Sunday, December 31, 2006

3000

U.S. deaths in Iraq confirmed by the DoD: 2989.

Reported U.S. deaths in Iraq pending DoD confirmation: 11.

Total U.S. deaths in Iraq: 3000.

"...when the final history is written on Iraq, it will look like just a comma..."--

President George W. Bush

Well, here what 3000 commas look like you sick motherfucker:
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Oh, don't forget those fortunate enough to survive their injuries. Non-mortal casualties in Iraq: 46,880.

Happy New Year.

Saturday, December 30, 2006

This Just Gets Worse and Worse

I was thinking that Saddam's execution was rather hasty, but it seems to have been carefully timed.

The Sunni and Shi'a calenders differ by one day. This bit of trivia turns out to be very important. According to Iraqi law, executions cannot take place on a religious holiday, and Saddam's execution was scheduled on the Sunni Holy Day of Sacrifice.

This is a direct middle finger salute to Sunnis everywhere, especially those in Iraq. It is the Shi'a majority saying, "Take that, you Sunnis--you have no power and you never will by lawful means."

Expect the violence to crescendo.

Friday, December 29, 2006

Saddam Dead

It;s official. He's dead.

Whoo hoo.

Now back to the spinning violent feedback loop that is America's Iraq adventure.

My Uncle Must Be Fuming...

My Uncle Ralph was a Park Service employee, and this must have him livid:
Grand Canyon National Park is not permitted to give an official estimate of the geologic age of its principal feature, due to pressure from Bush administration appointees. Despite promising a prompt review of its approval for a book claiming the Grand Canyon was created by Noah's flood rather than by geologic forces, more than three years later no review has ever been done and the book remains on sale at the park, according to documents released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER).

“In order to avoid offending religious fundamentalists, our National Park Service is under orders to suspend its belief in geology,” stated PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch. “It is disconcerting that the official position of a national park as to the geologic age of the Grand Canyon is ‘no comment.’”
Jesus H. Chee-rist. My brain hurts.

Tuesday, December 26, 2006

Nomination for the Most Imaginative Turn of Phrase

...goes to Nicole Bell over at Crooks & Liars:
Krauthammer is spinning and twisting so tightly in this op-ed that he's almost braided himself.,
I agree with her 100%. He is working so hard lately to gin up support for an invasion of Iran, or bombing the living daylights out of said country, that he has become a parody of himself.

It would be comical if it were not so absolutely tragically supported by the Bush Administration.

Tuesday, December 05, 2006

The View From Your Window

Sully posted this shot by my DH, taken out of our front door at dawn. I shoveled 6, then 4, then DH shoveled another 4 inches-in that order.

Saturday, November 18, 2006

The Daily Show and The Colbert Report

Last night, watching Real Time with Bill Maher, I heard Richard Dreyfuss expound upon the lack of civics teaching in schools. I know I am an old fart, but I remember Civics being a subject for my whole freshman year, and I had to take an additional year of American government.

With civics no longer taught in the public schools, TDS and TCR have essentially replaced it, in a fractured and comical fashion. The demographics from the 2006 elections strongly suggest that the two shows on Comedy Central (of all networks!) were instrumental in record voter turnout in younger age groups--up to a 116% increase!

Now Stephen Colbert is doing a riff on his "Better Know A District" segment, doing a "Better Know A Founder" interviewing three different Thomas Jefferson imitators, in the guise of finding the "real" Jefferson and highlighting the real issues of slavery in America from a Founding Father's point of view.

It was brilliant.

Wednesday, November 08, 2006

Oh Happy Day!

I am singing and dancing for joy today!

I was amazed and moved to tears when Claire McCaskill was declared the winner of the Senate race. Jim (No)Talent was a terrible Senator, not just voting for Bush (rubber stamping) but refusing to listen to his constituents on important issues.

I wrote to oppose the war, the torture bill, NSA wiretapping, and more and got bullshit answers and smug, self important posturing on the issues.

Now he gets to be on the receiving end of the voter's wrath.

Music to mine ears!

Tuesday, November 07, 2006

Election Predictions

The Republicans have become resigned to losing the House, I think. The evidence? Watching Fox News Sunday, Brit Hume and Bill Kristol looked positively depressed even to despondency this week.

If Brit Hume's face were any longer, it wouldn't fit in the screen. He talked about the abysmal picture in front of him with devastating honesty and was very frank with the group about the future for the Bush Administration with a Democratic House and the reason why the Republicans have forfeited their chances. For the first time in recent memory, the Republicans have not controlled the message about their policies and their consequences of their actions.

Bill Kristol's affect was totally different than his usual smirking, relaxed, nearly supine posture. He was sitting straight up and his face was tense and stressed.

It was the first time I watched this show with glee!

Sunday, November 05, 2006

I Am Stunned

I am absolutely amazed at the immense hypocrisy of evangelical so-called preacher who defends the leader of the National Association of Evangelicals, who represent 30 million Christian conservatives, by blaming his wife.
Most pastors I know do not have satisfying, free, sexual conversations and liberties with their wives. At the risk of being even more widely despised than I currently am, I will lean over the plate and take one for the team on this. It is not uncommon to meet pastors’ wives who really let themselves go; they sometimes feel that because their husband is a pastor, he is therefore trapped into fidelity, which gives them cause for laziness. A wife who lets herself go and is not sexually available to her husband in the ways that the Song of Songs is so frank about is not responsible for her husband’s sin, but she may not be helping him either.
This is a classic example of blame the wife for her husband's sin. She is ultimately responsible because she did not keep herself up to her husband's standards, which is to say that she was not manly enough for him.

Unbelievable.

Pastor Haggard's family deserve love and support in this sad time. It is particularly offensive to cause them further pain in this matter. It is twisting a knife in their wounds instead of binding them with love and prayer.

My prayers are with them. They are in need of them in this time of loss and isolation. They need to know that they are not alone.

Saturday, November 04, 2006

I've Been Quoted!

I got quoted on Talking Points Memo, talking about the 30 robocalls I received yesterday and the 12 I received today.

72 hours and counting....

Tuesday, October 31, 2006

Cutting Through the Bullshit

The bullshit is flying fast and free as far as the embryonic stem cell issue is concerned. Even Jim Caviezel has weighed in on the issue (in mumbled Aramaic at that), saying, "You betray the Son of Man with a kiss."

Evidently, Caviezel has confounded the fact that he played the Son of God with the notion that he is the Son of God.

Mind you, I am a practicing Roman Catholic but I have to disagree with the church on this matter. The embryos used are from already-fertilized eggs that will be destroyed in an autoclave if they are not used for research. In point of fact, they are not even embryos yet, they are blastocysts.

The Biblical definition of life is in Genesis 9:3-4
3Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things.

4But flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof, shall ye not eat.

Thus the life is in the blood, and at 8 cells, there is no blood yet.

The next problem with the religious right is that they say that there are no cures for any disease from embryonic stem cells, which is patently false. Researchers at the University of Minnesota have concluded a trial that has:
For the first time, stem cell researchers at the University of Minnesota have coaxed human embryonic stem cells to create cancer-killing cells in the laboratory, paving the way for future treatments for various types of cancers (or tumors). The research will be published in the Oct. 15 issue of the Journal of Immunology.

Researchers generated "natural killer" cells from the human embryonic stem cells. As part of the immune system, natural killer cells normally are present in the blood stream and are play a role in defending the body against infection and against some cancers.

"This is the first published research to show the ability to make cells from human embryonic stem cells that are able to treat and fight cancer, especially leukemias and lymphomas," said Dan Kaufman, M.D., Ph.D., assistant professor of medicine in the Stem Cell Institute and Department of Medicine at the University of Minnesota and lead author of the study.

"We hear a lot about the potential of stem cells to treat conditions such as Parkinson's disease, diabetes, and Alzheimer's disease. This research suggests it is possible that we could use human embryonic stem cells as a source for immune cells that could better target and destroy cancer cells and potentially treat infections," Kaufman added.

The results also provided the researchers with a model of how the immune system develops.
So we now know more about how the immune system functions as well as finding a new treatment for cancer. This research was done on two of the stem cell lines that fall under the federal funding guideline, so your taxpayer dollars went toward funding this project. Aren't you proud of the accomplishment of our scientists, or do you want to run back to the Stone Age?

The last bit of bullshit is that there are 65 (or 72) diseases that can be treated with adult or cord blood stem cells. Actually, that number is severely inflated - there are only nine diseases that have emerged from the required clinical trials. That's an abysmal 14% of treatments. More can come later and I fully support all research into this area.

He Was On Vacation

When he got the Presidential Daily Briefing, warning about the worst man-made of disaster (9/11), he was on vacation.

When the worst natural disaster happened, Katrina, he was on vacation.

He was on vacation for the worst disasters in American history, and nobody held him responsible. He stayed on vacation, even when the disaster was so horrific. You can be sure that Bill Clinton would have been there, rolling up his sleeves if necessary.

I miss Bill.

Saturday, October 28, 2006

I Love the General!


Racial politics have been on the back burner until recently. Kenney-Boy Mehlmen even went in front of the NAACP and apologized for the past and pledged that there was room under the Big Tent in the Republican Party for everyone.

That was until they were down in the polls for long enough that they had to come to terms with the fact that the Democrats were going to win unless the GOP could mobilize their base. In the South, that base is fairly strongly racist.

If it were otherwise, why even think of planting the image of a white-trash woman winking and vamping for the camera, asking the "mixed" Harold Ford, Jr. to, "Call me"?

Wednesday, October 25, 2006

Michael J. Fox Is Right


This is a devastating ad. The GOP's Mighty Wurlitzer is warming up and delivering a full frontal assault on Michael J. Fox in an attempt to reduce the effectiveness of this ad.

Rush Limbaugh (who knows a lot of pharmacology, but only the ones treating pain and erectile dysfunction) is accusing Fox of going off his medications in order to exaggerate the devastating effects of Parkinson's disease for political gain. He obviously knows nothing about the treatment for Parkinson's disease.

The jerking and swaying that you see on the video is called tardive dyskinesia and is a side effect of the medications used to treat Parkinson's disease. After decades of research, there is still no better treatment than oral levodopa. Parkinson's disease is currently thought to be related to depletion of dopamine in the corpus striatum in the central nervous system. Dopamine does not cross the blood-brain barrier, so it cannot be administered orally, but L-dopa does cross it and is metabolized into dopamine in the CNS; however, it requires tremendously high doses of L-dopa in order for sufficient amounts to cross the blood-brain barrier in order to have the desired effect.

The high levels of L-dopa cause intense nausea, tardive dyskinesia, and other negative effects. Carbidopa is a drug that reduces the amount of L-dopa required to have the desired effect by 75%, so it is a significant improvement in the treatment of Parkinson's disease.

Sinemet is a medication that is a combination of L-dopa and carbidopa, and has been approved for use since 1991. The fact that there has been no significant advancement in the treatment of Parkinson's in the last 15 years is very telling. The fact that young people, like Fox (ouch, I see 45 as being young!), are willing to live with these adverse effects - that their lives are better with these constant motions, nausea and vomiting is horrifying.

It is vital that every possible option for research is funded by the federal government, since the vast majority of medical advances have been made by federally-funded research. Expecting the private sector to bleed money for more than a decade is delusional. Medical research is by its very nature a slow and cautions activity. Rushing a treatment to market in order to maximize profitability can be disastrous. The Viagra debacle is proof of that concept - the only reason it remains on the market is that there is a very large portion of the population that is willing to risk death in order to prove that they can still "do what comes naturally". Can you imagine if a drug to treat ADD killed several children after it was rushed to market? I can picture the mobs with torches and pitchforks storming the gates of the drug manufacturers.

Sunday, October 22, 2006

We Never Learn, Do We?


This is such a powerful argument against dogmatism as I have seen. A reader at Andrew Sullivan states:
Your comments about the necessity to recognize doubt reminded me of the most profound moment I ever witnessed on television, namely, the final episode of a series called "The Ascent of Man", which aired in the early 70's. You may of course be well versed in this already, and forgive me if you do, but briefly, the narrator (Dr. Jacob Bronowski) contrasted the certainty of Nazism with the contemporaneous Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.

Standing in a swamp behind one of the Nazi death camps, Dr. Bronowski bent forward, and ran his hands through the muck of this swamp that contained the bodily remains of some of his family, while trying to explain the consequences of ideological certainty. I cannot think or tell of this without tears, and yet we seem never to learn these lessons.
We still haven't learned.

Thursday, October 19, 2006

We Are All Conservatives...

Andrew Sullivan writes a piece of prose that is worthy of poetry in his book, The Conservative Soul:
All conservatism begins with loss.

If we never knew loss, we would never feel the need to conserve, which is the essence of any conservatism. Our lives, a series of unconnected moments of experience, would simply move effortlessly on, leaving the past behind with barely a look back. But being human, being self-conscious, having memory, forces us to confront what has gone and what might have been. And in those moments of confrontation with time, we are all conservatives...

The regret you feel in your life at the kindness not done, the person unthanked, the opportunity missed, the custom unobserved, is a form of conservatism. The same goes for the lost love or the missed opportunity: these experiences teach us the fragility of the moment, and that fragility is what, in part, defines us...

Human beings live by narrative; and we get saddened when a familiar character disappears from a soap opera; or an acquaintance moves; or an institution becomes unrecognizable from what it once was. These little griefs are what build a conservative temperament. They interrupt our story; and our story is what makes sense of our lives. So we resist the interruption; and when we resist it, we are conservatives.
True liberalism (ecological conservation; equal rights for all-women, children, latino, black, native American, GLBT, and so on; safety in workplace, home, streets, etc.; protection of our Constitution; etc.) is actually very conservative.

Keeping money in the pockets of the very rich, savaging our environment for profit, diminishing freedom of religion, abandoning the needy (children, elderly, disabled), starving scientists of funding for research that would improve the lives of multitudes of citizens around the world, invading the privacy of citizens' lives to ferret out personal medical decisions are all done by those who do not learn from history.

All the horrific abuses of the Gilded Age are being revisited in today's so-called conservatives. Fracturing the social structure that has been built over the last century is the goal for today's GOP. A return to the Have-Mores is not something of which to be proud. America's prosperity is tied in to the welfare of all citizens.

If we had universal health care, there would be less catastrophic illness due to early detection and treatment. Funding for medical research, including stem cell research in all it's forms, improves the understanding of and treatment for disease, leading to a healthier, more productive workforce.

Home care for the sick and elderly allows family members to enter the workforce, also leading to an increase in productivity. Increasing the access for disabled individuals allows them to add to the wealth of American workers. Imagine if an individual such as Stephen Hawking did not have access to equipment to allow for mobility and communication--how poverty-stricken we would be without his ability to add to the intellectual wealth of humanity.

Measures that decrease environmental destruction decrease contamination of water supplies and exposure to toxic substances. Everything that causes extinction of any species is a canary in the mineshaft-a warning of disasters to come for humanity. Katrina would not have been the massive disaster that it was had the wetlands been preserved, which would have contained the storm surge that turned New Orleans into a inland sea.

Liberalism is actually quite conservative.

Wednesday, October 18, 2006

Remember What I Said About Domestic Terrorism?

Jennifer Pozner at Newsday.com reports on the issue of domestic terrorism. Money quote:
On Sept. 11, 2006, the fifth anniversary of the terror attacks that devastated our nation, a man crashed his car into a building in Davenport, Iowa, hoping to blow it up and kill himself in the fire.

No national newspaper, magazine or network newscast reported this attempted suicide bombing, though an AP wire story was available. Cable news (save for MSNBC's Keith Olbermann) was silent about this latest act of terrorism in America.

Had the criminal, David McMenemy, been Arab or Muslim, this would have been headline news for weeks. But since his target was the Edgerton Women's Health Center, rather than, say, a bank or a police station, media have not called this terrorism - even after three decades of extreme violence by anti-abortion fanatics, mostly fundamentalist Christians who believe they're fighting a holy war.

Since 1977, casualties from this war include seven murders, 17 attempted murders, three kidnappings, 152 assaults, 305 completed or attempted bombings and arsons, 375 invasions, 482 stalking incidents, 380 death threats, 618 bomb threats, 100 acid attacks, and 1,254 acts of vandalism, according to the National Abortion Federation.
If any of these acts were committed by anyone even remotely resembling a Muslim, we would never have heard the end of it. Congress would have been reconvened to pass an emergency bill to authorise an immediate public execution, preferably in a medieval as-slow-as-possible-while-making-a-bloody-spectacle way.

Shown on every television and cable network, even Nickelodean.

Tuesday, October 17, 2006

Oh, This Is Too Funny

CommenterYour+Conscience on Think Progress has a hilarious aggregation of all the excuses for all the f^#$ups by right-wingers over the last six years. I just had to quote it in it's entirety:
It’s the liberals. It’s the ACLU. It’s Clinton. It’s Monica. It’s the “climate of permissiveness”. It’s France. It’s the liberal media. It’s Clinton’s p*nis. It’s Hillary. It’s Gov. Dean. We never could have known they’d fly planes into buildings. “No actionable intelligence”. They didn’t tell us to do anything. O’Neill’s lying. Clarke’s lying. General Shinseki’s lying. The Union of Concerned Scientists is lying. Our own weapons inspector David Kay’s lying. Wilson’s lying. John Dean’s lying. Newsweek lied! CBS lied! Everyone’s lying but us. We had to lie. We never lied.

Plame outed herself. Her husband outed her. The liberals outed her. No one outed her, since everyone already knew her covert identity. Rove had nothing to do with it. No comment. Lib’ral, lib’ral, lib’ral.

It’s the libs trying to pull Schiavo’s feeding tube. It doesn’t matter that DeLay pulled his own dad’s feeding tube. “Culture of life”. It’s Janet Jackson’s boobs; it’s the Statue of Justice’s boobs. Reading the news might cloud my judgement. It’s the “decade our government…blinded itself to our enemies”. It’s the homosexuals wanting to marry. “Restore honor and dignity to the White House”. A decision to go to war wasn’t a decision to go to war. “No actionable intelligence”. It’s the pledge of allegiance. They’re taking God out of America. Osama didn’t tell us when, how, where, and by what means he’d attack, and he didn’t leave a forwarding address. The 9/11 panel is biased against us. Saddam = Al Qaida. Saddam = Al Qaida.

Chalabi’s an honorable man and I believe everything he says about WMDs. Chalabi’s a crook and he passed secrets to Iran. Chalabi’s the liberals’ fault because they didn’t shoot us when we started using his “intelligence”. Chalabi? I don’t know any ‘Chalabi’!

It’s just a few dead-enders. They’ll be gone when we capture Saddam. They’ll be gone when we capture Saddam’s sons. They’ll be gone when we hand over “sovereignty”. They’ll be gone when Iraq has elections. They’ll be gone in 12 years. They’ll never be gone.

We fight them in London so we don’t have to fight them, er, uh, well, can’t get fooled again!

Bolton didn’t lie! He just knowingly gave incorrect answers under oath.

Aw, so what’s another ISLAMIC STATE in the mideast? It’s not like Bush has made it a home for terrorists or anything!

No one could have anticipated that a category 5 hurricane aimed directly at New Orleans would have destroyed it! No one could have anticipated that they might need federal assistance quickly! Of course no one’s in charge of accepting the generous aid offered by other nations — isn’t that the mayor’s responsibility? Being a judging supervisor for the Arabian Horse Association is ample experience to head FEMA! It’s the mayor’s fault! It’s the governor’s fault! It’s Howard Dean’s fault! It’s CBS’s fault! It’s the Monica Crime! Ted Kennedy killed Mary Jo! Libtards killed Terry Schiavo! Wah! Wahhhhhhh!

It’s all these former staffers hawking their books. Money never corrupted anyone. “I’m a uniter, not a divider!” It’s the stem cells. It’s the feminazis, the intellectual elitists, and the ecoterrorists.

It’s Cthulhu. It’s the martians.

It’s anyone but Bush.
This is as complete a list as I have ever seen.

The Republicans were supposed to be the grownups, unlike the Democrats who were all into their "feelings" and wanted an "if it feels good, do it", amoral, licentious society. They were all about integrity. They were all about fiscal responsibility.

I have always been a social liberal and a fiscal conservative. I know that it is not seen to be fiscally conservative to support universal health care, but as an ICU nurse, I have seen the incredibly expensive medical care that could have been avoided if the patient had had access to early detection and early intervention to treat disease. I have known uncountable examples of situations where the patient could not afford to see a physician because they could not afford health insurance and they finally had to go to the ER because they could not breathe (Hodgkin's lymphoma, lung cancer, etc.) or any other catastrophic medical event.

ICU and ER care is incredibly expensive and a visit to a Nurse Practitioner who can prescribe a round of antibiotics for pneumonia, which would be paid for (with a small copay) by universal health insurance would be exponentially cheaper.

The insurance industry is incredibly corrupt. My credit is ruined because my own employer (the hospital where I worked) sued me for charges incurred at that hospital which should have been covered by the very insurance which they administered. I am being punished for their refusal to shoulder their responsibilities.

The Republican-led Congress has been spending money like Imelda Markos in a shoe store, but it has gone to corrupt enterprises such as KBR's contract to give clean water to our troops, which was found to be just as contaminated as the water in the Tigris River.

With the way the Republicans have been behaving, I have come to the conclusion that I would rather vote for Karl Marx's corpse over anyone with an "R" behind their name until they can prove they can act like old-school Republicans.

Then, maybe I'll vote for them.

Maybe, but not bloody likely.

Monday, October 16, 2006

The Funniest News I've Ever Heard Out Of Afghanistan!

Canadian soldiers bring a new high-oops, I mean meaning-to the term "smoking out the enemy". They encountered Taliban forces hiding out in a 10-foot-tall marajuana forest.

The problem? When they set fire to the forest, Canadian soldiers downwind from the "firefight" suffered "negative effects".

According to one unfortunate soldier, "Sir, three years ago before I joined the army, I never thought I'd say 'That damn marijuana'."

Bwaaaahhhhh, haaaaaaaa haaaaaaaaa!

This provided some much needed comic relief!

It Is Not Bill Clinton's Fault

Bill Clinton was not the president when:
  • North Korea violated the Agreed Framework negotiated by multilateral talks.

  • We blew through a $284 billion surplus into an average ANNUAL deficit in excess of $300 billion.

  • We invaded a sovereign country for the first time in the history of this country, one which was NOT a threat to this country.

  • The administration ignored multiple PDB's about al Qaeda and/or bin Laden determined to attack the US.

  • The US became nearly universally reviled due to arrogant international behavior.

  • New Orleans was reduced from a vibrant city into a photocopy of a third-world country and we were no longer confident that FEMA would always be there in the case of natural disaster.

  • Our military was reduced from being the best in the world to a stretched-out shadow of it's former glory and was not sent into battle on any front without the proper equipment.
  • It is not Bill Clinton's fault.

    Friday, October 13, 2006

    About That NorK Nuke...


    Jeffrey Lewis has an interesting post on defensetech.org about North Korea's nuke test this week:
    I -- Jeffrey Lewis, crossposting from Arms Control Wonk -- love the US Geological Survey.

    They've published lat/long (41.294 N, 129.134 E) and Mb estimates (4.2) for the North Korean test.

    There is lots of data floating around: The CTBTO called it 4.0; The South Koreans report 3.58-3.7.

    You're thinking, 3.6, 4.2, in that neighborhood. Seismic scales, like the Richter, are logarithmic, so that neighborhood can be pretty big.

    But even at 4.2, the test was probablya dud.

    Estimating the yield is tricky business, because it depends on the geology of the test site. The South Koreans called the yield half a kiloton (550 tons), which is more or less -- a factor of two -- consistent with the relationship for tests in that yield range at the Soviet Shagan test site:

    Mb = 4.262 + .973LogW

    Where Mb is the magnitude of the body wave, and W is the yield.

    3.58-3.7 gives you a couple hundred tons (not kilotons), which is pretty close in this business unless you're really math positive. The same equation, given the US estimate of 4.2, yields (pun intended) around a kiloton.

    A plutonium device should produce a yield in the range of the 20 kilotons, like the one we dropped on Nagasaki. No one has ever dudded their first test of a simple fission device. North Korean nuclear scientists are now officially the worst ever.
    More evidence that the NorK nuke test was a dud.

    photo from defensetech.org

    Talking To the Shrub


    This is an amazing ad: simple yet very effective. It is done by Jimmy Siegel, a Madison Avenue ad exec who is looked down upon by political admakers. I think it is because they fear that their jobs are threatened by someone this good.

    Wednesday, October 11, 2006

    Ah, the fabulous Mark Shea!

    Catholics are committed to following the Church's teachings in our lives. How does this sync with allowing torture? Mark Shea has the answer in spades:
    My concern, in writing the "Toying with Evil" piece was to say that, for Catholics, it is forbidden to do evil that good may come of it. This elementary moral teaching is what undergirds Paul's thinking in Romans 3:8 and it remains an elementary teaching today. And that means, when the Church says "X is intrinsically immoral" our job as Catholics is to see that we bloody well do not make excuses for X.

    In short, when the Church says "This is evil" the mind docile to the Church's teaching says, "Okay, how do I avoid that evil?" The mind looking for legalistic loopholes and a Minimum Daily Adult Requirement standard of obedience says, "Okay, then how do I tiptoe right up to the line of doing evil, but not step over it? How do I figure out a way to say the Church isn't really saying what it is obviously saying?" It is a question asked by randy teenagers, children trying to steal from cookie jars, and people attempting to figure out just how much suffering they can inflict on somebody before it technically is called torture, or people trying to figure out a way to prove that the Church can't really have said that torture is intrinsically immoral. It is not a question asked by people who are want to know "How do we treat our prisoner justly and humanely?"

    That there are people who are clearly attempting to avoid the obvious teaching of the Church about the intrinsical immorality of torture is, I think, beyond dispute. The Coalition for Fog distinguishes itself in this way, when it declares that reading Veritatis Splendor as a condemnation of the intrinsic immorality of torture is "fundamentalist proof texting". Clearly, the goal of such rhetoric is to say that the Magisterium does not teach what it does, in fact, teach. It's as believable as Daniel Maguire's attempts to square the circle of the Church's condemnation of abortion with his pro-choice zealotry--and as contemptible. At the end of the day, the Coalition for Fog is trying, by hook or by crook, to tell us that we can ignore Veritatis Splendor when it declares that physical and mental torture are, like rape and abortion, acts for which there can never be any justification. That's what "intrinsically immoral" means, and that's what Veritatis Splendor says. I do not think the members of the Coalition for Fog are fools, therefore I have to conclude they are dishonest in trying to pretend VS does not say this, and that they cover up their dishonesty with name-calling about fundamentalist proof-texting.

    One issue that comes up is, of course, the inconsistency between the Church's past behavior and her present teaching. As has been shown elsewhere, this is a fruitless approach, because the Church is not protected by infallibility in her juridical acts. She is only protected by infallibility in her teaching.

    "Ah HA!" someone will reply, "But Veritatis Splendor does not *infallibly* define torture as intrinsically immoral." And that would really matter--to a Minimum Daily Adult Requirement Catholic whose sole question when approaching the Church for guidance is, "Just tell me what the infallible stuff is and screw all the rest of it." However, for Catholics serious about obeying the Church, that is not the question. The question is, "What does the Magisterium teach and how do I best obey it?" To Catholics like that, it is sufficient that the Church says "Torture is intrinsically immoral" for them to agree that torture is intrinsically immoral and not rush off looking for excuses, loopholes, apparent contradictions--anything so they can ignore the Church's teaching and ridicule those who take it at face value as "fundamentalist proof-texters".

    Generally, what undergirds this quest for loopholes, excuses, and contradictions are two streams of thought. One is the Traditionalist stream which regards whatever is old as automatically more valid and which therefore regards recent developments as modernistic, squishy, and dubiously Catholic. I think Fr. Harrison's argument essentially turns on this and is motivated more by an aversion to the Council and to John Paul's teaching than to a zeal for excusing American policy. As he puts it, "the Catholic “tradition” against torture only goes back to, well, yesterday." Older is better. If the Church of the Middle Ages tortured, then it's good enough for me, etc. Of course, the answer to all that argument by the clock is "So?" There was a time when the Church's condemnation of Arius only went back to yesterday too. Indeed, there was a time when it was heretical to refer to the Son as "homoousious" (one in being) with the Father. Protestants argue every day that the Assumption is likewise false since the definition only goes back to yesterday. Arguments like "this is recent" are completely worthless for establishing whether a development is valid or not. That's what Popes are for. And our most recent Pope has clearly taught that torture is intrinsically immoral.
    I can't add to perfection.

    First-Person News From Iraq

    I must apologize to the anonymous Marine who penned this email, but I feel I need to quote it in it's entirety:
    All: I haven't written very much from Iraq. There's really not much to write about. More exactly, there's not much I can write about because practically everything I do, read or hear is classified military information or is depressing to the point that I'd rather just forget about it, never mind write about it. The gaps in between all of that are filled with the pure tedium of daily life in an armed camp. So it's a bit of a struggle to think of anything to put into a letter that's worth reading. Worse, this place just consumes you. I work 18-20-hour days, every day. The quest to draw a clear picture of what the insurgents are up to never ends. Problems and frictions crop up faster than solutions. Every challenge demands a response. It's like this every day. Before I know it, I can't see straight, because it's 0400 and I've been at work for twenty hours straight, somehow missing dinner again in the process. And once again I haven't written to anyone. It starts all over again four hours later. It's not really like Ground Hog Day, it's more like a level from Dante's Inferno.

    Rather than attempting to sum up the last seven months, I figured I'd just hit the record setting highlights of 2006 in Iraq. These are among the events and experiences I'll remember best.

    Worst Case of Déjà Vu - I thought I was familiar with the feeling of déjà vu until I arrived back here in Fallujah in February. The moment I stepped off of the helicopter, just as dawn broke, and saw the camp just as I had left it ten months before - that was déjà vu. Kind of unnerving. It was as if I had never left. Same work area, same busted desk, same chair, same computer, same room, same creaky rack, same . . . everything. Same everything for the next year. It was like entering a parallel universe. Home wasn't 10,000 miles away, it was a different lifetime.

    Most Surreal Moment - Watching Marines arrive at my detention facility and unload a truck load of flex-cuffed midgets. 26 to be exact. I had put the word out earlier in the day to the Marines in Fallujah that we were looking for Bad Guy X, who was described as a midget. Little did I know that Fallujah was home to a small community of midgets, who banded together for support since they were considered as social outcasts. The Marines were anxious to get back to the midget colony to bring in the rest of the midget suspects, but I called off the search, figuring Bad Guy X was long gone on his short legs after seeing his companions rounded up by the giant infidels.

    Most Profound Man in Iraq - an unidentified farmer in a fairly remote area who, after being asked by Reconnaissance Marines (searching for Syrians) if he had seen any foreign fighters in the area replied "Yes, you."

    Worst City in al-Anbar Province - Ramadi, hands down. The provincial capital of 400,000 people. Killed over 1,000 insurgents in there since we arrived in February. Every day is a nasty gun battle. They blast us with giant bombs in the road, snipers, mortars and small arms. We blast them with tanks, attack helicopters, artillery, our snipers (much better than theirs), and every weapon that an infantryman can carry. Every day. Incredibly, I rarely see Ramadi in the news. We have as many attacks out here in the west as Baghdad. Yet, Baghdad has 7 million people, we have just 1.2 million. Per capita, al-Anbar province is the most violent place in Iraq by several orders of magnitude. I suppose it was no accident that the Marines were assigned this area in 2003.

    Bravest Guy in al-Anbar Province - Any Explosive Ordnance Disposal Technician (EOD Tech). How'd you like a job that required you to defuse bombs in a hole in the middle of the road that very likely are booby-trapped or connected by wire to a bad guy who's just waiting for you to get close to the bomb before he clicks the detonator? Every day. Sanitation workers in New York City get paid more than these guys. Talk about courage and commitment.

    Second Bravest Guy in al-Anbar Province - It's a 20,000 way tie among all the Marines and Soldiers who venture out on the highways and through the towns of al-Anbar every day, not knowing if it will be their last - and for a couple of them, it will be.

    Best Piece of U.S. Gear - new, bullet-proof flak jackets. O.K., they weigh 40 lbs and aren't exactly comfortable in 120 degree heat, but they've saved countless lives out here.

    Best Piece of Bad Guy Gear - Armor Piercing ammunition that goes right through the new flak jackets and the Marines inside them.

    Worst E-Mail Message - "The Walking Blood Bank is Activated. We need blood type A+ stat." I always head down to the surgical unit as soon as I get these messages, but I never give blood - there's always about 80 Marines in line, night or day.

    Biggest Surprise - Iraqi Police. All local guys. I never figured that we'd get a police force established in the cities in al-Anbar. I estimated that insurgents would kill the first few, scaring off the rest. Well, insurgents did kill the first few, but the cops kept on coming. The insurgents continue to target the police, killing them in their homes and on the streets, but the cops won't give up. Absolutely incredible tenacity. The insurgents know that the police are far better at finding them than we are. - and they are finding them. Now, if we could just get them out of the habit of beating prisoners to a pulp .. . .

    Greatest Vindication - Stocking up on outrageous quantities of Diet Coke from the chow hall in spite of the derision from my men on such hoarding, then having a 122mm rocket blast apart the giant shipping container that held all of the soda for the chow hall. Yep, you can't buy experience.

    Biggest Mystery - How some people can gain weight out here. I'm down to 165 lbs. Who has time to eat?

    Second Biggest Mystery - if there's no atheists in foxholes, then why aren't there more people at Mass every Sunday?

    Favorite Iraqi TV Show - Oprah. I have no idea. They all have satellite TV.

    Coolest Insurgent Act - Stealing almost $7 million from the main bank in Ramadi in broad daylight, then, upon exiting, waving to the Marines in the combat outpost right next to the bank, who had no clue of what was going on. The Marines waved back. Too cool.

    Most Memorable Scene - In the middle of the night, on a dusty airfield, watching the better part of a battalion of Marines packed up and ready to go home after six months in al-Anbar, the relief etched in their young faces even in the moonlight. Then watching these same Marines exchange glances with a similar number of grunts loaded down with gear file past - their replacements. Nothing was said. Nothing needed to be said.

    Highest Unit Re-enlistment Rate - Any outfit that has been in Iraq recently. All the danger, all the hardship, all the time away from home, all the horror, all the frustrations with the fight here - all are outweighed by the desire for young men to be part of a 'Band of Brothers' who will die for one another. They found what they were looking for when they enlisted out of high school. Man for man, they now have more combat experience than any Marines in the history of our Corps.

    Most Surprising Thing I Don't Miss - Beer. Perhaps being half-stunned by lack of sleep makes up for it.

    Worst Smell - Porta-johns in 120 degree heat - and that's 120 degrees outside of the porta-john.

    Highest Temperature - I don't know exactly, but it was in the porta-johns. Needed to re-hydrate after each trip to the loo.

    Biggest Hassle - High-ranking visitors. More disruptive to work than a rocket attack. VIPs demand briefs and "battlefield" tours (we take them to quiet sections of Fallujah, which is plenty scary for them). Our briefs and commentary seem to have no affect on their preconceived notions of what's going on in Iraq. Their trips allow them to say that they've been to Fallujah, which gives them an unfortunate degree of credibility in perpetuating their fantasies about the insurgency here.

    Biggest Outrage - Practically anything said by talking heads on TV about the war in Iraq, not that I get to watch much TV. Their thoughts are consistently both grossly simplistic and politically slanted. Biggest offender - Bill O'Reilly - what a buffoon.

    Best Intel Work - Finding Jill Carroll's kidnappers - all of them. I was mighty proud of my guys that day. I figured we'd all get the Christian Science Monitor for free after this, but none have showed up yet. Talk about ingratitude.

    Saddest Moment - Having the battalion commander from 1st Battalion, 1st Marines hand me the dog tags of one of my Marines who had just been killed while on a mission with his unit. Hit by a 60mm mortar. Cpl Bachar was a great Marine. I felt crushed for a long time afterward. His picture now hangs at the entrance to the Intelligence Section. We'll carry it home with us when we leave in February.

    Biggest Ass-Chewing - 10 July immediately following a visit by the Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister, Dr. Zobai. The Deputy Prime Minister brought along an American security contractor (read mercenary), who told my Commanding General that he was there to act as a mediator between us and the Bad Guys. I immediately told him what I thought of him and his asinine ideas in terms that made clear my disgust and which, unfortunately, are unrepeatable here. I thought my boss was going to have a heart attack. Fortunately, the translator couldn't figure out the best Arabic words to convey my meaning for the Deputy Prime Minister. Later, the boss had no difficulty in convening his meaning to me in English regarding my Irish temper, even though he agreed with me. At least the guy from the State Department thought it was hilarious. We never saw the mercenary again.

    Best Chuck Norris Moment - 13 May. Bad Guys arrived at the government center in the small town of Kubaysah to kidnap the town mayor, since they have a problem with any form of government that does not include regular beheadings and women wearing burqahs. There were seven of them. As they brought the mayor out to put him in a pick-up truck to take him off to be beheaded (on video, as usual), one of the bad Guys put down his machinegun so that he could tie the mayor's hands. The mayor took the opportunity to pick up the machinegun and drill five of the Bad Guys. The other two ran away. One of the dead Bad Guys was on our top twenty wanted list. Like they say, you can't fight City Hall.

    Worst Sound - That crack-boom off in the distance that means an IED or mine just went off. You just wonder who got it, hoping that it was a near miss rather than a direct hit. Hear it every day.

    Second Worst Sound - Our artillery firing without warning. The howitzers are pretty close to where I work. Believe me, outgoing sounds a lot like incoming when our guns are firing right over our heads. They'd about knock the fillings out of your teeth.

    Only Thing Better in Iraq Than in the U.S. - Sunsets. Spectacular. It's from all the dust in the air.

    Proudest Moment - It's a tie every day, watching my Marines produce phenomenal intelligence products that go pretty far in teasing apart Bad Guy operations in al-Anbar. Every night Marines and Soldiers are kicking in doors and grabbing Bad Guys based on intelligence developed by my guys. We rarely lose a Marine during these raids, they are so well-informed of the objective. A bunch of kids right out of high school shouldn't be able to work so well, but they do.

    Happiest Moment - Well, it wasn't in Iraq. There are no truly happy moments here. It was back in California when I was able to hold my family again while home on leave during July.

    Most Common Thought - Home. Always thinking of home, of Kathleen and the kids. Wondering how everyone else is getting along. Regretting that I don't write more. Yep, always thinking of home.

    I hope you all are doing well. If you want to do something for me, kiss a cop, flush a toilet, and drink a beer. I'll try to write again before too long - I promise.

    Semper Fi,
    God bless you and all your fellow soldiers, may you stay safe until we can get you all home--we are trying to do it as fast as we can.

    Monday, October 09, 2006

    The Legacy of Nurenberg

    Poster scribe on TalkLeft said something very profound:
    For those who were disputing over why the Administration took some revenge on Commander Swift, by forcing him from the service, the following quote is revelatory :

    These [the Admin's] lawyers adopted a mantra, namely, to quote Alberto Gonzales, that the Geneva Conventions were "quaint" and "obsolete," and did not apply to a "new kind of warfare." In so doing, they thoughtlessly moved in the same paths traversed by lawyers in Berlin sixty years earlier. Indeed, at the General Staff trial, the world public learned for the first time of the valiant struggle of Moltke when one of his memoranda was put into evidence. It pleaded in forceful terms for respect of the Geneva Convention rights of enemy soldiers, civilians and irregular combatants on the East Front, mustering a series of arguments that bear remarkable similarity to a memorandum sent by Colin Powell to President Bush sixty years later. And in the margins, in the unmistakeable pencil scrawl of Field Marshall Keitel, were found the words "quaint" and "obsolete." This was cited as an aggravating factor justifying a sentence of the death against Keitel.

    The Bush Administration apparently assumed that the court system would toe the political line they had drawn. It was clearly taken by surprise when the Supreme Court, in Hamdan, knocked the legal props out from under the Administration's detainee policy, validating the positions taken by the senior legal officers of the nation's uniformed military services and the State Department, which had opposed the Administration on this grounds.

    So, when Justice Kennedy mentioned the Geneva Conventions and the War Crimes Act in his Hamdan concurrence, he was (as I and others noted at the time) making a pointed reference and warning to the Administration. His warning was that the policy they chose (not created - the Nazis had done that, and the Repugs were merely following their footsteps) was taking them down a course to where these members of the Admin would, some day, place their lives on the line for their actions.

    It's just that simple - because Commander Swift had the courage - moral and physical - to take on his case and defend his client, he's shown the Admin not only to have no clothes, but to be in truth a criminal enterprise. And that, to these folks, is intolerable.

    For standing up for the principles of law, Moltke was murdered by the Nazis. For standing up for the principles and letter of the law, Swift's career was murdered, no less surely, by the Admin. And Haynes, Bybee and others, wrongdoers all, were rewarded.

    This also puts more context to the browbeating Haynes gave to the heads of the various services' JAG Corps, demanding they sign on to supporting the Torture Bill and locking them in a room until they did. Like in a criminal gang, where one has no standing until as an initiation the gang members hand one a gun and point out a target. Kill the target, become a member of the gang through complicity in the crime. Refuse to kill the target, the gang kills you.

    That is what passes for a governmental administration today - the morals and ethics of a street gang or, as John Dean has noted, La Cosa Nostra. A fine pass we've come to, and, I worry, there is yet worse to come.
    I think the reference to La Cosa Nostra is very apt. This administration acts just like a crime family straight out of "The Godfather" or "The Sopranos". If you don't do their bidding, they threaten your livelihood, then they threaten your life. If you don't think that lives have been threatened, then you have your head in the sand. Troops who question the status quo are sent into "killing zones" where there is very high troop mortality ratios. Emails sent immediately prior to a soldier's death state very clearly that this had occurred.

    At least La Cosa Nostra had a code of ethics, unlike criminal gangs these days.

    Friday, October 06, 2006

    I Seem To Be On A Dance Kick!


    I remember this to be one of the highlights of this season's So You Think You Can Dance. It was what this show is all about-growth as an artist.

    I have to say that I didn't give Ivan a snowball's chance of seeing the last few weeks of the show, but this dance proved me wrong. He grew so much over the weeks that I see a long career ahead of him.

    Historical Lessons on Waterboarding

    Last week I had a conversation (if you could call it that) with a staffer for Jim Talent about the TINtAW and the history of it's use against Americans. I doubt that I will get anything but a form letter in response. She couldn't possibly have noted the details of my complaints, as there was no sound of keyboarding and there were no breaks in the conversation.

    I called to remind Jim Talent that:
    in 1947, the United States charged a Japanese officer, Yukio Asano, with war crimes for carrying out another form of waterboarding on a U.S. civilian. The subject was strapped on a stretcher that was tilted so that his feet were in the air and head near the floor, and small amounts of water were poured over his face, leaving him gasping for air until he agreed to talk.

    "Asano was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor," Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) told his colleagues last Thursday during the debate on military commissions legislation. "We punished people with 15 years of hard labor when waterboarding was used against Americans in World War II," he said.

    I suppose that waterboarding is a war crime when other nations use it, but is ok if Americans do it.

    What a typical "America can do no wrong" attitude. I will probably be labeled an "America-hater" for saying that, but what is more patriotic than loving your country so much that you want to live up to the ideals that the Founding Fathers enshrined into the document that defines America.

    Thursday, October 05, 2006

    The Argentine Tango



    This is an amazing dance--I wish that I had an ounce of their talent.

    The Human Joystick!

    Today is the 3rd anniversary of this amazing return by the one, the only Human Joystick Dante Hall!



    A thing of beauty!

    More Reasons To Love Juan Cole

    I love reading Juan Cole for his profound, intellectual analyses of Middle East politics and policy. His insights into the culture, history, and religion of the Arab states are impeccable, but I had not fully appreciated Professor Cole's fine sense of snark.

    His post today was a thing of beauty:
    That item started me thinking of other things that the Republican Party could spend $20 million of the taxpayers' money to celebrate.

    10. Stopping weapons of mass destruction programs that aren't even there!

    Read it all--it is a much-needed break from the bleak news from the Middle East.

    Wednesday, October 04, 2006

    Oh My F#@^$%g Jesus Lord...



    I was horrified as I watched this. It is bad enough to read about waterboarding, but watching it (as one might expect) was infinitely more terrifying.

    Everyone who voted for the TINtAW Act needs to watch this every hour until they beg for mercy.

    Then, I might just make them see it for the rest of their natural lives.

    Now that's torture.

    Tuesday, October 03, 2006

    What About Domestic Terrorism?

    In all this terrorism debate, there is one question that I want the Right-Wing Insane Asylum Inmates to answer--what are you willing to do to domestic terrorists?

    There are many, many instances of domestic terrorism by right-wing supposedly pro-life ideologues. Ob-Gyn physicians are murdered, their houses burned down, abortion clinics are bombed (sometimes without warning during regular hours when there are people in the clinics), etc. These supposed pro-lifers are part of the right's base, and they are never prosecuted as terrorists.

    It's enough to make you say, "Hmmmmm...."

    Monday, October 02, 2006

    I haven't posted in a while because I have been so angry over the Torture Is Now the American Way bill, but I have been heartened by the fact that the ACLU has pre-emptivly filed a lawsuit on behalf of 20 Guantanimo detainees (POW's) against the federal gov't, challanging the constitutionality of the TINtAWtm.

    The funny thing is that the Republicans will probably say that it is too late to file a lawsuit as if the bill had already become law and the Supreme Court had upheld the law already, even though the bill has not even been signed into law yet. I don't think the Bush Crime Is Our Middle Nametm administration can even claim they can predate his signature on a bill.

    There is hope yet for this country.

    Courage!

    Friday, September 29, 2006

    The Angels Are Weeping...


    i walked thru hell and burned my soul.
    ashes falling from my hands.
    part of me lost forever.
    grieving,
    i found the others,
    burnt and charred like me.
    holding on to each other,
    i knew -
    even hell had a silver lining.

    Terri St. Cloud
    I can't speak, I mourn so for our country, which has been sold down the river by corrupt individuals who value power over principle and money over self-respect.

    The only thing that comforts me is that they will have to face the ultimate reckoning before He who is immune to spin. His rulebook is simple: love one another. You do not torture the ones you love.

    Period.

    Thursday, September 28, 2006

    Slavery and Gitmo

    I believe that it is well-established by now that most of the detainees in Gitmo were actually rounded up from rival tribes in Afghanistan, Pakistan, etc., for a cash bounty from the United States.

    Detainee--such a nice euphemism. In the 18th and 19th centuries, men and women were rounded up from rival tribes for a bounty, which started out as trinkets such as beads and ended up as guns and gold. Those men and women weren't called "detainees", they were called "slaves".

    "Slaves" were kept in chains unless they were in places where they could be monitored well enough that it was a fairly safe bet that they would not be able to run. A fenced-off and heavily guarded set of buildings worked quite well.

    They were subjected to beatings and rape and murder by their captors, for any "reasonable" offense, such as "fomenting rebellion". There was no recourse in court for these people, since they did not count as a full "person", they were only worth 3/5ths of a person, and as that only in the case of ascertaining how many Representatives to the United States House of Representatives the state in which they were enslaved would receive.

    The only way out for these "slaves" was through death, which only solidified their Christian faith that was forced upon them by their captors, as a way of decreasing the risk of running by reinforcing the concept that they would reap great rewards in the afterlife as a reward for their miserable existence on this earth. This is one of the reasons that Evangelical Christianity remains a very strong aspect of minority culture in this country. The hope that there has to be something better than this helps one endure this life with dignity and strength.

    The 13th Amendment to the Constitution abolished slavery in this country. "Detainees" who will never be brought to trial because of lack of evidence are, by definition, people who were sold to bounty hunters for cold, hard cash.

    Where I come from, that is the very definition of slavery.

    Wednesday, September 27, 2006

    Nuclear Winter in Iran?

    Matt Yglesias is scaring the living shit out of me:
    At this point, I think I need to bring up what one might call the Craziest Goddamn Thing I've Heard In a Long Time. This story came to me last week from an anonymous individual who I would say is in a position to know about such things. According to this person, the DOD has (naturally) been doing some analysis on airstrikes against Iran. The upshot of the analysis was that conventional bombardment would degrade the Iranian nuclear program by about 50 percent. By contrast, if the arsenal included small nuclear weapons, we could get up to about 80 percent destroying. In response to this, persons inside the Office of the Vice President took the view that we could use the nukes -- in other words, launch an unprovoked nuclear first strike against Iran -- and then simply deny that we'd done so. Detectable radiation in the area of the bombed sites would be attributed to the fact that they were, after all, nuclear facilities we'd just hit.
    This is a bad idea on so many fronts that it is difficult to imagine any administration that would even be thinking this, let alone considering seriously--except for this one.

    Suicidal ideation is considered a plus for this crew. WHAT ARE THEY THINKING?!?!?!?!?!?!? Sorry about the shouting, but our government is on the brink of throwing the third nuclear attack the world has ever seen--the first two one were enough for sane people to understand that there should never be another one. Ever.

    Ever.

    Torture and Global Warming

    In all the discussions about torture and when (if at all) it is acceptable to renege on our commitments we made when we signed the Geneva Conventions, it is the fact that there is any discussion at all on this topic that is the most frightening thing of all.

    Specter's collapse (like clockwork) on the torture issue was so expected that it was rather anticlimactic in the end. What will it take to wake the right up to the danger? I don't know.

    Commenter Lee on Balloon Juice had an idea:
    Put it in these terms and it MIGHT scare the Party of Torture (it is a very catchy phrase).

    A Democrat is elected President (Gore, Hillary, whoever is scarier to them).

    They decide that global warming is the biggest threat to our national security.

    With this bill anyone driving a gas guzzler would then be “purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States”.

    Matter of fact you could press the agrument with driving a gas guzzler and international terrorism.
    I rather like the idea, but in reality, this sort of threat to the American Way of LifeTM will bring out the knuckle-draggers who feel the need to drive these monstrous vehicles when they really only need a Toyota Corolla (but that isn't butch enough).

    Tuesday, September 26, 2006

    Ethics and Politics in the Mass Media Age

    Jeff Greenfield starts this wonderful series of lectures from the CAPS Center for Ethics. It is very interesting stuff.

    Global Politics In 30 Seconds

    Funnier that heck!

    Help America Vote--Honestly



    This is critical in any representative form of government-that the citizens of the country can each have a voice in the election of their representatives. This is in grave danger now due to pressures upon election boards to switch to electronic voting methods, all of which are currently very dangerously prone to being hacked.

    It only takes less than 2 minutes to hack into a Diebold machine and change the votes from one candidate to another without leaving a trace.

    This has been demonstrated by Princeton University professor Ed Felton and two students (who look like they are about 14 years old!).



    Chilling.

    Monday, September 25, 2006

    Where Are The Grownups?

    Why can't we have a few more men like Richard E. Clarke and Bill Clinton? They both said, "I tried but I failed."



    Richard Clarke was even more the grownup when he looked into the eyes of 9/11 victims' loved ones and said, "I failed you." It was very powerful.

    Bubba was just as powerful, forceful and articulate in the face of a cowardly Faux News talking head's attempt to blindside him.



    It was so nice nice to have a president who could string together multiple articulate, coherent sentences off the cuff.

    848 days and counting....

    Too Disgusting For Words

    Disgraced (now that's an understatement) former lobbyist for the sex-and-gambling industry, Jack Abramoff, is helping to pull down yet another lawmaker. TPM Muckraker:
    In November of 1997, Rep. Ralph Hall (R-TX) publicly questioned the credibility of a teenage girl's claims that she'd been the victim of the sex trade in the Northern Mariana Islands. The statement, which Rep. Hall entered into the Congressional Record, was prepared by Jack Abramoff, the lobbyist for the islands.

    "[S]he wanted to do nude dancing," Hall's statement said of the fifteen-year-old girl. She had earlier told federal investigators that she'd been forced to work for a local nightclub in a nightly live sex show. You can read the entirety of Hall's statement here.

    Press accounts at the time detailed how the girl had been taken from her parents in the Phillippines, and forced to perform sex acts on stage and before video cameras at a Northern Marianas sex club. A 1998 Department of Labor report confirmed those reports.

    Hall's challenger in Texas' 4th District, history professor Glenn Melancon, has made the episode a campaign issue. "When investigators discovered child prostitution and forced abortions on the Mariana Islands, Congressman Ralph Hall was paid for covering it up and publicly attacking one of the raped children," read postcards his campaign distributed to voters.

    Hall has called the charge an "outright lie." His office did not respond to our request for comment on this story. But records show that Abramoff's staff contacted Hall's office fifteen times in the two months leading up to his statement in the Congressional Record.
    Nice.

    Your buddy Jacko wants you to slander a teenager who was kidnapped from her family in the Phillipines, taken to the Marianas Islands and forced to strip and perform sex acts on a stage and on videotape until she manages to escape and contact the Phillipino Consulate, and you happily comply.

    She has been given asylum in Hawaii, where I hope and pray she will find peace and happiness.

    Where's The Little Girls When You Need Them?

    When I was a little girl, my mother drove me nuts, trying to teach me to keep my voice low. As you can imagine, I drove her nuts with my shrill, little girl voice. Well, I may be all grown up now, but I still remember how to be shrill, and I don't need any practice at it. I can pick it up on a moment's notice.

    The Poor Man has it right:
    These folks are very, very bad people, and they are, in the deepest sense, unAmerican. Halfway between them and what sane people recognize as “common decency” is a very, very long way away from decent. They have deceived a great many Americans over the years, and so, by gaining control of the machinery of the State, made every one of us complicit in this evil, unAmerican bullshit. We pay for the torture, we pay for the pointless, unwinnable wars (although we don’t pay for the body armor - can’t make an omlette without breaking some eggs!), we pay to lose the rights generations of our ancestors (either actual or spiritual - there’s no difference) fought and died to enshrine and preserve - and we even pay them a fine little salary for the priviledge. What they have done cannot easily be undone, and they will never, ever get more than a tiny fraction of justice for it. Fuck them. Fuck them whether they are Democrats or Republicans, and fuck the liars and sycophants and cowardly pussies who insulate them from getting even a tiny taste of their just deserts. It’s awful, it’s unspeakably awful, and, actively or passively, we all participate.

    Only shrillness can save America now.
    I'm ready for it. Anyone else?

    This Man Is A Genius!



    Even the rednecks (self-titled) get it...

    This should be on everyone's lips...if Bill Clinton had such a loving following in the press as Bush has, what a wonderful country this would be.

    We certainly would not have gone to war against a nation that did not attack us or our allies first. We would have applied sanctions, which worked. Sanctions worked. They worked.

    Sunday, September 24, 2006

    Are We Safer?

    The NY Times quotes a National Intellegence Estimate report that says, rather than decrease terrorism, the war in Iraq has actually increased terror threats against the United States.
    The classified National Intelligence Estimate attributes a more direct role to the Iraq war in fueling radicalism than that presented either in recent White House documents or in a report released Wednesday by the House Intelligence Committee, according to several officials in Washington involved in preparing the assessment or who have read the final document.

    The intelligence estimate, completed in April, is the first formal appraisal of global terrorism by United States intelligence agencies since the Iraq war began, and represents a consensus view of the 16 disparate spy services inside government. Titled “Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States,’’ it asserts that Islamic radicalism, rather than being in retreat, has metastasized and spread across the globe.
    Number of American deaths in Iraq alone since this report was made in April? 374.

    In Iraq.

    Alone.

    Do you feel safer?

    Saturday, September 23, 2006

    2,974

    Such an ordinary-looking number.

    One larger than the total number of victims of 9/11.

    This is the number of American who have been killed in Afghanistan and Iraq.

    Friday, September 22, 2006

    On Voting Irregularities...

    2004 was a very distressing year for me. We had to sell our "dream house" that we built from our own plan. Selling a house is never easy, having to be ready to let perfect strangers come into your home and look in all the nooks and crannies is very upsetting to me, especially as I am not the world's best housekeeper and my menfolk are extremely reluctant to make a housekeeper's life easy.

    What does this have to do with voting? (I hear you cry!) We closed the day after the Presidential Election in November. I knew that there was going to be a problem when I arrived at the polls and the lines were very long (usually there are only a few people waiting to sign the books). There also seemed to be a lot of extra people milling around, carrying clipboards and clutching cell phones.

    When it was my turn to sign the books, much to my surprise, my name was marked through with the words "not able to vote" hand written in red ink. I asked why this was, and (after a conference with some of the clipboard-clutchers) was told that I didn't live in that district anymore, so I could not vote there.

    Well, I am no shrinking violet, so I created a bit of a scene. I believe that I used the specific term "disenfranchised". It seems that some of the clipboard-clutchers had been busy trolling the neighborhoods and looking for "Sold" signs on houses, then looking up the owners on the county tax rolls.

    It just seemed very fishy that I would be denied the right to vote just because of a real estate sign, but my DH (a registered Republican) did not have a mark through his name.

    Well, in order to vote, I had to go downtown, change my address and registry to the new Board of Elections and vote absentee. I could not vote on any of the local matters, just Federal and State.

    Fast forward to January... I get a call from the FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION. What did they want from me? They wanted to know why I had voted twice. WHAT??? They told me I voted both places. I was glad I embarrassed myself while making such a scene at the first polling place, since my presence and the activities while I was there were, shall we say, very memorable. I even had names of clipboard-clutchers to give the investigator.

    He seemed satisfied.

    Fast forward to May... I get a call from my local police department. Now what?!?!? You guessed it..."why did you vote twice?" Aarrgh! I went through the whole scenario, gave the same names I gave to the FBI guy, blah, blah, blah... I asked the police officer if he had a lot of this to deal with, and he said, "Yeah, I guess a lot of people voted for Kerry." I couldn't help but blurt out, "How do you know who these people voted for?" He got quiet after that.

    I'm glad I don't have so much as an outstanding parking ticket, or this would be a true nightmare, instead of a massive nuisance and a chilling hint into how other voters were being intimidated. If I weren't so bleepin' stubborn, I would have given up. How many people did give up, I wonder...

    Thursday, September 21, 2006

    Moral Bankruptcy

    I thought that the me-me-me, go-go '80's would represent the low point in our cultural morality. The selfish consumption of the time, which was in itself a reaction to "protest overload" left over from the 1970's, was a mere blip on the graph of amoral behavior.

    We have now pegged the machine. I cannot believe that we are living in a country that was founded in a massive protest against immoral government, whose very defining document proscribes torture, imprisionment without a chance to see the evidence against the imprisioned, etc.

    The reason given, "Everything changed after 9/11." Well, it did, indeed. Our Founding Fathers, those who pushed the frontiers of this country to the Pacific Ocean, all faced daily risk of terrorists (Redcoats, Native American warriors, other settlers, brigands, etc.). They did not forsake the Constitution or say that everything changed after "_" (fill in the blank). They had just as much (or more) reason than we did after 9/11.

    There is NO excuse for us to even hint that we will retroactively absolve criminals who broke the War Crimes Act. War Criminals WILL be brought to justice. Please make it be Americans who bring our own leaders to the Hague, not others.

    Wednesday, September 20, 2006

    Can You Say, "Cognitive Dissonance?"

    This goes beyond satire.

    Michelle "Kill All Brown Skinned People (Except Me, Of Course! I'm Not Really Brown!)" Malkin has gotten her knickers in a knot over three man who were convicted of masterminding the deaths of 200 Muslims in interfaith clashes in 2000.

    The reason she so graciosly seeks to protect mass-murdering terrorists from their death sentences? They attend Mass! They are Catholic, and as such, they are part of "The Good GuysTM".

    The reason these terrorists should be freed, not executed for their heinous acts? There were doubts about the fairness of their trial! (Gasp!) Do you mean that they were imprisioned without the right of habeus corpus, not allowed to see the evidence against them and denied the right to confront their accusers? Perish the thought!

    This is something that would cause a normal person's head to explode, but not Malkin's. She has insurance against that particular catastrophe.

    Tuesday, September 19, 2006

    Keith Olbermann, En Fuego!

    Crooks and Liars has the video of KO's scathing commentary. It has the passion and the righteous anger of a glove slapped on the face of the Bush Administration. Rough transcript as follows:
    Finally tonight, a Special Comment about the Rose Garden news conference last Friday.

    The President of the United States owes this country an apology. It will not be offered, of course. He does not realize its necessity.

    There are now none around him who would tell him - or could. The last of them, it appears, was the very man whose letter provoked the President into the conduct, for which the apology is essential. An apology is this President’s only hope of regaining the slightest measure of confidence, of what has been, for nearly two years, a clear majority of his people.

    Not "confidence" in his policies nor in his designs nor even in something as narrowly focused as which vision of torture shall prevail — his, or that of the man who has sent him into apoplexy, Colin Powell. In a larger sense, the President needs to regain our confidence, that he has some basic understanding of what this country represents — of what it must maintain if we are to defeat not only terrorists, but if we are also to defeat what is ever more increasingly apparent, as an attempt to re-define the way we live here, and what we mean, when we say the word "freedom."

    Because it is evident now that, if not its architect, this President intends to be the contractor, for this narrowing of the definition of freedom. The President revealed this last Friday, as he fairly spat through his teeth, words of unrestrained fury…

    …directed at the man who was once the very symbol of his administration, who was once an ambassador from this administration to its critics, as he had once been an ambassador from the military to its critics. The former Secretary of State, Mr. Powell, had written, simply and candidly and without anger, that "the world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism."

    This President’s response included not merely what is apparently the Presidential equivalent of threatening to hold one’s breath, but — within — it contained one particularly chilling phrase. Mr. President, former Secretary of State Colin Powell says the world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism. If a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and former secretary of state feels this way, don’t you think that Americans and the rest of the world are beginning to wonder whether you’re following a flawed strategy? BUSH: If there’s any comparison between the compassion and decency of the American people and the terrorist tactics of extremists, it’s flawed logic. It’s just — I simply can’t accept that. It’s unacceptable to think that there’s any kind of comparison between the behavior of the United States of America and the action of Islamic extremists who kill innocent women and children to achieve an objective.

    Of course** it’s acceptable to think that there’s "any kind of comparison." And in this particular debate, it is not only acceptable, it is obviously necessary. Some will think that our actions at Abu Ghraib, or in Guantanamo, or in secret prisons in Eastern Europe, are all too comparable to the actions of the extremists. Some will think that there is no similarity, or, if there is one, it is to the slightest and most unavoidable of degrees.

    What all of us will agree on, is that we have the right — we have the duty — to think about the comparison. And, most importantly, that the other guy, whose opinion about this we cannot fathom, has exactly the same right as we do: to think — and say — what his mind and his heart and his conscience tell him, is right.

    All of us agree about that.

    Except, it seems, this President.

    With increasing rage, he and his administration have begun to tell us, we are not permitted to disagree with them, that we cannot be right. That Colin Powell cannot be right.And then there was that one, most awful phrase.

    In four simple words last Friday, the President brought into sharp focus what has been only vaguely clear these past five-and-a-half years - the way the terrain at night is perceptible only during an angry flash of lightning, and then, a second later, all again is dark.

    "It’s unacceptable to think…" he said. It is never unacceptable… to think.

    And when a President says thinking is unacceptable, even on one topic, even in the heat of the moment, even in the turning of a phrase extracted from its context… he takes us toward a new and fearful path — one heretofore the realm of science fiction authors and apocalyptic visionaries.

    That flash of lightning freezes at the distant horizon, and we can just make out a world in which authority can actually suggest it has become unacceptable to think. hus the lightning flash reveals not merely a President we have already seen, the one who believes he has a monopoly on current truth.

    It now shows us a President who has decided that of all our commanders-in-chief, ever… he, alone, has had the knowledge necessary to alter and re-shape our inalienable rights. This is a frightening, and a dangerous, delusion, Mr. President.

    If Mr. Powell’s letter - cautionary, concerned, predominantly supportive — can induce from you such wrath and such intolerance — what would you say were this statement to be shouted to you by a reporter, or written to you by a colleague?

    "Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government…"

    Those incendiary thoughts came, of course, from a prior holder of your job, Mr. Bush. They were the words of Thomas Jefferson.

    He put them in the Declaration of Independence. Mr. Bush, what would you say to something that annti-thetical to the status quo just now? Would you call it "unacceptable" for Jefferson to think such things, or to write them?

    Between your confidence in your infallibility, sir, and your demonizing of dissent, and now these rages better suited to a thwarted three-year old, you have left the unnerving sense of a White House coming unglued - a chilling suspicion that perhaps we have not seen the peak of the anger; that we can no longer forecast what next will be said to, or about, anyone… who disagrees.

    Or what will next be done to them. On this newscast last Friday night, Constitiutional law Professor Jonathan Turley of George Washington University, suggested that at some point in the near future…some of the "detainees" transferred from secret CIA cells to Guantanamo, will finally get to tell the Red Cross that they have indeed been tortured.

    Thus the debate over the Geneva Conventions, might not be about further interrogations of detainees, but about those already conducted, and the possible liability of the administration, for them. That, certainly, could explain Mr. Bush’s fury.

    That, at this point, is speculative. But at least it provides an alternative possibility as to why the President’s words were at such variance from the entire history of this country. For, there needs to be some other explanation, Mr. Bush, than that you truly believe we should live in a United States of America in which a thought is unacceptable.

    There needs to be a delegation of responsible leaders — Republicans or otherwise — who can sit you down as Barry Goldwater and Hugh Scott once sat Richard Nixon down - and explain the **reality** of the situation you have created.

    There needs to be… an apology from the President of the United States.

    And more than one.

    But, Mr. Bush, the others — for warnings unheeded five years ago, for war unjustified four years ago, for battle unprepared three years ago — they are not weighted with the urgency and necessity of this one. We must know that, to you…thought with which you disagree — and even voice with which you disagree - and even action with which you disagree — are still sacrosanct to you.

    The philosopher Voltaire once insisted to another author, "I detest what you write, but I would give my life to make it possible for you to continue to write." Since the nation’s birth, Mr. Bush, we have misquoted and even embellished that statement, but we have served ourselves well, by subscribing to its essence.

    Oddly, there are other words of Voltaire’s that are more pertinent still, just now. "Think for yourselves," he wrote, "and let others enjoy the privilege to do so, too." Apologize, sir, for even hinting at an America where a few have that privilege to think — and the rest of us get yelled at by the President.

    Anything else, Mr. Bush, is truly… unacceptable.
    Anything else is truly unacceptable, but we must learn to live with the unacceptable because swine will rival the Blue Angels in their aerial acrobatics before any of us will get an apology from the Sociopath-in-Chief.

    Monday, September 18, 2006

    They've Already Won



    We need Denzel Washington to step in and stop Torture Boy Abu G, John Yoo, et al, before they can entrench their horrors into law.

    We need him now.

    "Democracy Is Not A Spectator Sport"

    Ron Donald was spot-on when he said this. Sometimes it needs a kickoff to get things really moving.



    Daily Kos' Markos Molitsas made a good point when he said, "If preaching to the choir is a bad thing, why do you even have churches?" The choir members interact with others in their communities, and that is where the message spreads.

    To use a religious metaphor, being a Catholic does not just entail the attendance at Mass--you must live your faith. You have to walk the walk.

    I am not afraid to live my politics. My faith and my politics inform my actions and spreads my beliefs out into the universe. What the universe does with them is not in my power, but I like to think that my little acts, done with great love (as the Blessed Mother Teresa taught) have echos, ripples that amplify and reach far beyond my little circle of influence.

    Sunday, September 17, 2006

    Educational TV?

    The events of the last two weeks regarding the influence of television brings up some very pertinent questions.

    What next? Jihad for Dummies? IRA training in throwing bombs?

    It seems like it is only a matter of time before we are training the next generation of terrorists right on broadcast television. These will be another generation of home-grown terrorists like Timothy McVeigh. They are the ones we should really fear, because they will give no warning and will be able to work among us without raising alarms.

    The best way to fight this kind of war is to return to our ideals. We need to stop stomping on every other country in the world, economically and socially. Helping other countries will only strengthen ours, but we must ensure that we don't act like 21st Century Robber Barons.

    We've spent the last century pulling ourselves out of the morass left by the Carnegie's, Vanderbilt's, etc. Let's not let my son's generation bear the full brunt of the poor decisions by our leaders today.

    I know I sound like my grandmother, who always told me I watched too much television, but there is a visceral power to the medium that requires the responsible use of that power. The networks have the right to show whatever programming they wish, within the laws of decency that are on the books, but with rights come responsibilities.

    This is the time that we all start to act like grownups. We need to clean house this November, soak the Capitol in bleach until the stench of corruption is gone and start over.

    Borat and "The Path to 9/11"

    You can't make this shit up:
    US President George Bush is to host White House talks on British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen.

    Cohen, 35, creator of Ali G, has infuriated the Kazakhstan government with his portrayal of Borat, a bumbling Kazakh TV presenter.

    And now a movie of Borat's adventures in the US has caused a diplomatic incident.

    The opening scene, which shows Borat lustily kissing his sister goodbye and setting off for America in a car pulled by a horse, had audiences in stitches when it was first shown last week.

    But the film, which has just premiered at the Toronto Film Festival, has prompted a swift reaction from the Kazakhstan government, which is launching a PR blitz in the States.

    Kazakhstan president Nursultan Nazarbayev is to fly to the US to meet President Bush in the coming weeks and on the agenda will be his country's image.

    President Nazarbayev has confirmed his government will buy "educational" TV spots and print advertisements about the "real Kazakhstan" in a bid to save the country's reputation before the film is released in the US in November.

    Yeah, that'll work.

    Just ask ABC and Scholastic Books about "educational" TV.

    Even Fox News Is Getting It...



    Two Princeton students (who each look about 14 years old), and a Princeton professor show how quickly and easily a Diebold machine can be hacked, leaving no trail.

    Even Fox News had these men on and they hacked the vote in less than 4 minutes.

    I think Fox is sensing a shift in the political winds, one that will absoulutely cry foul if there is a significant difference between exit polls and tallied votes. Historically, exit polls are fairly accurate harbingers of voting trends.

    This has changed in the Diebold, E,S&S era. Exit polls reflect precinct returns until, at the last minute, in the Republican candidate's home district, there will be a sudden surge of support--enough to win the election for the R candidate.

    This has happened time and again. There were -25,000,000 votes cast for Kerry in one district in Ohio in the 2004 election. There are not even 25 million citizens in that part of Ohio, let alone negative 25 million.

    How Kerry let this pass, I will never understand. Ohio would have given him the Presidency. What would this country be like if Torture Boy GWClusterfuck and his campadres (since he likes to pretend he's a good ole Texas cowboy) had been sent to that great brush-clearin' place in Hell. Otherwise known as East Texas.

    (Apologies to the worthy denizens of East Texas--you probably don't want them either.)

    Friday, September 15, 2006

    I Am Not Afraid




    Since when in this country have we let the opinions of others inform us as to how we should live our lives and govern ourselves?

    Since when have we kowtowed to fringe elements in foreign lands?

    Since when have we cowered in fear of boogymen and things that go bump in the night?

    Since when have we abrogated our responsibility to show the rest of the world the shining lights that are the ideals upon which this country was founded?

    Since when have we entered into a preemptive war, one not waged to protect ourselves or our allies, one that our allies have not requested our help to wage and win?

    Since when have we lost the moral obligations to those who stand on the wall, protecting us from enemies that threaten to change our way of life, our rights, our liberties, our method of governance?

    Since when have we waged a war that we are unwilling to send our sons and daughters, all of them, rich and poor and in the middle?

    Since when have we abrogated our responsibility to care of service men and women's families while they are deployed, when they return injured, both physically and mentally.

    Since when have we not taken care of the bereaved families of service men and women, allowing them to sink into poverty?

    Since when have we allowed whole cities, whole communities, whole swaths of our own country to be destroyed and left to rot, even a year later?

    I will not allow our country to sink into a sniveling, cowering shadow of what we once were.

    I will not allow the stupid, cowardly acts of a few, pusillanimous individuals to inform me as to how I should live.

    I will not allow my son to grow up, learning that it is OK to lie, to be influenced by liars, to become so inured to lies that he is convinced that it is morally acceptable to lie in order to show his actions in a favorable light.

    I will not allow whole swaths of my own country to rot and to enrich corrupt companies who profit obscenely, paid astronomical amounts of my money to do work that they never perform.

    Channelling Dylan Thomas, "I will NOT go quietly into the night, I will rage rage against the dying of the light!"

    We were once a shining light, a magnet for those who would risk everything, who wanted to live free or die.

    Our shine has tarnished, like silver that has not been cared for, polished regularly, used lovingly and frequently.

    Our form of government requires our citizens to care for it, as one cares for silver. Every one of us has the responsibility to use it, love it, polish it, remove the tarnish of corruption and self-interest. We have the chance to do this in November.

    It will take a lot of work to remove this taint, this boil on the ass of the body politic. It takes a lot of unpleasant tasks, ones that get one's hands dirty and requires hard work when the corrosion is extreme, but it is always worth it in the end.

    I am not afraid to get my hands dirty.

    I am not afraid.