have made a modest contribution to the Long Island Sentinel today. A little something about the too-important-to-prosecute-for-tax-evasion Treasury Secretary designate, Timothy Geithner.

Stimulus Plan Pork Justifies Cynicism about Obama

The change we've been waiting for continues. Great story today on the SF Chronicle web site with some of the details of the so-called Obama stimulus plan.

Included are the same kind of pork-barrel projects we see in "normal" times in Washington. Yet, this is supposed to be an emergency, and the kind of situation that requires immediate action. To do what, renovate malls? Give me a break.

I think it's all clear to be cynical about Obama, even for the Obama zombies. It took us, what, all of a few weeks?

Long Island Sentinel Launches

Congratulations to my good friend and always entrepreneur Ray Keating, on the recent launch of the Long Island Sentinel, a much needed alternative voice on Long Island for free markets and less government here, and across the country.

The web-based publication is producing new content seven days a week, on the model of a daily newspaper. It also features cultural and sports commentary as well.

I will be participating to some degree in this new venture, with an occasional contribution about this and that. An honor and a privilege.

NSA Spying Story Disturbing

A disturbing story is bubbling up in the recent days about the National Security Agency (NSA) allegedly spying without warrant on American citizens.

Keith Olbermann is not my favorite guy, but I have to say that tonight I sat riveted by the program Countdown as he reported on allegations that the NSA illegally obtained information about ordinary Americans, particularly journalists.

This may be another example of how, as I mentioned earlier, speed limits in our laws get pushed. Give the government the power to spy on foreign nationals in the U.S. (who do not enjoy the same constitutional protections) and you run the risk that gung-ho security types will abuse that power.

I'm going to be waiting and watching on this one, especially when the whistleblower, Russell Tice (seen in the video below), and others in the security business go before Congress to tell what they know.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Tax Cheat Tim Geithner "Too Important" To Reject for Treasury?

Amazing, absurd story today about tax cheat Tim Geithner, Barack Obama's nominee for Treasury. When the political class decides a tax cheater is too important to their plans to "fix" the economy to disqualify for office -- even though the same tax cheat will oversee the IRS -- you know the country is in serious, serious trouble.

This is the "change" we've been waiting for? If a Republican tried this, the Democrats would be apoplectic. Don't tell me this is a principled group in Washington. They deserve nothing but scorn.

Read Byron York's coverage of this story at National Review Online.

More Political Murder in Putin's Russia

Another day in Vladimir Putin's Russia, another "troublemaker" murdered.

Stanislav Markelov, a lawyer representing the family of a murdered Chechen girl, who also represented murdered journalist Anna Politkovskaya and other abused Chechens, has been shot and killed. Curious how all these people making trouble against the Russian established order just happen to die.

One of George Bush's worst mistakes, among his many, was calling Mr. Putin someone he could work with, and his "friend." The prospects for the naive Obama administration are not much better, since BO seems to think he charm just about anyone.

Putin is, in fact, a murderer. And a potential mass murderer if energy prices rise again, which may encourage him to return to overrunning the former Soviet bloc nations such as Georgia and Ukraine. One shudders to think of the political murders that will ensue then.

In Case of Waterboarding Conservative, Break Glass

I failed to note in my previous post that Joe Scarborough and Patrick Buchanan can't seem to decide what they are debating. A) Waterboarding is or isn't torture, or B) Who cares, it works.

As I noted in another previous post, it may well "work" in overly narrow terms. Not the point. The issue is do the ends justify the means?

In the video in the previous post, Buchanan asks Financial Times editor Christia Freeland if she would waterboard someone to save nine plane loads of people from terrorist bombings. Classic utilitarian reasoning.

The proper response, which you are welcome to use if you run into waterboarders: "The Nazis "experimented" on Jews in the concentration camps. If that information saved nine plane loads of people's lives, would that make what they did moral? Or, if you prefer a "guilty" analogy - if we could save nine plane loads of people's lives by doing "controlled" experiments on our murderers, rapists and child molesters to obtain valuable medical information, should we do it?"

At this point, one would expect nothing more than a sigh and a roll of those squinty eyes from Scarborough. Who knows what Buchanan would say. But, in any case, the answer to both of them is to debate the principle, not the results. The debate is not about what "works," which the "realists" define according to their own narrow terms, independent of blowback and damage to moral standing. The debate is about the logic of one's morality, and its longer term results.

What frightens people about some conservatives is that in situations where the high goods of God and country appear threatened, they too easily cast off their principled mantles - the one's they don so well (and rightly so) on the constitution and free markets, and embrace "extremism in defense of liberty (and possibly God) is no vice."

I never liked that statement by Barry Goldwater. I always thought it was stupid. What I realize now is that it was revelatory of a deep utilitarian strain that some, some conservatives need to purge from their thinking.

(Goldwater's statement is right up there with that of irresponsible idiot Ann Coulter's comment: "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren't punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That's war. And this is war.")

Torture Debate Brings Out the Worst in One Conservative

I discovered this video posted on a very right wing blog recently. It's of an MSNBC debate about waterboarding and torture. The author of that blog had a different view of it than I did.

Sorry, but Joe Scarborough is being enormously unfair here. Arrogant. And a jack ass. (And normally, I like Joe Scarborough.) He is doing his best paternalistic Jack "You Can't Handle the Truth about Our Dangerous World" Nicholson routing here, and it's not working. I think there is also a bit of male chest thumping.



Not everything a left-winger, or so-called moderate says is wrong. There are no limits to what Buchanan and Scarborough are advocating. It offends the sensibilities of people who don't want crude "realist" thugs protecting our freedoms.

As I have said before, the willingness to believe one has to do these things in order to protect freedom, as the "only choice," is (aside from cheap utilitarian reasoning toward which conservatives are usually averse - see previous post) a kind of exercise in Nietzschean over-man beyond-good-and-evil vanity. And, sad to say, some conservatives just LOVE IT.

On Torture and Exceeding Speed Limits

The news today is that another "detainee" was tortured, at least according to a Bush administration official. Except for the fact that someone in the Bush administration is admitting to it, from my point of view, this is sad news.

While I consider myself a right-leaning individual, (something of a libertarian), I have never accepted the rationalizations of torture from the right, or attempts to parse the meaning of torture so that waterboarding skirts that definition.

Waterboarding, sleep deprivation, enforced nudity and other coercive acts all strike the average person as acts of torture - physical and mental. Yet, national security-minded media outlets like the Wall Street Journal's editorial board, and others on the right, continue to dance on the heads of semantic pins, and invoke situational ethics to defend these practices. (The fact that Congress may also have been aware of these acts and supported them, only to turn into hypocrites about it later, is completely beside the point. Sorry, WSJ.)

I have no doubt that you can get some good information from torture. Sometimes. And, from that you can "do good." What is forgotten -- ridiculously, embarrassingly and conveniently forgotten on the right -- is the distinction between means and end - and the so-called "unintended consequences" that flow when you skirt that distinction.

Conservatives are highly skilled at pointing out the unintended consequences of all sorts of other policies, such as income redistribution, unfunded mandates, etc.

But when it comes to the so-called "blowback," or the codependent political responses that will be generated by acts of torture, rendition, subversion of governments and more, many conservatives degrade into so-called political "realists."

Conservatives know that every law can be twisted, pushed beyond its normal limits. Just like we all drive 60 in a 55 MPH zone. Henry Paulson's TARP has been a mockery of legislation - leaving aside the fact the constitution bars any of this kind of intervention by the federal government. As TARP could "morph," so can waterboarding and rendition. You stay away from the edges, so the edges don't get closer to the norm. That's the point of having a constitution and limits on national security practices.

Yet, somehow for the right, foreign policy remain hermetically sealed from these kind of considerations, buried in a mayonnaise jar at Foggy Bottom. (Sending out a horse laugh to Hillary Clinton today, and her absurd claim that she will make American foreign policy "smart." Just like smart urban planning, eh? All we need is some "smart" people and everything will be great. $&^#*#*!!!)

I got my first taste of the right-wing "realpolitik" blind spot when, as a junior editor at National Review, I made the argument that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, along with the indiscriminate bombings of Tokyo and Dresden, were immoral acts, contrary to thousands of years of natural law tradition. (You know, the kind of tradition we Burkean, Judeo-Christian conservatives are supposed to defend?)

With a few exceptions, I was met with intransigence and utilitarian rationalization, befitting the likes of Jeremy Bentham and Joseph Fletcher.

And while today, I don't find the world as "neat" as I did then, I cling to the distinction between means and ends as I do the love of my children and my own sanity. If there is no such distinction, there is no meaning at all, and nothing worth protecting.

A lesson long understood by some conservatives, somewhere.

Musical Artist Friday: Anders Trentemøller

Today, instead of writing about the latest political nonsense, I'm discussing music. More of this important subject matter to follow(!)

One of my favorite artists, among the many, is Anders Trentemøller. He creates some beautiful, amazingly layered music. I won't put a label on it. Many people do. I'll just say I love his stuff.

This piece, "Moan" is from the album "The Last Resort." (Note the use of singing birds to enhance the ambient backgrounds of the instrumental version song - along with various snaps, crackles and pops that are characteristic of his style.)

Below are the instrumental, and then vocal versions of the same song. The music video for the latter, complete with silly Soviet era imagery, is quite fun. It's also hauntingly beautiful, with the vocal support of Ane Trolle.) Check him out on YouTube when you get a chance. And buy his stuff.

Polyvore Throws Me a Fashion Lifeline

I just stumbled across "Polyvore" a fascinating online tool for fashion lovers (and the fashion challenged, like me, who just might learn something). Members create "sets" or combinations of items gathered from across the web that others can look at, learn from and buy if they like. (When it comes to my look, I need all the help I can get.) The content is searchable by tags like "rock" or "jeans." Some women I know will just LOVE this site. What do you think?


for men by • silent 3 •


learn to walk away by ♥MOOSEGiRL♥

Russian Gas Cutoff Signals Much-Deserved Desperation

Troubles for Putin's Russia and its energy giant Gazprom, as they get cagey in shutting off supplies to Ukraine. The International Herald Tribune notes:

"[E]nergy experts said that the Kremlin's decision to employ the gambit again in a pricing dispute with Ukraine was an indication as well of Russia's deepening economic woes."

Indeed, as world energy prices fall, Putin and his jackals are increasingly desperate for cash. Let's hope it's just the beginning of their troubles.

2008: Mission Statement Partly Accomplished

Several years ago, during a time when I was diagnosed with a chronic illness and "underemployed," I wrote a mission statement for myself. As I wrote it, I realized it was okay to aspire to be a serious "creative," because in doing so, I could share the benefits of these activities with my children, broadening their horizons at a young age in a way my I never did. Here's an excerpt from what I wrote:

"To renew a sense of value in my life, bring me back to the true interests that have been with my throughout my life and career, and draw my family, friends and those who experience my work into a world of creativity and humor with me. To allow my family, friends and associates to enjoy the social, cultural and spiritual benefits of this life, in the hopes that they also will be inspired to be creative and effective. To create cultural works that will be of lasting value and inspiration."

In the time since, I have taken a few shots at this. I experimented with some standup comedy for a while, and worked on some television commercials, corporate videos, a "mockumentary" and a horror film.

I continue to pursue opportunities in all these areas. But above all, I have come to realize that music offers me some of the most promising opportunities to achieve my mission statement objectives. I have been a musician since I started playing bass guitar with my friends at about age 14. Many years have passed, and while I have had the guitar out on and off, actively playing music has not been a part of my life.

In that sense, 2008 had already been a great year for me. I took a shot answering a Craigslist ad for a guitarist, and thanks to the welcoming Andrew Camarco, Bob Muller, John Cunningham and John Esposito, I am part of a great band - Triple 7 - whose motto is: "If I ain't having fun, I'm done."

And we are having fun. I'm learning new music, expanding my musical abilities, and meeting great people. My bandmates are all passionate about expanding their abilities and playing out, which we've done a few times now.

However, my hosts for last night's New Year's Eve bash, the extended Camarco family, could not have known how important last night was to me. Because it offered the opportunity to close out an already great year by having my kids see my band play for the first time. One of the goals of my mission statement.

Well, due to some weather and other logistical problems, some members of the band couldn't make it. But Andrew, our drummer, and his nephew Brian, a former member of the band, were available to do drums and bass respectively. At Andrew's prodding I grabbed the nearby guitar (Brian's Fender Strat - thanks Brian) and we jammed a few songs - while the rest of the crowd did what I understand is classic Camarco Karaoke.

From afar I could see the kids watching. And clapping along. Singing. Connor had already received some free drumming lessons from Andrew earlier in the evening. (He just started taking guitar lessons this year.) Later, during a break in the action, Kevin and Connor would sit while the rest of the Camarcos sang some other tunes. Kevin would also grab the mic for the first time, and just make silly noises into it, uttering his trademark hearty laugh.

It didn't matter that daughter Emma would throw up on me later that evening. (She's fine now.) Nothing could "dampen" my spirits. I had, to some degree, done what I had set out to do several years ago. It has been a long, twisted path. But here I am, thanks to some good luck and some great people.

And there are more fun gigs to come in the months and years ahead. And more improvement of my playing. We'll see how far it will take me and my family and friends.

My success here has also given me the confidence to pursue more of my goals. 2009 will hopefully bring more successes.

I also found out this week from my doctor as well that my chronic illness ("Crohn's Colitis," as my doctor unconventionally calls it) has eased off so much, that I won't need to be checked out so frequently. I am extremely fortunate to have what appears to be a "mild case" as she described it.

It started to get milder around the time I wrote my mission statement.

I don't know what the future holds, medically, or musically. I pray a silent prayer every day to a darker God than that of my childhood that I and those I know and love will escape tragedy. But I am deeply grateful for the good things that 2008 has brought. And more hopeful for the future than I have been in some time.