Let’s hope not:
A majority of those polled dislike health care reform but for all the wrong reasons, i.e., for all the reasons the right-wing sound & fury machine has told them to dislike it. It’s too expensive. It creates more big government. It increases the deficit. It diminishes the quality of care. On the other hand, they believe it will have a positive impact on the nation’s health care system as a whole. In other words, it’s bad, bad, bad, but it’s also good. Got that? Sure you do. God bless the folks!Nearly two-thirds of Americans say the health care overhaul signed into law last week costs too much and expands the government’s role in health care too far, a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll finds, underscoring an uphill selling job ahead for President Obama and congressional Democrats.
Those surveyed are inclined to fear that the massive legislation will increase their costs and hurt the quality of health care their families receive, although they are more positive about its impact on the nation’s health care system overall.
Here’s some of the results:
• A plurality predicts the law will improve health care coverage generally and the overall health of Americans. But a majority says it also will drive up overall costs and worsen the federal budget deficit.• When it comes to their families, they see less gain and more pain: Pluralities say it will make coverage and quality of care worse for them. By 50%-21%, they predict it will make their costs higher.
Here’s the best, meaning the worst, part:
There was a strong reaction against the tactics Democratic leaders used to pass the bill. A 53% majority call Democratic methods “an abuse of power;” 40% say they are appropriate.And when asked about incidents of vandalism and threats that followed the bill’s passage, Americans are more inclined to blame Democratic political tactics than critics’ harsh rhetoric. Forty-nine percent say Democratic tactics are “a major reason” for the incidents, while 46% blame criticism by conservative commentators and 43% the criticism of Republican leaders.
So a vote in the House of Representatives that results in a Democratic victory is an abuse of power, and Democrats are more to blame for last week’s outbreak of vandalism than Republicans or conservative commentators. Also, health care reform will worsen the federal budget deficit. Where was this poll conducted, Fox News studios? Among the staff of Rush Limbaugh’s ‘excellence in broadcasting’ network? It’s a total victory for right-wing talking points, brought to you by a relentless, monolithic propaganda machine and enabled by a limp, weak, ‘neutral’ mainstream media that simply will not challenge its distortions. They’ve very effectively drilled their biases into the average American’s mind, or at least that small, atrophied portion of the average American’s mind that ever bothers to think about politics at all. Fox News and the Republicans have apparently steered public opinion right where they want it.
Deficits. Gimme a break. After eight years of Bush and “Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter” Dick Cheney, and after their then record $482 billion deficit in 2008, Joe Six-Pack just suddenly wakes up and decides that budget deficits are an urgent problem? Yeah, right.
Mr. Murdoch, we await your orders.
Pardon my cynicism, but does anyone else find President Obama’s weekend pep rally in Afghanistan a bit show-boat-y? Especially, coming as it did on the heels of a week-long spree of Presidential power-lifting? — health care reform, student loan help, underwater mortgage help and recess appointments.
And then, as we all know, nothing spells ‘presidential’ like parachuting into the front lines of America’s “War du Jour.” I could almost hear the Andrews Sisters singing “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree” as back-up for Obama’s motivational moment with the troops before they start dying, in earnest, to make a point in Kandahar.
“The United States has made progress in the fight against al Qaeda and its allies. I know it’s not easy,” he said. “If I thought for a minute that America’s vital interests were not served, were not at stake here in Afghanistan, I would order all of you home right away.“The United States of America does not quit once it starts on something … We keep at it. We persevere. And together, with our partners, we will prevail. I am absolutely confident of that.”
When I look at that be-camouflaged audience, all I can think of is “Why?” Why would anyone put a single one of those lives in harm’s way for something as dubious and irrational as a foothold in Afghanistan. These soldiers aren’t laying their lives on the line to make anyone safer — their very presence in Afghanistan makes them, and us, considerably more unsafe.
Non-partisan experts from all corners of the earth and many diverse disciplines have told us that, in compelling terms, for years now, but it has become increasingly clear that neither reason, nor prudence, not even survival instinct will dissuade the “powers that be” from replacing the Cold War with the Long War.
Al Qaeda has very effectively become the 21st century version of ‘dirty, rotten Commies.’ “Better Dead than Red” has been replaced with a fatwa on Terrorism, ensuring decades and generations of defense contracts, weapons development, arms sales, special ops, espionage and war games aimed at “making the world safe for democracy…”
The Long War
Whenever I want to get an update on the Long War, I look to Tom Hayden who has been screaming into the wind about it for ages now (and for you old Hippies, yeah – that Tom Hayden). Just yesterday Hayden wrote an article for the LA Times that is a short, good read that will catch you up on the “Long War” concept if it has escaped your attention.
Basically, the Long War is an undeclared, undebated, largely undisclosed 80-year (give or take) war plan cooked up by the Pentagon and its neo-con fellow travelers and think tanks. The theater for the Long War is primarily the Middle East and South Asia or wherever else our Soldiers of Fortune see fit to lead us.
As taxpayers, we needn’t worry our little heads about any of this because our representatives in Congress don’t really have a role to play, outside of approving any and all defense budgets, supplemental, emergency and otherwise. Since that signatory function has become a political measure of patriotism, it is unlikely that outspoken constituents can have any impact.
If you are scratching your head, at this point, and saying ‘what the hell is she going on about?’ you’re in the right place, as far as DoD is concerned. You see, the Long War is less a war and more a state of mind that is being fed to the American psyche by slow-drip intravenous.
Here’s Hayden’s timeline:
The term ‘Long War’ was first applied to America’s post-9/11 conflicts in 2004 by Gen. John P. Abizaid, then head of U.S. Central Command, and by the retiring chairman of the Joint Chiefs of State, Gen. Richard B. Myers, in 2005.According to David Kilcullen, a top counterinsurgency advisor to Army Gen. David H. Petraeus and a proponent of the Long War doctrine, the concept was polished in “a series of windowless offices deep inside the Pentagon” by a small team that successfully lobbied to incorporate the term into the 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review, the nation’s long-term military blueprint. President George W. Bush declared in his 2006 State of the Union message that “our own generation is in a long war against a determined enemy.”
The concept has quietly gained credence. Washington Post reporter-turned-author Thomas E. Ricks used The Long War as the title for the epilogue of his 2009 book on Iraq, in which he predicted that the U.S. was only halfway through the combat phase there.
It has crept into legal language. Federal Appeals Court Judge Janice Rogers Brown, a darling of the American right, recently ruled in favor of holding detainees permanently because otherwise, “each successful campaign of a long war would trigger an obligation to release Taliban fighters captured in earlier clashes.”
Among defense analysts, Andrew J. Bacevich, a Vietnam veteran who teaches at Boston University, is the leading critic of the Long War doctrine, criticizing its origins among a “small, self-perpetuating, self-anointed group of specialists” who view public opinion “as something to manipulate” if they take it into consideration at all.
Lovely! Already we see how one war can segue into another: as troops are drawn down from Iraq, troops swell in Afghanistan. Some “troops,” that we prefer not to speak of, are already at work in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and elsewhere. Avenging Angels are poised to strike Iran, if Ahmadinejad doesn’t behave. Even Turkey is currently misbehaving, not to mention Israel…
An amorphous (or imaginary) “enemy” calls for untraditional tactics and boatloads of money to completely refit our own enormous military, as well as the foreign militaries that we are re-purposing and creating in our own image and likeness. Unfortunately, so far, we really suck at it…
The Afghan National Police and Other Insecurities
One of the more ludicrous goals that the US has set as a measure of success in Afghanistan is to leave the country in the hands of a well-trained National Police force that will provide the safety and security necessary for the flowering of a law-abiding Afghan society into a well-armed, fully compliant partner in US control of the Middle East.
Never mind that currently there are neither laws nor a judicial system in place to support police activities — all things in good time. When the laws are written and the courts established, prisons have been built and judges appointed, there will be a crack police force in place to enforce those laws. All Afghans will surely rejoice when their thousand years old de-centralized system of tribal justice is replaced with a top-down well-policed system. No doubt, tribal warlords will be happy to relinquish their local power for the sake of modernization.
The notion of the Afghan National Police program defies reason in so many well-documented ways that it boggles the mind that, eight years and $7 billion dollars later, sane people would countenance renewing contracts with Dumb and Dumber, Inc. (Xe aka Blackwater and/or DynCorp) for another $1 billion whack at this losing proposition. Unless, of course, the architects of the Long War find it expedient to create impossible goals to keep us interminably engaged in the region and supporting that military-industrial complex which is currently America’s only ‘booming business’ and major export.
I’m no military expert but I do know a thing or two about business management and I’m certain that, without an endless flow of taxpayer dollars, this dog of a project would have been written off ages ago by any self-respecting private or publicly-owned business.
A joint team of Defense and State Department Inspectors General wrote a lengthy (and fairly scathing) analysis of the situation in 2006. That investigation found that the contractors hired (DynCorp) were ill-equipped to do the job (some of the trainers’ police backgrounds were as campus security guards) and that the State Department was doing an epically bad job of managing the contracts. There were essentially no stated contract requirements and virtually no oversight – just blank checks and free rein.
Unfortunately, this program is not only a fiasco; it can be argued that it is actually colossally counterproductive to the US mission in Afghanistan (if there is such a thing). As Pratap Chatterjee reported on TomDispatch.com:
The Obama administration is in a fix: it believes that, if it can’t put at least 100,000 trained police officers on Afghan streets and into the scattered hamlets that make up the bulk of the country, it won’t be able to begin a draw-down of U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan by the middle of next year.”The Obama administration’s strategy for the Afghan police is to increase numbers, enlarge the ‘train and equip’ program, and engage the police in the fight against the Taliban, says Robert Perito, an expert on police training at the United States Institute of Peace and the author of a new book, The Police in War. “This approach has not worked in the past, and doing more of the same will not achieve success.”
When it comes to police training, the use of private contractors is not unusual — and neither is failure. North Carolina-based Xe has, in fact, been training the Afghan border police for more than two years, and Virginia-based DynCorp has been doing the same for the Afghan uniformed police for more than seven years now. Nonetheless, the mismanagement of the $7 billion spent on police training over the last eight years, partly attributed to lax U.S. State Department oversight, has left the country of 33 million people with a strikingly ineffective and remarkably corrupt police force. Its terrible habits and reputation have led the inhabitants of many Afghan communities to turn to the Taliban for security.
And, later:
“There are some parts of Afghanistan where the last thing people want to see is the police showing up,” Brigadier General Gary O’Brien, former deputy commander of the Combined Security Transition Command-Afghanistan, told the Canadian Press news agency in March 2007. “They are part of the problem. They do not provide security for the people — they are the robbers of the people.”
Seven years and $7 billion of taxpayers’ money later, at a June 2008 discussion at the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs, Congressman John Tierney summed up findings on the 433 Afghan National Police units of that moment this way: “Zero are fully capable, three percent are capable with coalition support, four percent are only partially capable, 77 percent are not capable at all, and 68 percent are not formed or not reporting.”
That dismal result did not come flying unexpectedly out of the blue, either. As Chatterjee reports:
“A prevalent view, even among some international police, is that Afghanistan is unready for civilian policing and holds that the police must remain a military force while insecurity lasts,” writes Tonita Murray, a former director general of the Canadian Police College, who worked as an adviser to the Afghan Ministry of Interior in 2005. “If such a view were to prevail, only military solutions for security sector reform would be considered, and Afghanistan would be caught in a vicious circle of using force against force without employing other approaches to secure stability and peace…”Earlier this month, Lt. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, head of the NATO Training Mission in Afghanistan, admitted that police training has been a train wreck since the toppling of the Taliban almost nine years ago. “We weren’t doing it right. The most important thing is to recruit and then train police [before deployment]. It is still beyond my comprehension that we weren’t doing that.”
The realization that giving illiterate, drug-prone young men a uniform, badge, and gun (as well as very little money and no training) was a recipe for corruption and disaster is certainly a first step. But how to withdraw the 95% of the Afghan police force that is still incapable of basic policing for months of desperately needed training in a country with no prior history of such things? That turns out to be a conundrum, even for President Obama.
If the Pentagon does not dramatically alter the current training scheme, it doesn’t look good for either governance or peace in Afghanistan. Yet the likelihood remains low indeed that Pentagon officials will take the advice of a chorus of police experts offering critical commentary on the mess that is the police training program there.
Instead, it’s likely to be more of the same, which means more private contracting of police training and further disaster. Bizarrely enough, the Pentagon has given the Space and Missile Defense Command Contracting Office in Huntsville, Alabama, the task of deciding between DynCorp and Xe for that new billion-dollar training contract. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, as the French say: The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Counterinsurgency Sniff Test: Shit Happens
Meanwhile, the old Afghan War continues with its new Counterinsurgency strategy which seems to involve many of the old conventional tactics — night raids, special ops, drone attacks, checkpoint shootings. etc — with the notable addition of apologies from Gen. Stanley McChrystal whenever the wrong people get killed, which appears to be frequently.
Rumors about collateral damage are no longer solely the province of “bleeding heart liberals,” anonymous sources or anti-war politicians. ‘Straight from the horse’s mouth’ we have this incredible admission from Gen. McChrystal to no less than The New York Times (where some neocon gatekeeper was clearly out to lunch):
“We have shot an amazing number of people, but to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat,” [my emphasis] said Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, who became the senior American and NATO commander in Afghanistan last year. His comments came during a recent videoconference to answer questions from troops in the field about civilian casualties.Failure to reduce checkpoint and convoy shootings, known in the military as “escalation of force” episodes, has emerged as a major frustration for military commanders who believe that civilian casualties deeply undermine the American and NATO campaign in Afghanistan.
Well, General, if you think that’s frustrating, imagine the “frustration” of the dying and maimed innocents and their families and loved ones. To make the point McChrystal-clear, Command Sgt. Maj. Michael Hall (the senior NATO enlisted man in Afghanistan and a trainer in the same session) added that “Many of the detainees at the military prison at Bagram Air Base joined the insurgency after the shootings of people they knew. There are stories after stories about how these people are turned into insurgents. Every time there is an escalation of force we are finding that innocents are being killed.”
And then, of course, there are the recent inconvenient revelations of one Jerome Starkey, an Afghanistan-based reporter and an eyewitness to atrocities committed by Coalition forces, followed by a fairly bungling campaign to deny and discredit Starkey’s report.
Over the past few months, Starkey exposed two incidents where NATO initially claimed to have engaged and killed insurgents, when they’d in fact killed civilians, including school children and pregnant women. In both cases, when confronted with eye-witness accounts obtained by Starkey that clearly rebutted NATO’s initial claims, NATO resisted publicly recanting.
In the first case, NATO officials told him they no longer believed that the raid would have been justified if they’d known what they now know, but no official would consent to direct attribution for this admission.
In the second case, NATO went so far as to attempt to damage Starkey’s credibility by telling other Kabul-based journalists that they had proof he’d misquoted ISAF spokesman Rear Adm. Greg Smith. When Starkey demanded a copy of the recording, NATO initially ignored him and eventually admitted that no recording existed. NATO only admitted their story was false in a retraction buried several paragraphs deep in a press release that led with an attack on Starkey’s credibility.
Get used to it, though, 80 years of Long War can’t be conducted without casualties and since the “enemy” is such a shape-shifter, well … mistakes happen. On the bright side, evidently, it’s now OK to shoot an “amazing number of people” who don’t pose a threat, if you’re convinced they are Taliban, or al Qaeda or something like that…
This is Shelby Steele in The Wall Street Journal, telling it like he thinks it is:
The old fashioned, big government liberalism that Mr. Obama uses to make himself history-making also alienates him in the center-right America of today. It makes him the most divisive president in memory — a president who elicits narcissistic identification on the one hand and an enraged tea party movement on the other. His health-care victory has renewed his narcissistic charge for the moment, but if he continues to be a 1965 liberal it will become more and more impossible for Americans to see themselves in him…Mr. Obama’s success has always been ephemeral because it was based on an illusion: that if we Americans could transcend race enough to elect a black president, we could transcend all manner of human banalities and be on our way to human perfectibility. A black president would put us in a higher human territory. And yet the poor man we elected to play out this fantasy is now torturing us with his need to reflect our grandiosity back to us.
Many presidents have been historically significant in retrospect, but Mr. Obama had historic significance on his inauguration day. His inauguration told a transcendent American story. Other presidents work forward into their legacy. Mr. Obama is working backwards into his.
Mr. Steele, a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, is the author most recently of “A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can’t Win” (Free Press, 2007).
Which last paragraph leads irresistibly to the question: “So Why Should We Be Excited About What Shelby Steele Thinks?” Which in turn leads to the question: “Is Shelby related to Michael?” (No.) Which of course leads to this final question: “Was Michael Steele’s sister once married to Mike Tyson?” (Yes.)
From the Associated Press:
WASHINGTON — A high-ranking Army general won’t be fired or formally reprimanded after urging troops to lobby against the repeal of a ban on openly gay military service.President Barack Obama supports lifting the ban, and an active attempt to keep it in place could be considered insubordination.
But Lt. Gen. Benjamin Mixon’s civilian boss says the three-star Army general won’t receive a letter of reprimmand or be forced to step down. Army Secretary John McHugh told reporters Wednesday that Mixon has been told that what he did was inappropriate. McHugh says he considers the matter to be closed.
Mixon is head of Army forces in the Pacific theater. He had urged troops to ‘speak up’ and urge political leaders not to repeal the ban.
Does anyone recognize this plant?
Sorry for the difference in color, these are from my BlackBerry. In real life these are instances of the same plant only a few feet apart.
So what’s the deal, I’m asked these days, with Pelosi and me, are we still in love or what?
Well, lemme assure you that “what” continues to be the answer. Is she the most powerful Speaker in a century, as lots of people are saying right now? There’s even a Guardian article asking if she’s the most powerful woman in US history.
Admittedly this is not as high a standard here, where we’ve yet to have a female Chief Executive. And if you think about powerful women in US history, at least those who were politically powerful independent of their husbands, the vast majority of them are still alive. Women couldn’t even vote in most states until 1920. Eleanor Roosevelt, to take an example, was powerful in many ways, not nearly all of them based on her husband; but her influence was not that of a Speaker of the House. Governors like Sebelius and Palin are surely powerful — in their states. Madeleine Albright, Hillary Clinton? Secretary of State reports to somebody, in fact serves at his, underline his, discretion. Speaker of the House is #3 to the football. So, yes, I think by process of elimination she’s the most powerful woman in American political history.
Most powerful Speaker in a hundred years? I’m not a historian of the Congress, so I don’t know how much my opinion counts on this topic. But it seems to me that power involves more than reacting, it involves acting with some purpose. Other than self-maintenance, which of course all power is about. To me a powerful Speaker would convince, or perhaps I should say “convince”, other Representatives to act to change things, to move the ball down the field.
What I see Pelosi as doing is realizing that the Reid blows with the wind, and Obama’s never fought for anything. Her job title will change later this year, she’ll become The Woman Who Used to Be The Most Powerful Woman in US History, if she doesn’t get a bill passed. This gives her just as much leverage as Obama bought himself by making clear that he needed a bill, any bill: namely, none. It does, however, provide two vital items: desperation, and a clear goal. Or, put another way, I’m walking into a jewelry store with my girlfriend wearing a sign that says, “I have to buy a ring today.”
Given the clear goal, and the fact that she’s the Democrat with the most personal status, not to say power, to lose, she was able to coerce a reluctant administration and a weak Majority Leader to engage fully in passing a large bill. Their alternative was a Republican Speaker. Now she’s hoping that the size of the bill, its complexity and time-release nature, will get her over the November hump.
It’s a big gamble, because it’s easier to attack the bill ideologically than to point to immediate benefits for most people. And then there’s the gamble that the substance of the bill will turn out to be to peoples’ liking, which I personally doubt.
But the thing is, she had no choice. In chess terms, she’s not acting with the initiative in hand, she’s responding to threats. I don’t think of that as powerful, though in a sense it is. Being able to organize a successful defense of your citadel indicates prowess, no doubt. But what she defended was her personal situation.
Unless you see the bill as a big advance. There’s the rub. Pelosi would probably argue in essence that although it’s a big giveaway to the insurance and drug companies, she’s created something to build on. She’s not stupid enough to think the bill “covers” a single new person, regardless of her press releases.
The bill mandates the buying of insurance, but it does not, as far as I can tell, require insurance to cover the medical procedures you will need. And notice I say will, because it’s a dead stone lock that you will need them. So how can a business bet that you won’t need them, and still turn a profit? By goosing expenses, of course, but mainly by denying coverage. The bill lists reasons you can’t be denied coverage, and anyone who’s ever dealt with an insurance company knows what that means: the company will find a different reason when it stops being profitable to cover you.
So it seems to me that the overall effect of the bill is basically a negative one. Rather than attempting to fix the problem that we agree is likely to destroy the economy, we’re handing the whole mess over to the people who caused the problem and continue to profit from its existence. That’ll help.
I suspect the Speaker might argue in private that the bill has a chance of making things better precisely because it fails so utterly to make a difference in how we do things. Now that we’re criminalizing those who don’t buy insurance, it’ll be even more obvious how much we needed a public option, that watered-down version of what two-thirds of Americans have supported in polls for decades, single-payer. So Pelosi can claim to have put the inquiry to the country: do we need a public option? Thank God someone had the courage to state that question.
It’s certainly not leadership. Whether it’s power depends on whether your definition of power requires something other than self-preservation. Mine does, so I don’t think of Pelosi as a particularly powerful Speaker. Undoubtedly she’s an astute political player, she grew up in a political family; but she’s also working against the backdrop of the milquetoasts the Democrats have become.
To me the health care bill, despite having some positive features, seems like a failure, overall worse than no bill at all. But it could turn out that it’s only an initial failure which we’ll work to remedy for the next several decades, gradually producing some approximation of a reasonable system. Certainly we’ll be stuck trying to fix the problems Pelosi’s members forced her to insert for a long time. So she’s definitely made a mark on society, and that’s one definition of power.
There is no time like the present to get off the dime and make hay. You can make the hay while the sun shines or you can burn the midnight oil. You can make do, you can make your mark, or you can make a difference. Whatever you do, do it right, do it now, and do wacka do.
And win one for the Gipper.
You can be a bump on a log or go bump in the night. You can bump it up or get bumped off, but don’t get bummed out. And don’t let them make a bum out of you. Or a monkey either. Remember, you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear and you can’t get milk from a stone.
And be careful what you wish for; it may come true.
It goes without saying that the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world, but don’t rock the boat, as the saying goes. Keep your chin up and knock on wood and always bear in mind that money talks but doesn’t grow on trees and all that glitters is not gold. And let’s not forget that money is the root of all evil.
And as you sow so shall you reap.
True, rules were made to be broken, but if you dress to the nines and go for the whole nine yards, appearances can be deceiving. Opportunity knocks only once, but if at first you don’t succeed, try again. Grabbing the brass ring, going for the big cahuna, the whole enchilada, going for broke, and going for gold can land you on the horns of a dilemma, and you end up going to hell in a handbasket…
But when the going gets tough the tough get going.
Even if you didn’t get up with the chickens or get out of bed on the wrong side or get off on the wrong foot, you might not get the picture if you don’t get with the program. The squeaky wheel gets the grease and the early bird gets the worm. You can go by the book or you can go off half-cocked, but either way you’ll find yourself out on a limb if you don’t give the Devil his due. You will find him in the details.
If you can’t stand the heat get out of the kitchen.
Handsome is as handsome does and he who laughs last laughs longest so long as one understands, more in sadness than in anger, that boys will be boys, and that’s all she wrote. You can hit the bricks or hit the books or hit the hay or hit the road. You can hit a home run or hit the right note or hit it off, but you can’t hit the broad side of a barn if you’re carrying a torch.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
Maybe you’re a flash in the pan or maybe you’re in for the long haul, but if you fly by the seat of your pants and you can’t hold a candle, if you don’t know whether to fish or cut bait, if you won’t face the music, you may face a Hobson’s choice. You’re right as rain if you believe you’ve got an axe to grind. Are you a flash in the pan or will you face the music? Can you keep your powder dry and your nose to the grindstone? Are you in the black or in the red or in the pink? You’re in the limelight and it is anywhere but in the bag. More likely it’ll be in your face and you might well go bananas or bonkers or ballistic or postal. What you need to do is go the distance.
Don’t forget, nature abhors a vacuum.
You can’t fiddle while Rome burns and then wake up and smell the roses, which, incidentally, by any other name would smell as sweet. You have to know the ropes and know which way the wind is blowing and know your limitations and know which way is up and to thine own self be true, knock on wood. Be an Indian giver and things will never be hunky dory even if it all does come out in the wash.
And if you remember nothing else, remember this: It’s not over till the fat lady sings.
…or did you already know that? From today’s New York Times:
Lawyers for the father of a Marine who died in Iraq say a court has ordered him to pay legal costs for the anti-gay protesters who picketed his son’s funeral. The protesters are led by Fred Phelps of Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kan. The father, Albert Snyder of York, Pa., had won a $5 million verdict against Mr. Phelps, but it was thrown out on appeal. On Friday, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in Maryland, ordered Mr. Snyder to pay the costs of Mr. Phelps’s appeal.The United States Supreme Court agreed earlier this month to consider whether the protesters’ provocative messages, which include phrases like “Thank God for dead soldiers,” are protected by the First Amendment. Members of the church maintain that God hates homosexuality and that the death of soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan is God’s way of punishing the United States for its tolerance of it.
We have shot an amazing number of people, but to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat.
Gen. Stanley McChrystal, quoted in Friday’s New York Times.
(h/t to Chris Floyd at Empire Burlesque.)
In an attempt at redemption among our Pogo fans, I offer up the following story of a Good Samaritan Pennsylvanian who mistook a dead opossum for either Phil or Pogo. Unfortunately the dead animal could not be revived but we’ve received positive confirmation that the animal was not Pogo nor one of his groundhog buddies, the groundhog having appeared in the Pogo series since at least 1963.
We will give the good soul in Pennsylvania who tried to save the creature an A Plus for effort; after all, when you’re quite intoxicated, a creature laying in the road having been smashed up by a vehicle might look just look like Pogo or even his buddy, the real Phil, and if that scenario had actually happened, Punxutawney would never be the same again.
State police Trooper Jamie Levier says several witnesses saw a 55-year-old man, of Brookville, near the animal Thursday along Route 36 in Oliver Township, about 65 miles northeast of Pittsburgh.The trooper says one person saw Wolfe kneeling before the animal and gesturing as though he were conducting a seance. He says another saw Wolfe attempting to give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
Levier says the animal already had been dead a while.
The witless hominids on the right have broken their chains and launched an all-American, red-white-and-blue trailer trash version of Kristallnacht. This is all because they regard a law that requires people to buy insurance from private, for-profit companies to be an apocalyptic act of socialism, socialism! Good god. It’s a marvel these primates can eat with a knife and fork. On an evolutionary spectrum, I’d place them somewhere between Homo habilis, one of our most primitive ancestors, and the more advanced Neanderthals, who could manipulate objects to bludgeon their prey but lacked the fire to cook it.
I suppose it’s fitting that one of their intellectual leaders, the great ‘idea’ guy of the Republican party, Newt Gingrich, originally wanted to be a zookeeper. So what’s Gingrich’s response to the escalating violence of a mob that he himself inspires? It’s time for political leaders to take moral responsibility for what’s happening in our country, he says. Not Republican political leaders, mind you, but Democratic leaders:
I think the Democratic leadership has to take some moral responsibility for having behaved with such arrogance, in such a hostile way, that the American people are deeply upset. So let’s be honest with this. This is a game that they’re playing. People should not engage in personal threats. I’m happy to condemn any effort to engage in personal threats. But I think the Democratic leadership has to take some real responsibility for having run a machine that used corrupt tactics, that bought votes, that bullied people, and as a result has enraged much of the American people. And I think it’d be nice for President Obama, Speaker Pelosi, and Majority Leader Reid to take some responsibility over what their actions have done to this country.
This is good news for every wife beater in the country. The victim has to take moral responsibility for having provoked him!
I wonder who’s going to take moral responsibility when this carnivorous rabble starts turning against people in their own movement who they deem to be ideologically impure. Ask Dick Armey, whose position on immigration has made him a deviationist among some tea party “patriots.”
[…] And in recent weeks, Dick Armey has found himself targeted by a quiet, but concerted campaign from fellow conservatives challenging — and seeking to undermine — his status as a leader of the tea party movement.
Critics ranging from prominent conservatives to bloggers to grass-roots tea party activists have called into question whether Armey’s stances on illegal immigration and social issues, his candidate endorsements and his past lobbying work are fundamentally inconsistent with the tea party movement. They also have suggested he raised the white flag too early in the fight over the Democratic health care overhaul and is beholden to corporate benefactors, and have accused him of trying to hijack the tea parties to serve those benefactors or his own personal political ambitions.
“We’re seeing lots of traffic that shows a lot of anger at (Armey). I would think that he’s endangering his entire standing among the patriots,” reports a tea party leader from a rival faction, and another one says “…right now, I think we should tar-and-feather Dick Armey.”
Republicans have stimulated the basal ganglia of the most violent, racist, and fascistic elements in our society for cheap political gain, and now it’s getting out of control. Rather than forthrightly condemning these thugs, they play politics by rationalizing their behavior, which will only encourage and embolden them. Sooner or later, someone’s going to get hurt, and it’s possible it will even be a conservative. Family quarrels are always ugly, and civil wars are always the bloodiest. I wouldn’t expect nitwits like John Boehner or Eric Cantor to understand this, but the historian Gingrich surely knows better, he just doesn’t seem to care — a morally responsible act if I ever saw one.
Back in the early days of our Southeast Asian War Games a Washington Post and Times-Herald editor sent me to the District Building to cover what he figured had to be a mob scene at the marriage license bureau. After all, the White House had just announced that married men would become eligible for the draft in just a few days’ time. I reported back that there was no mob and consequently no news. “There you go,” the editor said. “There’s your story.”
When I bitched about this nonsense to an older reporter he said, “Don’t sweat it, kid. We call that a ‘no-snow story.’ Some idiot on the desk looks out the window and sees it isn’t snowing when it said in his own paper it would. To an idiot it’s news when the world fails to cooperate with him.”
I have been sensitive to no-snow stories ever since, and once you start looking, they’re everywhere. Thus I sympathize with a certain Jonathan Strong who writes for Tucker Carlson’s new conservative website, The Daily Caller. Poor Strong did the best he could with what he had.
The idiots topped his story with this headline, which is almost totally divorced from the perfect blizzard of no-snow that follows it:
GOP AIDES CITE RUDENESS AND CURSING
FROM OBAMA-PUSHED HEALTH-CARE CALLS
Meet Mike Vanderboegh of Pinson, Alabama, who was:
“…unapologetic in a 45-minute telephone interview with The Washington Post early Thursday. He said he believes throwing bricks through windows sends a warning to Democratic lawmakers that the health-care reform legislation they passed Sunday has caused so much unrest that it could result in a civil war…He said his call for people to throw bricks is “both good manners and it’s also a moral duty to try to warn people.”
Another death panel story, this one from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram:
At birth, Houston Tracy let out a single loud cry before his father cut the cord and handed him to a nurse.Instantly, Doug Tracy knew something was wrong with his son.
“He wasn’t turning pink fast enough,” Tracy said. “When they listened to his chest, they realized he had an issue.”
That turned out to be d-transposition of the great arteries, a defect in which the two major vessels that carry blood away from the heart are reversed. The condition causes babies to turn blue.
Surgery would correct it, but within days of Houston’s birth March 15, Tracy learned that his application for health insurance to cover his son had been denied. The reason: a pre-existing condition…
Correction: March 25, 2010An earlier version of this article misstated the scale of the abuse scandal within the Irish church as described in Irish government reports last year. The reports revealed the abuse of tens of thousands of children, not hundreds of thousands of children.
More disgusting news from the Vatican. Read the whole thing, but the excerpts below particuarly struck me. It seems the Vatican knew it had a problem with priests using confessional booths as pick-up joints at least by 1962 — decades before the pedophilia scandals exploded in America. Maybe those earlier problems involved only women, but I do not find that encouraging. Nor probable.
Church and Vatican documents obtained by two lawyers who have filed lawsuits alleging the Archdiocese of Milwaukee didn't take sufficient action against Murphy show that as many as 200 deaf students had accused him of molesting them, including in the confessional, while he ran the school.While the documents — letters between diocese and Rome, notes taken during meetings, and summaries of meetings — are remarkable in the repeated desire to keep the case secret, they do suggest an increasingly determined effort by bishops to heed the despair of the deaf community in bringing a canonical trial against Murphy…
Just a few weeks later, Bertone — now the Vatican's secretary of state — told the Wisconsin bishops to begin secret disciplinary proceedings against Murphy according to 1962 norms concerning soliciting sex in the confessional, according to the documents.
David Leonardt in The New York Times highlights a key component of Obamacare that you may not have focussed on. I hadn’t, anyway.
Incidentally, if the first person to call the bill “Obamacare” was a Republican, that person will have a lot to answer for in years to come. Johnson wasn’t lucky enough to have Medicare named after him.
An excerpt:
For all the political and economic uncertainties about health reform, at least one thing seems clear: The bill that President Obama signed on Tuesday is the federal government’s biggest attack on economic inequality since inequality began rising more than three decades ago…
From Robert Paul Wolff’s memoirs (pdf), via The Philosopher’s Stone:
It seems, [Carl] Sandburg began, that two cockroaches, brothers, were riding on a farmer’s cart into town one day, when the cart hit a bump, and they were both thrown off. The first brother fell on a big pile of dung, which is seventh heaven for a cockroach. He settled in, ate himself fat and glossy, and prospered.The second brother fell into a deep hole, where there was nothing to eat and scarcely any way to get out. Slowly, laboriously, he dragged himself up the side of the hole, repeatedly falling back and starting again. He grew thin and weak, and his shell lost its sheen, becoming dull and discolored.
At long last, by the greatest of effort, he managed to heave himself back onto the road. Looking up, he saw his brother perched happily atop his dung pile. “Brother,” he said, looking up, “You are so fat and sleek. How have you managed to flourish like that?”
His brother looked down disdainfully over the edge of the dung and said, with a smug self-congratulatory smile, “Brains. And hard work.”
Meet Texas congressman Randy Neugebauer, the ranking Republican on the Agriculture Committee's Livestock, Dairy, and Poultry Subcommittee. He’s opposed to killing babies, too!
…or so says former Bush speechwriter David Frum. Myself, I would never impute ulterior motives to the fat freak.
When Rush Limbaugh said that he wanted Obama to fail, he was intelligently explaining his own interests. What he omitted to say — but what is equally true — is that he also wants Republicans to fail.If Republicans succeed — if they govern successfully in office and negotiate attractive compromises out of office — Rush’s listeners get less angry. And if they are less angry, they listen to the radio less and hear fewer ads for Sleep Number beds.
So today’s defeat for free-market economics and Republican values is a huge win for the conservative entertainment industry. Their listeners and viewers will be even more enraged, even more frustrated, even more disappointed in everybody except the responsibility-free talkers on television and radio. For them, it’s mission accomplished.
For the cause they purport to represent, however, the “Waterloo” threatened by GOP Sen. Jim DeMint last year regarding Obama and health care has finally arrived all right: Only it turns out to be our own.
From Politico:
Pelosi’s great advantage is she has played her cards early and is a proven, aggressive political operative … Yet going forward, Pelosi will have to answer herself for some of the legislative shortcuts taken in her fierce “damn the torpedoes” march toward final passage. “She’s impressive, horrifying at times, but impressive,” said one person who observed the speaker closely in weeks of backroom meetings.
Condoleezza Rice is expressing regret over how things went so terribly wrong in Iraq. I thought this was going to be another example of a US official seeking absolution for their role in some disaster long after the fact, when their careers can no longer be jeopardized and they still have a chance at coming off as a swell, thoughtful person in the all of the history books. Think of the late Robert McNamara, or Colin Powell and Scott McClellan. But it’s not so. It’s just a lame variation of what will become the orthodox narrative of the Iraq War. The invasion was the proper thing to do and our intentions were pure, we just made a few tactical boo-boos. We’ll get it right next time.
Former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Friday she would “many times over liberate” Iraq again, but she regretted the Bush administration failed to work closer with Iraqis to rebuild the war-torn country.
[…]
“I would many times over liberate Iraq again from Saddam Hussein,” Rice said. “I think he was a danger to the Middle East.”
However, she suggested the U.S. government failed to understand “how broken Iraq was as a society” and should have focused its rebuilding efforts outside of Baghdad, the capital.
“We tried to rebuild Iraq from Baghdad out, and we really should have rebuilt Iraq from outside Baghdad in,” she said.
“We should have worked with the tribes, worked in the provinces,” she said, adding that smaller projects should have been favored over big ones.
How big of you to admit to a few mistakes, Dr. Rice. No doubt all the Iraqis who were killed in this war would understand and forgive you. I’m sure they wouldn’t mind that their lives were snuffed out for all of eternity as a result of the Bush administration’s klutzy, trial-and-error approach towards occupying them. After all, those dead Iraqis probably made a lot of rookie mistakes in their lifetimes as well, however brief those lifetimes may have been.
By the way, do you still buy your shoes at Ferragamo on 5th Avenue? There should be a big end of the season sale coming up soon, so get ready, girl! Nothing like a little shopping to soothe a troubled mind.
Peggy Noonan, in The Wall Street Journal:
Fox is owned by News Corp., which also owns this newspaper, so one should probably take pains to demonstrate that one is attempting to speak with disinterest and impartiality, in pursuit of which let me note that Glenn Beck has long appeared to be insane.
Well, frumps, I’ve been at this for a year now, and I must admit that writing the Frump Gazette has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my long and varied life. It has forced me to focus on the world around me in new and different ways; it has opened my eyes, ears and heart to things that slid right on by during my hustle and bustle years of working and parenting.
Best of all, I have met some truly remarkable people that I might not have otherwise met. Despite being drawn to troubling subjects, the intelligent, thought-provoking commentary and good humor of my readers have continually reassured me that all is far from lost. I have met with some modest blogging success and have expanded my audience with spots on Alternet’s “Speakeasy,” Salon.com’s Open Salon and Jerome Doolittle’s Bad Attitudes.
For a while now, I have planned to take an “anniversary” week off so that my granddaughter can teach me how to play, again. But before I do that, I would like to leave you with something to chew on that has the potential to put an end to the freewheeling forum that has become known as the Blogosphere as well as any other venue where dissent and activism currently flourish.
On March 4, 2010, Sen. John McCain introduced new legislation that he has written called the “Enemy Belligerent, Interrogation, Detention, and Prosecution Act of 2010.” The bill is co-sponsored by Sen. Joe Leiberman making it “bipartisan” — after a fashion…
The Horror
Assessing McCain’s bill in an article for Salon.com, Glenn Greenwald noted that:
“It’s probably the single most extremist, tyrannical and dangerous bill introduced in the Senate in the last several decades, far beyond the horrific, habeas-abolishing Military Commissions Act. It literally empowers the President to imprison anyone he wants in his sole discretion by simply decreeing them a Terrorist suspect — including American citizens arrested on U.S. soil. The bill requires that all such individuals be placed in military custody, and explicitly says that they ‘may be detained without criminal charges and without trial for the duration of hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners,’ which everyone expects to last decades, at least. It’s basically a bill designed to formally authorize what the Bush administration did to American citizen Jose Padilla — arrest him on U.S. soil and imprison him for years in military custody with no charges.”
For those of you who may not be familiar with Glenn Greenwald, he is a constitutional expert, a lawyer, a columnist, a blogger, and author. He worked as a constitutional and civil rights litigator prior to becoming a contributor to Salon.com, where he focuses on political and legal topics. He has also contributed to other major newspapers and political news magazines, including The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The American Conservative, The National Interest, and In These Times.
His commentaries “on surveillance issues and separation of powers” have been cited in The New York Times, in The Washington Post, in United States Senate floor debates, and in House “official … reports on executive power abuses.”
In short, when Glenn Greenwald is alarmed, we should all be paying attention.
The (Possible) Law of the Land
If you would like to read the bill for yourself, you’ll find it here. It’s a short read (12 pages); Republicans seem to have become great fans of brevity in their legislative endeavors lately.
Basically, the bill would establish a policy for the detention, interrogation and trial of suspected enemy belligerents who are suspected of hostilities against the United States. Such detainees would be held in military custody, interrogated for their intelligence value by High Value Intelligence Teams and pointedly would not be provided with a Miranda warning.
Here’s a relevant bit taken directly from the bill:
“The bill asks the President to determine criteria for designating an individual as a “high-value detainee” if he/she: (1) poses a threat of an attack on civilians or civilian facilities within the U.S. or U.S. facilities abroad; (2) poses a threat to U.S. military personnel or U.S. military facilities; (3) potential intelligence value; (4) is a member of al Qaeda or a terrorist group affiliated with al Qaeda or (5) such other matters as the President considers appropriate. The President must submit the regulations and guidance to the appropriate committees of Congress no later than 60 days after enactment.”“To the extent possible, the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Team must make a preliminary determination whether the detainee is an unprivileged enemy belligerent within 48 hours of taking detainee into custody.”
“The High-Value Detainee Interrogation Team must submit its determination to the Secretary of Defense and the Attorney General after consultation with the Director of National Intelligence, the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. The Secretary of Defense and the Attorney General make a final determination and report the determination to the President and the appropriate committees of Congress. In the case of any disagreement between the Secretary of Defense and the Attorney General, the President will make the determination.”
Things that “go bump in the night” about these passages:
* We are no longer referring to these “targets” as “aliens;” American citizens like you and I (and José Padilla) could now be (officially) pulled off the street and detained indefinitely
* The bill calls for the President to decide what behavior will label a person a “high-value detainee.” The bill then makes suggestions about possible criteria but ends with “or (5) such other matters as the President considers appropriate.” I have to wonder what a President Cheney or a President Palin might consider appropriate criteria for “detainment.” Perhaps anyone who might have called for the indictment of Bush/Cheney, on war crimes, would suddenly become a “high value detainee”?
* Once the criteria have been set, the Kangaroo Court is in session and the Orwellian-sounding High-Value Detainee Interrogation Team have “48 hours” to deliver a verdict. So — based on 48 hours of extra-judicial deliberation by a group who make their living being part of an “interrogation team” you, or someone you know, could be “disappeared” for quite a long time. Period.
* That “interrogation team” verdict is handed over to the Secretary of Defense and the Attorney General who make the Final Determination and hand it over to the President (who DOES NOT have a say in that determination unless DoD and DoJ bring in a split decision).
Furthermore, per the bill, such detainees can be held until the end of terrorist hostilities against the US and its Coalition allies – which, as we all know, could be a very, very long time. And wouldn’t this act be a great tool for anyone with a feverish imagination and an “enemies list”? In our overheated national security environment it shouldn’t be too awfully hard to make, say – any regular subway commuter into a terrorist suspect.
Let Me Count the Ways…
This is not one of those hair-splitting constitutional debates that go on in some rarefied legal ether. This bill is a down and dirty assault on the Constitution that has so much glaringly wrong with it that any American high-schooler could shoot it full of holes in five minutes. Here are some of its major constitutional transgressions:
Fourth Amendment 4 — Search and Seizure:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Fifth Amendment 5 — Trial and Punishment, Compensation for Takings:
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger.
Sixth Amendment — Right to Speedy Trial, Confrontation of Witnesses:
In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defense.
Eighth Amendment — Cruel and Unusual Punishment:
Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.
Fourteenth Amendment — Citizenship Rights:
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law, which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
WTF?
Keeping in mind that this bill was written by a United States Senator, who is sworn to uphold the Constitution, and co-sponsored by ten others (see list of co-sponsors below) – it is little wonder that the American public is thoroughly disgusted with Congress’s performance of late (approval rating is consistently around 20%). If this bill had been introduced on April 1st, I would have known what to make of it. As it stands, I have to assume that Sen. McCain’s loss of the Presidential election, the imminent repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and, now, the very real threat to even holding on to his Senate seat, has completely unhinged the man.
Here is the promised list of Co-Sponsors of the Enemy Belligerent, Interrogation, Detention, and Prosecution Act of 2010:
Sen. Scott Brown [R, MA]
Sen. Saxby Chambliss [R, GA]
Sen. James Inhofe [R, OK]
Sen. George LeMieux [R, FL]
Sen. Joseph Lieberman [I, CT]
Sen. Jefferson Sessions [R, AL]
Sen. John Thune [R, SD]
Sen. David Vitter [R, LA]
Sen. Roger Wicker [R, MS]
These are, of course, many of the usual subjects; but I find it especially chilling to find Sen. Jeff Sessions, Ranking Member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, on that list.
Now, it’s only fair to let McCain speak for himself and, to that end, here’s a link to his official letter introducing his bill to the President. Unfortunately, McCain’s rambling, finger-pointing screed doesn’t go very far in elucidating good motives for establishing a police state.
There are a number of political ways to look at this development — it could be simply a Republican effort to introduce legislation that provides an opportunity for the administration to appear wimpy by shooting it down. Who’s paying attention? Sen. McCain is just being a stand-up, ex-military patriot trying to make Americans safer but the radical Obama administration shots down anything that smacks of traditional values — right?
McCain, whose Senate seat seems to be imperiled in November, may believe that his bill will appeal to a gun-toting, xenophobic, kick-ass contingent of Arizona voters (centrism sure doesn’t seem to be working).
It could be that he believes the McClatchy-Ipsos poll, from January 2010, that found that 51 percent of Americans agree with this statement: ”it is necessary to give up some civil liberties in order to make the country safe from terrorism.”
It could be part of the GOP’s general accretion of scary material that keeps Americans wary and the defense dollars flowing until the Republican Party rises from the ashes and saves us from ourselves, once again.
Or it could just be what we’re coming to — a corporatist, militarist global concern that needs to sweep stodgy American values out of its way. The precedent for using US military inside the US occurred in 2005 in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Since then, U.S. Northern Command (USNORTHCOM) has run exercises called “Vigilant Shield” to prepare, prevent and respond to any number of national crises that would call for the use of the military inside the United States. Vigilant Shield 2008 builds a scenario of a domestic disaster in the US (terrorist attack or natural disaster). It posits the domestic use of the US military including a special role for the US Air Force.
Can’t Happen Here, Right?
In case anyone out there is comforted that President Obama would never sign that bill, don’t be sure. Here’s a clip from Rachel Maddow last spring that puts the lie to that false security:
I’m sure that Sen. McCain, like Liz Cheney, is just obsessed with Keeping America Safe … so why do I feel so very afraid?
While we’re on the subject (or were a few days ago), here’s a reader’s comment on Ezra Klein’s blog:
In your recent post you mention that providing universal health care may make abortions go up or go down because “women have more access to birth control. Another answer is that there’s no change because abortions are related to pregnancy rather than health-care coverage, and most women don’t know that their insurance covers abortions anyway.”You forgot a 3rd reason: the cost of childbirth. When an uninsured woman finds out she’s pregnant she also finds out she will need to spend about $25k to deliver the baby (assuming no complications), which she may not find fiscally palatable. In this case there’s a strong financial incentive to go through with a substantially cheaper option: having an abortion.
This isn’t just theory: a friend of our family faced this situation a couple years ago and she opted to have an abortion because she couldn’t afford to have the baby. Having health insurance would have prevented this.
The Cato Institute is a libertarian “think tank” in Washington. Yesterday it hosted a panel led by Grover Norquist, who thinks. His principal thought so far, the one for which he will be remembered once he is finally gathered into the loving arms of Ayn Rand, is this: “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” Another Norquist thought, posssibly related: “When I became 21, I decided that nobody learned anything about politics after the age of 21.”
From the Cato Institute website:
In a Thursday panel at Cato on conservatism and war, U.S. Reps. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.) Tom McClintock (R-Calif.) and John Duncan (R-Tenn.) revealed that the vast majority of GOP members of Congress now think it was wrong for the U.S. to invade Iraq in 2003.The discussion was moderated by Grover Norquist, who asked the congressmen how many of their colleagues now think the war was a mistake.
Rohrabacher: “I will say that the decision to go in, in retrospect, almost all of us think that was a horrible mistake … Now that we know that it cost a trillion dollars, and all of these years, and all of these lives, and all of this blood … all I can say is everyone I know thinks it was a mistake to go in now.”
McClintock: “I think everyone [in Congress] would agree that Iraq was a mistake.”
Following this revelation virtually every Republican in Congress and most of the Democrats disemboweled themselves on the steps of the Capitol. Just kidding. The American language has no word for “shame.”
Some Republican state legislators down in Georgia are concerned about the connection between drug abuse and joblessness, so they’ve devised a bill to tackle the problem head on: mandatory drug testing for people on unemployment.
With Georgia’s unemployment rate over ten percent, some state lawmakers want those receiving unemployment benefits to undergo yearly random drug testing.
Rep. Michael Harden (R-Toccoa) is sponsoring HB 1389 that would also apply to anyone receiving state assistance or state administered federal assistance.
“Upon the first offense they will lose those benefits of the taxpayers until the period they pass a positive drug screening... upon the second offense they will lose those benefits for two years,” says Harden.
He says the recipients would be required to pay $25 for the tests and would also lose their benefits if they refuse to take the tests.
“We have to make sure that these people, particularly if they’re on the unemployment line, have the ability to go back to work, and one of the things that’s preventing them from having that opportunity is the fact that they can’t get past the drug test,” says co-sponsor Rep. Jimmy Pruett (R-Eastman).
The people of Georgia are blessed to have these two beautiful minds working on their behalf. It’s not necessarily the recession that’s causing such high unemployment, you see, it’s also drug use, because this drug use is denying people, “these people,” the opportunity of passing a pre-job drug screening, which keeps them out of the workforce and inflates the unemployment rolls. And there you have it, post hoc ergo propter hoc. I bet you feel pretty silly for not having figured that out, huh?
Having identified the problem, the solution becomes obvious. It’s so obvious, in fact, that any pair of morons could have come up with it. Force people who don’t have jobs to pay $25 for the privilege of submitting their bodily fluids for inspection. If they test dirty for drugs, cut off their benefits until we decide when to test them again. If they test dirty a second time, cut them off for two years. And while we’re at it, let’s include people who receive state assistance of any kind. Why let the welfare cheats slide? If this results in hordes of destitute and desperate people who are unable to feed and cloth themselves, well, let that be lesson about the evils of drugs.
I can’t imagine where anybody got the idea that Republicans hate the poor.
I don’t blame you for wondering what happened yesterday when Hill-Murray School met Annandale. Well, according to the St. Paul papers, “Hill-Murray pulled away from Annandale in the second half this afternoon to claim a 66-44 victory in the Class AAA state girls quarterfinals at Williams Arena. Center Bethany Doolittle led Hill-Murray with 18 points. The 6-foot-4 junior scored six points during a 17-4 run by the Pioneers early in the second half.”
Bethany is the one hanging onto the ball, below. Today’s game, half an hour from now, will be against currently undefeated DeLaSalle. I’ll keep you posted. Why? Because this is my blog and she’s my granddaughter.
Addendum: DeLaSalle went into the game having beaten every other opponent this season by an average of 31 points. They went out on the short end of a 61-48 tally, as we scribes say. The Hill-Murray Pioneers thus advance to the state finals on Saturday. I'll keep on keeping you posted, sports fans.
…abortions drop under health reform. This, from the New England Journal of Medicine (via Jay Bookman):
Underlying the opposition to federal subsidization of private plans that provide abortion is the belief that such subsidies would remove financial disincentives for women to have abortions and would result in a significant increase in the abortion rate in the United States. For example, in a video released last summer that featured 16 religious leaders speaking out against health care reform, Dr. Richard Land, an official of the Southern Baptist Convention, said, “If we fail, abortion will dramatically increase.” Representative Trent Franks (R-AZ) said in a nationally televised interview that “this health care plan will be the largest expansion of abortion in the United States since Roe vs. Wade, only this time it’ll be paid for by taxpayer dollars, and people don’t see that as health care…”The national health care reform legislation that was recently passed by the Senate has been modeled, in many respects, on the Massachusetts reform law; both lack the “public option” that was included in the House bill, which was the focus of the Stupak–Pitts Amendment prohibiting federal subsidies for health plans that would pay for abortion. Therefore, I hypothesized that the early experience in Massachusetts might serve as a good model in which to examine whether a substantial expansion in health care coverage might result in an increased number of abortions…
In 2007, the first year of Commonwealth Care, the number of abortions fell to 24,128, and in 2008, it fell to 23,883 — a decline of 1.5% from the 2006 level (see graph). The number of abortions among teenagers in 2008 fell to 3726, a 7.4% decline from 2006. These decreases occurred during a period of rising birth rates, from 55.6 per 1000 women 15 to 44 years of age to 56.9 per 1000 in 2006 and 57.2 per 1000 in 2007 (the latest year for which data are available from the Massachusetts Department of Public Health), and an increase in overall population (in 2008, the Massachusetts population surpassed 6.5 million for the first time, and it was nearly 6.6 million in 2009, according to the Census Bureau). The abortion rate thus declined from 3.8 per 1000 population in 2006 to 3.6 per 1000 in 2008. Overall, since 2000, the number of abortions in Massachusetts has dropped by 12% (from 27,180 to 23,883) and by nearly 36% since 1991.
This is truly disturbing footage. It was made at demonstrations yesterday outside the district office of Ohio congresswoman Mary Jo Kilroy. The man in the red cap sitting on the ground is carrying a sign that says he has Parkinson’s disease. The man in the white shirt throwing pocket change at him is a particularly repellent member of his and unhappily my species. I would very much like to meet him sometime, to reason with the son of a bitch.
Well, Washington, DC hosted “Armey’s Last Stand” yesterday. About two weeks ago Health Care Reform was officially designated a Tea Party “Code Red situation” calling for urgent mobilization; forthwith a couple hundred TPers dutifully shaped up at the Capitol in their signature Tea Party regalia, carrying their signature “down with everything” posters and placards.
This group has evolved, since their first appearance last year around this time, in ways that would have been impossible to predict. Yesterday’s street theater successfully demonstrated that evolution, if not much else. Over time, Republican Party outpourings of solidarity and support for Tea Party activism have dwindled, coincident with the Tea Party’s repudiation of Republican apparatchiks as just as undesirable as any other target “government-as-usual” group which the TP has singled out for extinction.
Signs of strain were not that difficult to sniff out. By now, everyone has probably seen pictures of the TP placards that were supplied by the RNC earlier in the game. This time around, RNC was still distributing the things but had gone to the trouble of placing “blackout” stickers over their endorsement. Then, too, GOP notables were conspicuously absent from yesterday’s pep rally, signaling Republicans’ wariness of how truly the Tea Party actually speaks for the “silent majority” they profess to represent…
Dramatis Personae
A few die-hard Washington wing-nuts still turned out for Code Red — Michelle Bachmann (R-MN), Louie Gohmert (R-TX), Steve King (R-IA) and Joe “You Lie” Wilson (R-SC) were there to incite hundreds to new levels of insanity. Fox News, doing the best with what they had, described the Code Red Rally as featuring “a host of Republican speakers, including Reps. Mike Pence (R-IN), Michele Bachmann (R-MN), Tom Price (R-GA) and Marsha Blackburn, (R-TN).”
Notably missing from that lineup was Sen. Jim DeMint who has been working assiduously at being the Tea Party’s Best Friend in Washington, according to a recent article in Politico. And while DeMint’s efforts might be scoring him points with the Tea Party (although there’s not a lot of evidence of that yet) it’s definitely not making him any more popular with his own party, which appears to have decided to give the TP a wide berth, for now at least.
So, it appears that the past year has brought evolution, some contraction as well as greater “clarity” (if you can call it that) to both the Tea Party and the Republican Party platforms. The Tea Party, despite its astro-turf beginnings, has gelled into what looks like a fairly adamant anti-government movement, strong on fear and loathing and short on solid facts – but, then, in the Tea Party world, facts and people who deal in facts are not to be trusted; history, like the Bible, is meant to validate their views and effectively rubber stamp their agenda “best for everyone involved.”
The Tea Party has morphed into a conservative populist movement willing to take conservatism to new extremes to represent the wishes of a (largely mythical) “silent majority.” I think that the “silent majority” notion is part and parcel of a mythology of fear and imagined oppression; freedom and liberty, in this mythology, are freedom “from anything I don’t like or agree with” and the liberty “to do as I please” without regard to how it affects the common good. Proponents of this mythology populate their world with like-minded fellow travelers who are too meek to speak up – but they’re out there. There also seems to be that Christian Conservative, homespun American Puritan influence that says “this is right and this wrong for all God’s children, end of argument” substantiation not required. And so it is that the Tea Party quickly gets to a place where facts are subordinate to ideology and the ends always justify the means.
If you think I overstate, here are a few samplings of yesterday’s commentary coming from the Tea Party itself:
The following “sentiments” appeared on the America’s News Online website which describes itself thus:
“As a company, AmericasNewsOnline.com is a dedicated group of writers covering the topics that are making a difference in people’s lives. Our goal is to give the reader a balanced perspective of both sides of the news. In our opinion, it should be up to the reader to decide the real truth.This from contributor Susan Thompson:“We have a team of 6 researchers submitting breaking news everyday. With our team’s diverse background, we are able to cover news from different points of view.”
“The Tea Party Movement along with a little help from Rush Limbaugh turned the face of Washington red today. Even Barrack Obama is coming with his tail between his legs and is to appear for an interview with Fox News.“There are members of the Tea Party Movement, in fact all of the Tea Party, that are outraged on the way that the Obama administration and the Dems in Congress are trying to find the sneakiest ways imaginable to pass the healthcare bill. Americans are very much in shock that the Dems would try to ram this bill through with an 80% disapproval rating.”
“Pelosi was heard to be paraphrased saying, ‘Americans aren’t smart enough to figure out how we’re doing this and aren’t interested in the process.’ She went on to same (sic) we will pass this bill for the good of American citizens. The Tea Party is holding strongly to ‘kill the bill.’”
Really, really awful writing aside, this stuff is pure propaganda, not to mention poppycock; but it is emotionally appealing to a crowd that believes that all of their ills have been caused by government and that, furthermore, they don’t need or want anything that government provides. It’s not that they have conflicting views on how the government should operate, no alternative methods are ever promoted beyond “sending Obama’s socialism ‘back to Russia.’”
Speaking to a CNS News interviewer, a woman who would only identify herself as “Jamie” said congressional arrogance is the main reason she came to the rally.
“I’m here, because I’m really concerned about how the legislative process is being bastardized to push this through. Whether you’re for it or against it, if they can bastardize our legislative process like this, what’s to stop them for anything? Why do we even have elected officials?”
Russ Cote of New Jersey told CNS this is the third event he has attended to protest a proposed health care system that he said is unsustainable and unconstitutional: “It’s simple economics. We’re going to go broke. We’re going to go broke fast.”
What these people seem to be saying is that they are afraid – afraid that something is terribly wrong with the day-to-day operation of government that they have, by and large, chosen to ignore lo these many years. They are afraid of “bastardized legislative processes,” the passage of unconstitutional legislation, death panels and socialism — now; despite the fact that extrajudicial renditions, assassinations, the use of torture, and warrant-less wiretapping caused barely ripple in their deeply-running still waters.
Neither do these emotional, impressionable people seem to care a fig about unsustainable health care costs in the status quo, or rampant US global militarization, or rapacious defense corporations defrauding the US government as a matter of course. They don’t even seem to worry much about the erosion of their constitutional rights to privacy and due process or the loss of America’s moral standing in the world due to high officials condoning, even expressing pride in having committed war crimes.
Be Afraid! Be Very Afraid
Why do you suppose that is? My theory is that it’s all in the packaging. People enjoy a good scare, sometimes. Generally, when things are not going so well, it helps to believe that the problem is “larger than life” and that we’re “all in this together.” Anyone with “I told you so, on their lips” is cruisin’ for a bruisin’ and it’s human nature to try to deflect blame and shame.
Republicans have suffered some electoral humiliations over the pickle we find ourselves in and they are more than ready for that to change. The trick is to make enough people believe that the Democrats are even worse or that Republicans, having made the mess in the first place, are the only ones who can effectively clean it up. Clumsiness over this messaging, so far, has engendered some pretty entertaining political positions on both sides of the aisle. For a while the large number of uncommitted Tea Partiers looked pretty attractive to the GOP with its 28% approval rating. In order to come roaring back, Republicans needed some fresh voters. From the beginning, it was pretty obvious what the TP hot buttons were and, in an effort to court them, the GOP made the Tea Party causes their causes.
A year later, clearly Republican leadership is rethinking that one. Appealing to the Tea Party is a lot like herding cats…
Nevertheless, a few stalwarts are still banging that drum for lack of anything better to do. One of those is Rep. Steve King from Iowa who has always had a lot to say that made little sense. The problem with King’s embrace of the Tea Party is that clearly, these Tea Partiers either can’t or don’t want to distinguish between fact and fiction and to them King represents a voice of authority (telling them it’s quite all right to be crazy).
King’s contribution, this time around, was to whip the Tea Partiers into an anarchic frenzy to paralyze the Capitol. He said, “Fill this city up, fill this city, jam this place full so that they can’t get in, they can’t get out and they will have to capitulate to the will of the American people.”
Elsewhere in his speech, he spouted his usual disinformation about the health care bill funding abortion as well as care for 6.1 million illegal immigrants, winding up with an impassioned plea for concerned citizens to “continue to rise up.”
I haven’t yet decided whether I think King is just simple-minded or whether he’s a world-class demagogue – either way, King has spent his years in Washington filling the air with a giant load of misleading crap – below are some samples of King’s wit and wisdom, taken from Wikipedia, which lists links for all comments.
On Joseph McCarthy:
In 2005, King whipped up a group to oppose honoring a Berkeley, California councilwomen because of her “affiliation” with the Niebyl-Proctor Marxist Library in Berkeley. Democratic Congresswoman Barbara Lee claimed that King’s “campaign of innuendo and unsubstantiated ‘concern’ is better suited to the era of Joseph McCarthy than today’s House of Representatives,” King claimed that history showed McCarthy to be “a hero for America.”
On the May 1, 2006 “Day Without an Immigrant” rallies, King offered his opinion to the Op-Ed editor of the Des Moines Register:
“What would that May 1st look like without illegal immigration? There would be no one to smuggle across our southern border the heroin, marijuana, cocaine, and methamphetamines that plague the United States, reducing the U.S. supply of meth that day by 80%. The lives of 12 U.S. citizens would be saved who otherwise die a violent death at the hands of murderous illegal aliens each day. Another 13 Americans would survive who are otherwise killed each day by uninsured drunk driving illegals. Our hospital emergency rooms would not be flooded with everything from gunshot wounds, to anchor babies, to imported diseases to hangnails, giving American citizens the day off from standing in line behind illegals. Eight American children would not suffer the horror as a victim of a sex crime.”
[Critics immediately argued that King's daily numbers in the editorial are inflated, based on the incorrect premise that 28% of all prisoners in all American jails and prisons are illegal aliens. King cited an April, 2005 GAO report as the source of that statistic; that report actually says that 27% of federal prisoners were "criminal aliens," a term that includes both legal and illegal aliens. "Criminal aliens" doesn't mean "illegal aliens". State prisons and local jails together hold 92% of US prisoners. The actual percentage of illegal aliens held at the time in state prisons and local jails can be determined by comparing figures for SCAAP federal compensation to states and localities with federal Bureau of Justice Statistics prisoner censuses. Such a comparison reveals that the accurate illegal alien percentage being held was less than 4%, rather than the 28% claimed by King.
In May 2008, King downgraded his original claims about the contents and reliability of the GAO report from which he "extrapolated" them saying: “ . . . that report came back not quite apples to apples.”]
On Washington, D.C.:
“My wife lives here with me, and I can tell you… she’s at far greater risk being a civilian in Washington, D.C., than an average civilian in Iraq.”
King said that there were 45 violent deaths per 100,000 in Washington, D.C., in 2003 while he calculated that there were 27.51 per 100,000 in Iraq as a whole.
The Iraqi Health Ministry casualty survey, however, estimated 151,000 violent deaths in Iraq due to the war from 2003 to 2006, or roughly 162.37 per 100,000 per year. The Lancet survey published in 2006 estimated that 2.5% of the population of Iraq had died from the war as of June 2006.
On State Department appropriations:
On June 21, 2007, King introduced an amendment to the $34 billion State and Foreign Operations bill to prohibit funds from being used by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi to travel to Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan or Syria. When asked why the measure did not apply to Republican House members who had also made trips to the countries in question, King’s spokesman replied that he was unsure whether that had been considered, or why it might not have been.
UPDATE: At the end of 2009, Rep. King went on his own “fact-finding” junket to Afghanistan. Upon his return he reported that he met with President Muhammad (sic) Karzai and found him to be “human.”
On Barack Obama:
On March 7, 2008, during his press engagements to announce his reelection campaign, King made his now famous remarks about Senator and Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama and his middle name, saying:
“ … if he is elected president, then the radical Islamists, the al-Qaida, the radical Islamists and their supporters, will be dancing in the streets in greater numbers than they did on September 11 because they will declare victory in this War on Terror.”
[At the time, Obama said he did not take the comments too seriously, describing King as “an individual who thrives on making controversial statements to get media coverage.” The McCain campaign disavowed King's comments, saying "John McCain rejects the type of politics that degrades our civics…and obviously that extends to Congressman King's statement.”
On the Iowa Supreme Court:
In April, 2009, the Iowa Supreme Court ruled that a state ban on same-sex marriage violated the Iowa constitution. King opined that the judges "should resign from their position" and the state legislature "must also enact marriage license residency requirements so that Iowa does not become the gay marriage Mecca."
On the IRS building bombing in Austin, Texas:
Last month, in his closing remarks at CPAC, King said he could “empathize” with the man who flew a plane into the IRS building in Austin, Texas, killing himself and an IRS employee.
On Washington lobbyists:
On the House floor in February 2010, King made remarks defending and supporting lobbyists as a source of “valuable information”:
“Lobbyists do a very effective and useful job on this Hill, and if anyone gave me information that wasn’t accurate or honest, if they found out about it they would bring it back and correct it to me first. If I thought they were doing so intentionally, they would not come back to talk to me ever. There is credibility there, in that arena, that I think somebody needs to stand up for the lobby. It is a matter of providing a lot of valuable information.”
One might reasonably ask whether Rep. King would recognize “valuable information” if it bit him in the ass …
After King’s latest outing a Huffington Post reporter asked him about his comparison of the Tea Party protest with the 1989 Velvet Revolution in Prague. Here’s how that went:
HuffPo: “So this is just like Prague under communist rule?” the Huffington Post asked.King: “Oh yeah, it is very, very close,” King replied. “It is the nationalization of our liberty and the federal government taking our liberty over. So there are a lot of similarities there.”
“I look back 20 years ago in the square in Prague ... when tens of thousands showed up there and they shook their keys peacefully and they took over their country and they achieved their freedom back again,” he said. “If you can keep coming to this city, fill up the congressional offices across the country but jam this city. If you can get on your cell phones, and get on your Blackberries and your email, and ask people to keep coming to this town. Storm this city, fill up Washington D.C., jam this capital so they can’t move. And if tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of you show up, we will win. We will defeat this bill and you will have your liberty back.”
Of course, part of the reason that Prague is so idyllic is because they have government-sponsored health care — just like you do, Rep. King…
From the Associated Press:
WASHINGTON — Catholic nuns are urging Congress to pass President Barack Obama’s health care plan, in an unusual public break with bishops who say it would subsidize abortion.Some 60 leaders of religious orders representing 59,000 Catholic nuns Wednesday sent lawmakers a letter urging them to pass the Senate health care bill. It contains restrictions on abortion funding that the bishops say don’t go far enough.
The letter says that “despite false claims to the contrary, the Senate bill will not provide taxpayer funding for elective abortions.” The letter says the legislation also will help support pregnant women and “this is the real pro-life stance.”
…to give up on the whole human race, damned if some guy down in Peru doesn’t go and teach an alpaca to surfboard:
From the Washington Independent:
Kathy Ropte — like Jackson, a member of the Harris County, Ga. Tea Party, had started to move beyond lobbying. As cameras snapped away, she stood in front of the Cannon Building and announced the termination, “to take effect in November,” of pro-health care reform members. One activist chided her for the display, which included a massive sign reading “Waterboard Congress.” Jackson didn’t care. She was in the fight, whether or not health care reform passed.“One day I turned off American Idol,” Ropte told TWI, “and I turned on Fox News. Before this year I’d never voted in my life.”
This is the country we live in today:
Get used to sustained high unemployment. That’s the domestic news. Meanwhile, on the foreign front:U.S. employers won’t hire enough workers this year to lower the jobless rate much below the level of 9.7 percent reached in February, three Obama administration economic officials said today.
“We do not expect further declines in unemployment this year,” the officials said in testimony prepared for the House Appropriations Committee. They predicted the economy would add about 100,000 jobs a month on average — not enough to bring the jobless rate down substantially.
The United States just can’t seem to figure out how to keep its people working, but at the same time we’re shipping bunker buster bombs to Diego Garcia for a possible attack on Iran. While the people fall through the cracks, our leaders are busy preparing for another war. That’s vision for you, isn’t it?Hundreds of powerful US “bunker-buster” bombs are being shipped from California to the British island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean in preparation for a possible attack on Iran.
The Sunday Herald can reveal that the US government signed a contract in January to transport 10 ammunition containers to the island. According to a cargo manifest from the US navy, this included 387 “Blu” bombs used for blasting hardened or underground structures.
Experts say that they are being put in place for an assault on Iran’s controversial nuclear facilities. There has long been speculation that the US military is preparing for such an attack, should diplomacy fail to persuade Iran not to make nuclear weapons.
It’s enough to make you just want to give up and join the military-industrial complex. The warfare state is here to stay and that’s obviously where all the money’s at. Why waste time trying to beat back the inevitable tide of American history? Shed your humanity, learn to love Big Brother, and just go with the flow. Join the team and make a buck.
The unemployment rate last year for young veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars hit 21.1 percent, the Labor Department said Friday, reflecting a tough obstacle that combat veterans face as they make the transition home from war.
The number was well above the 16.6 percent jobless rate for non-veterans of the same ages, 18 to 24. It was significantly higher than the 2008 unemployment rate among veterans in that age group: 14.1 percent.
The unemployment rate is higher among vets than among other people in the same age bracket. So much for the rewards of service.
I suppose this is the take-away: acclimate yourself to chronically high unemployment, prepare for a new war, and have fun living in a country full of jobless combat veterans, many of whom will suffer from PTSD and become very, very pissed when they realize that they wasted the best years of their lives fighting for a moribund empire that quite simply doesn’t care about them.
Go figure. When you’ve given up, One Fly has the answer, or at least an answer. I’m not totally convinced, but any explanation at all is more than I have.
From Reconstitution 2.0:
According to the Reverend John Hagee, Adolph Hitler was a “hunter,” sent by God, who was tasked with expediting God’s will of having the Jews re-establish a state of Israel.Going in and out of biblical verse, Hagee preached: “‘And they the hunters should hunt them,’ that will be the Jews. ‘From every mountain and from every hill and from out of the holes of the rocks.’ If that doesn’t describe what Hitler did in the holocaust you can’t see that.”
Yes, Hitler the Hunter came to the Earth to do the Lord’s work. This attitude among Jesusistanis is not an uncommon one; the simple fact of the matter is that most Jesusistanis are more or less open anti-Semites. A lot of people seem to think that the unwavering support the Jesusistanis have for Israel “proves” that they aren’t anti-Semites, but that belief is wholly mistaken. In order for the “Rapture” dogma of the Jesusistanis to come to pass, the Jews have to be in Jerusalem to be burned alive and sent to Hell. Understand that this, and only this, is why the Jesusistanis are such unabashed, staunch supporters of Israel.
Joe Bageant is at it again, telling the truth right out where the children could hear it. Not that we’d listen.
…What would happen if America had leadership that stood up and coolly, intelligently described the economic and ecological peril we face, both of which are completely interrelated. What would happen if a president told the people, “What we have been doing has obviously not been working (they’d sure as hell agree on that), so we are going to have to remake America to save it, and it’s going to mean real sacrifice.” And what if he could do so without capitalist forces sending out ideological swiftboats to blow him out of the water, or launching hate campaigns against him, branding him as an evil fascist eco-socialist, or whatever.I dare say the number of Americans who would respond, be willing to sacrifice and meet a challenge issued by cohesive, focused leadership, might surprise us. They might well do it, if for no other reason than that Americans are the most authority worshiping people on earth, outside of North Korea…
Bart Stupak might want to beef up his obstructionism by weighing down the health care bill with the language William Blum suggests below. Go for it, Bart. There are innocent lives to be saved!
About half the states in the US require that a woman seeking an abortion be told certain things before she can obtain the medical procedure. In South Dakota, for example, until a few months ago, staff was required to tell women: “The abortion will terminate the life of a whole, separate, unique, living human being”; the pregnant woman has “an existing relationship with that unborn human being,” a relationship protected by the U.S. Constitution and the laws of South Dakota; and a “known medical risk” of abortion is an “increased risk of suicide ideation and suicide.”…I'd like to suggest that before a young American man or woman can enlist in the armed forces s/he must be told the following by the staff of the military recruitment office:
“The United States is at war [this statement is always factually correct]. You will likely be sent to a battlefield where you will be expected to do your best to terminate the lives of whole, separate, unique, living human beings you know nothing about and who have never done you or your country any harm. You may in the process lose an arm or a leg. Or your life. If you come home alive and with all your body parts intact there’s a good chance you will be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Do not expect the government to provide you particularly good care for that, or any care at all. In any case, you may wind up physically abusing your spouse and children and/or others, killing various individuals, abusing drugs and/or alcohol, and having an increased risk of suicide ideation and suicide.
“No matter how bad a condition you may be in, the Pentagon may send you back to the battlefield for another tour of duty. They call this ‘stop-loss’. Your only alternative may be to go AWOL. Do you have any friends in Canada? And don’t ever ask any of your officers what we’re fighting for. Even the generals don’t know. In fact, the generals especially don’t know. They would never have reached their high position if they had been able to go beyond the propaganda we’re all fed, the same propaganda that has influenced you to come to this office.”
Here’s Coffee Party founder Annabel Park, interviewed by Tom Schaller on FiveThirtyEight:
Q: Do you think Obama should let his inner community organizer come out a bit more?A: I don't know what Obama should do exactly other than to keep pointing out the opposition's tactics and communicate directly to people. I personally think that he may be a good driver and I see him trying, but the fact is we are asking him to drive a broken car.
Suggested by my last post, the following excerpt is from William Greider’s 2009 book, Come Home, America:
The U. S. military, despite its massive firepower and technological brilliance, has itself become the gravest threat to our peace and security. Our risks and vulnerabilities around the world are magnified and multiplied because the American military has shifted from providing national defense to taking the offensive worldwide, from being a vigilant defender to being an adventurous aggressor in search of enemies.The predicament this muscle-bound approach puts our country in is dangerous and new. Go looking for trouble around the world and you are likely to find it. The next war may be a fight that is provoked not by them but by us. The next war may already have started somewhere in the world, perhaps in a small, obscure country that we’ve considered threatening.
From a review of the book by George C. Wilson, the Washington Post’s longtime Pentagon correspondent:
I agree with Greider that there is a new attack elephant in the American living room. The old watchdog that would bark if some stranger knocked at the door but only bite if he broke into the house has been retired. Obama and Defense Secretary Robert Gates seem to have fallen in love with Army Green Berets, Navy SEALs and Marine special operators who do their deadly work in the shadows. The top of our government was similarly infatuated with special operations during the Vietnam War until some of the operators got out of control and had to be reined in to discourage what was called “cowboyism” back then.
From today’s New York Times:
…What we had to abandon was quite clear: the rigid ideological, political and economic system; the confrontation with much of the rest of the world; and the unbridled arms race. In rejecting all that, we had the full support of the people.
The words could have been spoken by President Obama in his State of the Union, but weren’t. The author instead is Mikhail Gorbachev, who sacrificed his political career by calling off the Cold War.
Unlike most of us who have been sounding off on the matter, Papa Bonk actually knows the man who recently became his former congressman: Eric Massa. Therefore attention must be paid:
The real tragedy of Eric Massa (who I know personally) is that he was a damn good congressman, a hard working Progressive who took principled stands on tough issues… like Afghanistan and single payer health care. He, like Larry Craig, is in many ways a victim of a culture that causes many citizens to suppress their true selves. If Eric Massa ran again as a gay man I would be there running with him.Eric made a few big mistakes in bowing out … pointing fingers at Nancy and Rahm, for example. But he also pulled off a major coup … getting on Glennn’s Moron Show for an entire hour. Once inside the viper’s nest, he gave Beck nothing useful and managed to score a couple of points.
He said a good first step towards fixing Washington’s problems would be for the GOOP to stop lying about the facts. He also suggested there would be no real solutions until we had real campaign finance reform. No one has ever been able to say anything quite so true on Fox News without being censored or shouted down. Beck, who is preprogrammed by his handlers to spew fascist silliness for hours at a time … was left speechless.
There is a line in this song that has stuck in my mind for years, and I always realized that, it being an old English ballad, it was once literally true once as far as health care goes, but not anymore. The line goes “if living were a thing that money could buy, you know the rich would live and the poor would die.” I think about women who die in this country of breast cancer because they don’t have health insurance, and heart disease (and my friend Al who died because he couldn’t afford the procedure to fix his heart) and the thousands of other instances where money can indeed buy life.
I think about the death penalty and how money almost always can buy life, I think about... Well, you get the idea, there are so many examples of how a person’s lack of money can kill him or her. Many of our lefty blogger friends demonstrated that lack of health care kills when they wrote about what happened to Jim Cappozolla, the the owner of the Rittenhouse Review and many more examples of posts detailing what we in the left blogosphere lost when Jim died.
Jim’s death could have been prevented with adequate health care, but the recent untimely death of Jon Swift, one of the best “conservative” writers on the net, Jon Swift is an example of one that MAY have been preventable. Maybe not, although a good inexpensive screening can often find a latent aneurysm and the price for the screening is quite inexpensive. My wife and I had a screening for aneurysms done a year or so ago and the price was less than $200. Maybe if Jon Swift (aka Al Wiesel) had been screened for an aneurysm he would still be with us today. We will never know, I guess. But I’m sad to report that yes, Virginia, living is a thing that money can buy and Santa can’t save you from the Republicans who would rather see you die than perhaps be the person who finds a cure for cancer, who invents the solution to the energy problem, or who solves some other problem that has plagued humanity for decades.
Juan Cole reminds us that we are in last place in all the industrialized countries when it comes to preventing deaths that are preventable. How criminal is that? Maybe we should start calling those who are stopping health care reform criminals and murderers, because they are murdering those without health care, and violate the Fifth (or Sixth if you are Catholic or Lutheran) commandment which admonishes us all that we shall not kill. No legislators are excluded. No, not one. Particularly those legislators who are on the record as having stated that we must live by the Ten Commandments. God has a special place in hell reserved for these hypocrites when their time comes.
The chances of such solutions to the problems of humanity happening in this country without health care for all is thus substantially diminished. Some other nation will reap the benefits of that technological breakthrough if our health care system kills the one person here who could have solved that problem or some other problem of equal importance dies because our legislators stopped or held up health care for all the children of God that live in this country.
Thus this song is wrong in one important line. Remember that.
Who, happening across Mitch McConnell’s smooth, shiny, testudine visage on TV, has not wanted to grab hold of his lying words, turn them sideways, wrap them in barbed wire, and shove them firmly where the sun don’t shine?
Not Harry Reid, apparently. Here is the letter he sent the Senate Minority Leader today:
Eleven months ago, I wrote you to share my expectations for the coming health reform debate. At the time, I expressed Democrats’ intention to work in good faith with Republicans, and my desire that – while we would disagree at times – we could engage in an honest discussion grounded in facts rather than fear, and focused on producing results, not playing partisan politics.
Obviously, the opposite has happened, as many Republicans have spent the past year mischaracterizing the health reform bill and misleading the public. Though we have tried to engage in a serious discussion, our efforts have been met by repeatedly debunked myths and outright lies. At the same time, Republicans have resorted to extraordinary legislative maneuvers in an effort not to improve the bill, but to delay and kill it. After watching these tactics for nearly a year, there is only one conclusion an objective observer could make: these Republican maneuvers are rooted less in substantive policy concerns and more in a partisan desire to discredit Democrats, bolster Republicans, and protect the status quo on behalf of the insurance industry.
In fact, the attacks on the health care bill are part of a broader pattern. As has been well documented, your caucus conspicuously shattered the record for obstruction last Congress by demanding gratuitous procedural votes on even the most non-controversial matters, and by stalling the work of the Senate despite the urgency of the serious problems facing our country. Senate Republicans are on pace to again break their own record this Congress, illustrated by Sen. Bunning’s effort to prevent the Senate from acting to extend families’ unemployment and health benefits even after those benefits had expired…
While Republicans were distorting the facts in the health care debate and inflicting delay after needless delay, millions of Americans have continued to suffer as they struggle to afford to stay healthy, stay out of bankruptcy and stay in their homes. Thousands of Americans lose their health care every day, and tens of thousands of the uninsured have lost their lives since this debate began. Meanwhile, rising health costs have contributed to a rising federal budget deficit.
To address these problems, 60 Senators voted to pass historic reform that will make health insurance more affordable, make health insurance companies more accountable and reduce our deficit by roughly a trillion dollars. The House passed a similar bill. However, many Republicans now are demanding that we simply ignore the progress we’ve made, the extensive debate and negotiations we’ve held, the amendments we’ve added (including more than 100 from Republicans) and the votes of a supermajority in favor of a bill whose contents the American people unambiguously support. We will not. We will finish the job. We will do so by revising individual elements of the bills both Houses of Congress passed last year, and we plan to use the regular budget reconciliation process that the Republican caucus has used many times.
I know that many Republicans have expressed concerns with our use of the existing Senate rules, but their argument is unjustified. There is nothing unusual or extraordinary about the use of reconciliation. As one of the most senior Senators in your caucus, Sen. Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, said in explaining the use of this very same option, “Is there something wrong with majority rules? I don’t think so.” Similarly, as non-partisan congressional scholars Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein said in this Sunday’s New York Times, our proposal is “compatible with the law, Senate rules and the framers’ intent.”
Reconciliation is designed to deal with budget-related matters, and some have expressed doubt that it could be used for comprehensive health care reform that includes many policies with no budget implications. But the reconciliation bill now under consideration would not be the vehicle for comprehensive reform – that bill already passed outside of reconciliation with 60 votes. Instead, reconciliation would be used to make a modest number of changes to the original legislation, all of which would be budget-related. There is nothing inappropriate about this. Reconciliation has been used many times for a variety of health-related matters, including the establishment of the Children’s Health Insurance Program and COBRA benefits, and many changes to Medicare and Medicaid.
As you know, the vast majority of bills developed through reconciliation were passed by Republican Congresses and signed into law by Republican Presidents – including President Bush’s massive, budget-busting tax breaks for multi-millionaires. Given this history, one might conclude that Republicans believe a majority vote is sufficient to increase the deficit and benefit the super-rich, but not to reduce the deficit and benefit the middle class. Alternatively, perhaps Republicans believe a majority vote is appropriate only when Republicans are in the majority. Either way, we disagree.
Keep in mind that reconciliation will not exclude Republicans from the legislative process. You will continue to have an opportunity to offer amendments and change the shape of the legislation. In addition, at the end of the process, the bill can pass only if it wins a democratic, up-or-down majority vote. If Republicans want to vote against a bill that reduces health care costs, fills the prescription drug “donut hole” for seniors and reduces the deficit, you will have every right to do so.
Sincerely,
HARRY REID
United States Senator
Nevada
From the Associated Press:
A Rome high school has decided to install vending machines selling condoms for its students, sparking angry reaction from the Catholic Church which claims the move will only encourage youths to have sex…L’Avvenire, the newspaper of the Italian Bishops’ Conference, said Thursday that sex was being reduced to ‘‘mere physical exercise.’’ The paper lamented that young people these days have no spiritual guidance when it comes to sexuality, and that educators are more concerned with ‘‘the health and hygiene consequences of sex’’ than the moral implications.
We wouldn’t be seeing all this nonsense if choirboys could get pregnant.
Again the Rude Pundit nails it. (Image by Ben Tolman)
Our unending state of stress-out is al-Qaeda’s greatest victory against the United States. As the AP reports today, al-Qaeda got one big message from the Underwear Bomber’s failure: “the group that carried out the Sept. 11 attacks and has prided itself on its ideological purism seems to be eyeing a more pragmatic and arguably more dangerous shift in tactics. The emerging message appears to be: Big successes are great, but sometimes simply trying can be just as good.”Yeah, it seems like the simple cave dwellers have figured out big, complex, allegedly bad-ass America: we’re just a bunch of sticky fat kids crying because our ice cream fell off the cone. That wedgie-bait, Adam Gadahn (née “Pearlman”), an American in al-Qaeda, taunted, “Even apparently unsuccessful attacks on Western mass transportation systems can bring major cities to a halt, cost the enemy billions and send his corporations into bankruptcy.” He may be a traitorous asshole who can’t grow a decent beard, but that doesn’t mean he’s wrong. Ask anyone who was at Newark Airport in January, where security imprisoned thousands of innocent people for six hours because some idiot took a shortcut…
Indeed, the right has so successfully torqued the country into what our enemies believe it is, it’s almost as if the GOP is a subversive arm of al-Qaeda. They have nearly bankrupted us, thus making any great social advances impossible; they have turned mild dissent into sedition; and they have turned the Constitution into a loophole-ridden contract, filled with more fine print than a subprime mortgage. They did most of that shit when they were in power. Now, out of power, the right is seeking, as it did in the Clinton years, but even more insidiously, to undermine the very functioning of government…
You’d expect this sort of thing from the Rude Pundit or the Huffington Post. But the Daily Caller, Tucker Carlson’s new cybersheet?
Sarah Palin took a leave of absence from her Russia-watching post in Alaska to become a Fox News contributor. Who could have seen that coming? She represents diversity on Fox as that network’s only non-blonde correspondent…Sarah Palin does have charisma and a certain following. A woman resembling her once walked into a Florida breakfast place and nearly caused a riot. Folks soon realized she was not the former Alaska governor when she started reading a newspaper.
A confession:
In a note read on Vatican Radio, the Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, cautioned against limiting the concerns over child sexual abuse to Roman Catholic institutions, noting that the problem also affected the broader society.
From the Washington Post:
Former Representative Eric Massa (D-N.Y.) has been under investigation for allegations that he groped multiple male staffers working in his office, according to three sources familiar with the probe.
From Bette Noir’s blog, The Frump Gazette. Which I have just discovered, and recommend. I agree with her about President Obama’s political strategy; I hope we’re both right.
Well, frumps, things are definitely starting to look up for Democrats and the Obama administration if my Lunatic Fringe barometer can still be trusted. I’ve discovered, over the past year, that there is a quantifiable inverse relation between the fortunes of the Obama White House and threats of violence from the far-right reaches of the blogosphere. None too stable at the best of times, these folks have a tendency to fly around the room backwards whenever Obama shows signs of succeeding at advancing his domestic social policy agenda.Obama has an interesting way of achieving his ends. He allows debate to rage unbridled, allows people to act out and vent melodramatically until we are all simply exhausted by the topic. Then, as we mentally move on, he quietly administers CPR and, next thing you know, dead-in-the-water issues are moving apace toward realization. It’s a pretty impressive strategy, to me, at least.
Just think about the health care reform battle. A year went by while we raged and fumed on our various sides of the issue. As Obama put it in his Health Care Summit, last week, “everything that could be said, had been said.” Gray-haired grannies duked it out with the local teamsters in Town Halls. Conspiracy theorists pumped up the volume and warned us all of The New World Order and/or Socialism/Fascism that lie just around the corner…
Continuing my Hard-Hitting Songs for Hard-Hit People Series, this time I’ll put up two songs written by a couple of Woody’s Fellow Travelers and deviate from the original script that I set up which was to take only songs from the book by the same name as this series. Woody never belonged to the official version of the Fellow Travelers and the only things he had in common with what those words used to mean was that he was a fellow speaking up for other fellows and he traveled around a great deal. But he never joined any organization such as an “official fellow traveler” might have done. Let me add another fine point here and that is to note that the three men entertaining on these videos, Grant Rogers, Pete Seeger and Jim Garland were all blacklisted in one sort of another, either during the McCarthy era or as Union men. Kind of like what the Republicans have done or are trying to do to a lot of people, including what they are doing to some fine lawyers, the so called by Fox News “Gitmo Nine” lawyers.
But getting away from the past and back to the present, let’s not forget that our current situation with job losses started and accelerated under Bush and is just now starting to level off. It took President Obama a year but there are still a lot of unemployed people out there right now. So these songs are for all of those folks who don’t have a job or have a job that doesn’t allow them to live up to their full potential.
In addition, I’ve added a category for the songs posted in this series and will be going back and adding all the songs I’ve put up in this series so you can just click on the topic in the bottom left hand corner of these posts soon and see a list of all the songs in the series. Both of these selections come from a series that Pete Seeger had on Public Television called Rainbow Question. You can see all these YouTube entries for Pete’s old musical television show by clicking this link .
How pathetic is this, from the Sacramento Bee?
A Sacramento TV station last week reported that unnamed sources saw Ashburn at a gay bar the night before his arrest last Wednesday on suspicion of DUI. The speculation set off a media frenzy, rekindling rumors that Ashburn lived a closeted life.Gay-rights advocates seized on the news to point out Ashburn's votes against gay rights legislation and his appearance several years ago at a rally in support of a proposed constitutional amendment to prohibit gay marriage.
Ashburn defended his positions, telling Barks he was representing his district, a mostly conservative area running from Bakersfield to Visalia.
“There’s never been a doubt in my mind on the position of the … vast majority of people in my district ... on these different issues,” he said. “And I voted as I felt I should on behalf of the people who elected me.”
It used to be the practice at the old Washington Daily News to write things like, “Police identified the murder suspect as Howard Ignoto, of the 1700 block of Maple Street.” If a more precise address turned out to be even a single digit off, a bedridden 90-year-old bishop’s widow would inevitably be living at that number. Our lofty journalistic principle was therefore, “It is better to be vague than wrong.”
The Epicurean Dealmaker suggests following the same principle when it comes to resolution authority to discipline Wall Street houses judged too big to fail, and his reasons are equally practical:
I like the fact that the proposed resolution authority is currently vague and undefined. I think it should be written into law in as vague and undefined a manner as possible. That would make it much more effective in combating the next (inevitable) financial crisis…For another thing, vagueness will offer regulators discretion.
This will have two salutary effects. It is well known that financial institutions — like sophisticated businesses everywhere — are expert at structuring their business practices to satisfy the letter of the law, while evading its spirit and intent with maximal effect. The more specific laws and regulations become, the easier it is for these institutions and their in-house and outside counsel to find their way around them.
Should legislation authorizing resolution authority be too specific — in the tools, techniques, and processes regulators are allowed to use in identifying and winding down financial institutions in distress — then you can bet your bottom dollar those firms will exploit this fact to skew the game in their favor. In contrast, purposely vague and undefined resolution authority will not offer its potential objects as many preemptive opportunities to evade its intended jurisdiction or consequences.
In addition, regulatory discretion would foster what I would view as a healthy increase in uncertainty among financial institutions and their stakeholders. Should, for example, a regulator have the authority to unilaterally abrogate, modify, or suspend any and all prior contracts or securities arrangements entered into by a financial institution undergoing resolution — as some might suggest — you can just imagine how much more cautious investors, lenders, and counterparties would become in their dealings with any financial institution potentially subject to such a regime in the future.
The cost of funding financial institutions would undoubtedly rise, as investors become sensitized to increased contractual risk. Firms in obvious distress would see their cost of financing skyrocket and their counterparty business dry up, as no-one with a contractual claim could rest assured it would receive exactly what it was otherwise entitled to in a resolution wind up. But then again, firms in obvious distress see that happen anyway. The point is that regulators charged with cleaning up the mess would not have their hands completely tied by contractual arrangements entered into by others when the failing company was healthy…
From the McClatchy chain newspaper in South Carolina, The State, there appears at the beginning of a story in the paper the description of what is often a rather normal set of circumstances in that state in the quoted section below.
With politicians like Mark Sanford leading the state there, one just has to wonder about the question posed in the headline above. Fortunately Columbia SC, the state capital has a Democratic Mayor, but with all the Republican possums ambling about, one does have to wonder how the residents manage to avoid the nasty creatures:
Robbie Robertson had a good meal, steak and wine, at a downtown restaurant not long ago. As he walked outside, he was struck by a proud feeling that Columbia has become a good city, active and social and beautiful. Then a possum ambled across the parking lot.
Just this one more little cigarette and then I promise I’ll quit for good….
From the New York Times:
…But it seems there has been a genuine shift in Somali policy, too, and the Americans have absorbed a Somali truth that eluded them for nearly 20 years: If Somalia is going to be stabilized, it is going to take Somalis.“This is not an American offensive,” said Johnnie Carson, the assistant secretary of state for Africa. “The U.S. military is not on the ground in Somalia. Full stop.”
He added, “There are limits to outside engagement, and there has to be an enormous amount of local buy-in for this work.”
Most of the American military assistance to the Somali government has been focused on training, or has been channeled through African Union peacekeepers. But that could change. An American official in Washington, who said he was not authorized to speak publicly, predicted that American covert forces would get involved if the offensive, which could begin in a few weeks, dislodged Qaeda terrorists.
“What you’re likely to see is airstrikes and Special Ops moving in, hitting and getting out,” the official said.
The name Sven Kramer may not mean much to you unless you’re from the Netherlands where speed skating is the national passion. Kramer, one of the best speed skaters in the world, was about to win his second gold medal at the Vancouver Olympics, in the 10,000-meter event, when his coach frantically signaled him to switch lanes lest he be disqualified. Kramer hesitated but followed the signal, and was immediately disqualified for finishing in the wrong lane.
Kramer’s time would have set a new Olympic record for the distance. Kramer’s a big, strong boy and you could tell he was upset when he started throwing things and kicking holes in the ice. There was reason to fear for the coach’s life but apparently he survived to screw up another day.
Speed skating is a wonder and its appeal is embodied nowhere better than in Apolo Ohno, a superb athlete of great charm, intelligence and overdeveloped thighs. He is a sprinter and he captured all sorts of medals in the short track events. In fact, he won more medals in Vancouver than any American has ever won in a winter Olympics, some gold, some silver, some bronze. He also may have won a medal in one of the relay races but no one can ever be sure who is even racing in the relays, much less who won or came in second or third.
The relays are the Olympic imitation of the Keystone Kops of old silent films, a stew of mayhem, confusion and chaos. In the Olympic version, many, many skaters mill around in the middle of the ice rink while one skater from each of several teams races around the rink’s periphery. Whenever one of the interior skaters feels like joining the race he or she skates into the path of the teammate on the outside and asks for a push, much in the same way a car that won’t start gets a push from another car. The pusher now joins the melee in the center of the ice while the pushee skates like crazy in pursuit of who knows what. The relay race goes on like this until, for reasons that no one understands, it stops. In fact, no one understands anything about the relay races, but they are great fun to watch if you are of sound mind and body.
What are not fun to watch are the bobsled, the luge, the skeleton and other variations of the sledding we did when we were kids. It may be fun to be in a bobsled going ninety miles an hour if terror is your idea of fun, but there’s nothing at all interesting about watching it. Occasionally the bobsleds crash and turn over and that’s kind of diverting, but it doesn’t happen often enough to warrant listening to hysterical commentators go to pieces about the importance of fourteen one hundredths of a second.
I’m not sure I have a sufficiently developed sensibility to appreciate snowboarding and aerialist skiing. While these are amazing stunts requiring great daring and athleticism, wouldn’t they fit in better at the circus, along with the man who can stand on his index finger and the woman who can lift a Volkswagen while eating a pizza? After you have seen a snowboarder or skier catapult himself into the air where he or she performs a dizzying series of somersaults and spins before returning to earth, you find yourself curiously, and immediately, jaded. “Amazing,” you say to your wife. “Let’s see what else is on.”
I am told that much skill is involved in the sport of curling, an Olympic competition of long standing. It is not hard to understand why the sport is often prescribed as a calming antidote for persons suffering from various nervous disorders. Curling has the same effect as many sleeping potions and anti-psychotic drugs without any of the side effects. Feel an anxiety attack coming on? Put a little curling in your life and watch those demons run for their lives.
There have been so many memorable Olympic moments over the years, one could go on and on. Let me close with a personal favorite. For many years Chuck Scarborough and Sue Simmons have anchored the NBC eleven o’clock news in New York. For reasons only a TV executive could understand Chuck and Sue were dispatched to Salt Lake for the 2002 Winter Olympic Games. Each night, from Utah, they would broadcast the New York local news from an outdoor perch somewhere near the site of the games in the foothills of the Rockies. Rosy-cheeked and shivering in their matching blue NBC parkas, they would read the news as if they were back in their familiar Channel 4 studio in Rockefeller Center.
It was bizarre, so strange in fact that it seemed to have a deeply unsettling effect not only on us viewers but on the rest of the news team, particularly on Janice Huff, the ever-perky weather person. It was Janice who provided the historic Olympic moment. She, of course, had stayed in New York, where she would do her usual weather thing, and then send it back to Chuck and Sue on the Olympian slopes: “That’s the weather forecast. Back to you, Chuck and Sue.” That was the usual line, but on this night (and this is a true story) Janice gave the weather report and then said, “That’s the weather forecast. Back to you, Suck and Chew.”
From TPM:
A California Republican family values legislator who was arrested early Wednesday morning for drunk driving had recently left a gay club, sources tell a local news channel… [Roy] Ashburn, who has a history of opposing gay rights, issued a contrite apology for the drunk driving arrest yesterday.
Hear this, from the American Family Association:
Chalk another death up to animal rights insanity and to the ongoing failure of the West to take counsel on practical matters from the Scripture…What about the term “killer whale” do SeaWorld officials not understand?
If the counsel of the Judeo-Christian tradition had been followed, Tillikum would have been put out of everyone’s misery back in 1991 and would not have had the opportunity to claim two more human lives.Says the ancient civil code of Israel, “When an ox gores a man or woman to death, the ox shall be stoned, and its flesh shall not be eaten, but the owner shall not be liable.” (Exodus 21:28)
So, your animal kills somebody, your moral responsibility is to put that animal to death. You have no moral culpability in the death, because you didn’t know the animal was going to go postal on somebody.
But, the Scripture soberly warns, if one of your animals kills a second time because you didn’t kill it after it claimed its first human victim, this time you die right along with your animal. To use the example from Exodus, if your ox kills a second time, “the ox shall be stoned, and its owner also shall be put to death.” (Exodus 21:29)
Via Alternet, from Opium for the Masses, by Jim Hogshire:
In 1987 agents from the Drug Enforcement Agency showed up at Monticello, Jefferson's famous estate. Jefferson had planted opium poppies in his medicinal garden, and opium poppies are now deemed illegal. Now, the trouble was the folks at the Monticello Foundation, which preserves and maintains the historic site, were discovered flagrantly continuing Jefferson's crimes. The agents were blunt: The poppies had to be immediately uprooted and destroyed or else they were going to start making arrests, and Monticello Foundation personnel would perhaps face lengthy stretches in prison…
Would the president’s health care bill fare better if it wasn’t longer than War and Peace and nowhere near as interesting? If it was cut to, say, ten pages, even Republicans would be able to digest it and it might now be the law of the land.
Might we take Rachel Maddow more seriously if she didn’t wear sneakers on her news show? And wouldn’t her news show benefit from more news and less cuteness? On a recent evening Maddow interviewed Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, the upstate New Yorker who was named to succeed Hillary Clinton when Clinton became capo di tutti cappi di tutti diplomati. When the camera drew back for a long shot of the two women sitting at facing desks we could see that Rachel was ready for some post-punditry hoops. She was wearing what appeared to be Converse high-tops, black with white rubber trimming. Gillibrand, who has shed a few pounds since joining the August Body, is certainly the best-looking Senator and probably one of the smartest. She was soft-spoken, businesslike, not wearing sneakers, and was not in the least bit cute.
Would Chris Matthews find more viewers if he didn’t constantly interrupt his guests by answering his own questions and spraying saliva all over the place?
During the president’s state of the union address, Justice Alito, who was sitting directly in front of the president a couple of rows back, kept shaking his head from side to side in apparent disapproval of what he was hearing. Shouldn’t our Supreme Court Justices, even those who are runaway ideologues and hypocrites, at least try to maintain some measure of political neutrality?
To be sure, that’s an old-fashioned notion and not one that will find favor with the likes of Alito, or with the oddly creepy Chief Justice, with the sneering Scalia, or Clarence the Clown. These gifted legal theorists have now declared that corporations are the same as people and therefore have the right to spend as much money as they want to elect their favorite candidates. Thus forty or fifty years-worth of laws limiting the pernicious influence of powerful corporate interests on democratic elections was wiped away. And those laws prominently included the McCain-Feingold Act, co-sponsored by the recent Republican candidate for the presidency. Nobody is safe from this court.
What is the O’Reilly factor? Maybe if we could figure out what it is, we could eliminate it. (Ed. note: It is suavity.) Without his factor, might O’Reilly go away, too? Of course, if O’Reilly miraculously disappeared, then Keith Olbermann would have nothing to talk about on his news show and maybe he would also go away. As a recovering MSNBC addict, I can say that might not be all bad. Even if you like Olbermann, you can see that he’s almost as far out of control as Rachel Maddow.
But if Olbermann is out of control, what can we say about Rush Limbaugh? It’s hard to understand the attraction of a man of such spectacular repulsiveness. He’s fat, loud, ugly, mean as a rabid coyote, utterly cynical, totally irresponsible, dope-addled, and breathtakingly dishonest. He spews hate and broadcasts lies, and, despite these traits, or because of them, lots of people think he’s great. A great mystery. But then, lots of people thought Hitler was a fun guy.
A final few tidbits for thought. Why does anyone care what Arianna Huffington thinks? She used to be a loud-mouthed conservative and now she’s a loud-mouthed liberal. Huh?
Who is Glenn Beck and why do we keep hearing about him? There seems to be nothing about him that isn’t reprehensible. Nobody likes him, including his mother. Everything he says is a lie. He lacks charm, wit and intelligence. So why the hell do we keep hearing about him? Let’s put him out with the trash, with Sam Alito’s manners and O’Reilly’s factor.
Ezra Klein and Paul Krugman are onto something in this excerpt. Klein used the word “thoughtful” in the quote below. He meant “smart,” of course, but was too thoughtful to say so.
[Jonathan] Chait professes himself puzzled by the right’s intellectual insecurity. Me, not so much. Here’s how I see it: in our current political culture, the background noise is overwhelmingly one of conservative platitudes. People who have strong feelings about politics but are intellectually incurious tend to pick up those platitudes, and repeat them in the belief that this makes them sound smart. (Ezra Klein once described Dick Armey thus: “He’s like a stupid person’s idea of what a thoughtful person sounds like.”)
Here, via BLCKDGRD, is Walter Benn Michaels, writing in the London Review of Books:
…Race, on the other hand, has been a more successful technology of mystification. In the US, one of the great uses of racism was (and is) to induce poor white people to feel a crucial and entirely specious fellowship with rich white people; one of the great uses of anti-racism is to make poor black people feel a crucial and equally specious fellowship with rich black people.Furthermore, in the form of the celebration of ‘identity’ and ‘ethnic diversity’, it seeks to create a bond between poor black people and rich white ones. So the African-American woman who cleans my office is supposed to feel not so bad about the fact that I make almost ten times as much money as she does because she can be confident that I’m not racist or sexist and that I respect her culture. And she’s also supposed to feel pride because the dean of our college, who makes much more than ten times what she does, is African-American, like her. And since the chancellor of our university, who makes more than 15 times what she does, is not only African-American but a woman too (the fruits of both anti-racism and anti-sexism!), she can feel doubly good about her.
But, and I acknowledge that this is the thinnest of anecdotal evidence, I somehow doubt she does. If the downside of the politics of anti-discrimination is that it now functions to legitimate the increasing disparities not produced by racism or sexism, the upside is the degree to which it makes visible the fact that the increase in those disparities does indeed have nothing to do with racism or sexism. A social analyst as clear-eyed as a University of Illinois cleaning woman would start from there…
