LSU'S MASSIVE TRIAGE FOR NEW ORLEANS

I reported earlier this afternoon that the Pete Maravich Assembly Center (PMAC) is currently being used as a morgue for New Orleans' dead: that's only partially true; the PMAC is actually a massive triage, and only part of that is about storing bodies. The pictures I've taken just can't do justice to how big this event is. Probably the best way to describe it is that this triage operation is as big as what one would expect to be needed for a hurricane like Katrina. Along those same lines, the enormous human effort I've seen today has been, at times, as uplifting as the images of the hurricane's devastation I've seen on television have been depressing. At times. At other times, it was hard not to just stop and say "Oh my god; this is so terrible."

I've got more pictures, but before I get to them I want to mention the picture I didn't get. The stadium where the LSU Tigers play football is just across the street from the PMAC. It's nickname is "Death Valley." One of the greatest visual ironies I've ever encountered was seeing a huge sign in the stadium that says "Welcome to Death Valley" while I was walking toward the PMAC. Don't get me wrong: it's not like everybody running around the triage area was having to look at such an ominous phrase--really, you had to be at just the right angle to see it, which is why I was unable to get a shot of it. Still, the irony is incredible. You can't write stuff like this.

Now, onto the pictures.

This is where I park my car, right off campus.



The sign says "Special Needs Shelter." This next pic is of yet another of the scores of ambulances surrounding the PMAC.



A couple of tired medical technicians take a smoke break.



Volunteers organize donations coming in from Salvation Army trucks.



More donations.



Strapped to a gurney.



Wheelchair bound.



All of the above pictures I took on the way to our evening rehearsal, around 5:45 or so. The stuff below I took on the way home from around 9:30 to 10:30 or so. As I neared the PMAC, I encountered a media van and took a picture--you know, I felt clever to be photographing the real news people. As soon as I took it, one of the producer guys said, "hey, come on over here and take a look inside," which I did. They were really friendly, fellow Texans from WOAI TV in San Antonio.

Here's that first shot.



Inside the van.



Another shot inside the van.



WOAI sends in a live report.



Then I moved on.

A National Guard medic makes a call on his cell phone.



No matter where you go, cops love to hang out.



At this point I need to observe that, despite my continual cop-bashing here at Real Art, I am thankful that we have police, and as far as I can tell, Louisiana's finest are performing their jobs remarkably well. They have my utmost respect. Here are a few more cop shots:

Traffic chaos.



A mobile command unit for the Federal Witness Protection Program in Atlanta.



A police chopper comes in for a landing.



Police chopper on the makeshift landing pad at the track and field stadium adjacent to the PMAC, which is in the background.



Well, that's all for now. Tomorrow I'm going to try to write my own personal Book of Exodus, detailing my and Becky's flight from the hurricane zone. Tonight, I'm going to get some sleep.

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LSU'S BASKETBALL ARENA IS NOW A MORGUE

I walked by the Pete Maravich Assembly Center (PMAC) on my way home from rehearsal. My camera was still in my backpack from our trip to Tyler:













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IT'S LIKE SOMETHING FROM THE BIBLE

Well, after rushing off to Tyler and back again I'm exhausted. I also had to sit down and review my lines for Arms and the Man a little while ago because life goes on: we've got eight hours of catch-up rehearsal tomorrow, even though all LSU classes have been canceled until after Labor Day because campus is now a triage for the high volume of injuries out of the Big Easy--a media call has gone out for all Baton Rouge medical professionals to report to the Tigers' field house, just down the street from where we live. Consequently, I'm going to hold off for a couple of days on relating the details of our Star Wars like exodus from the hurricane zone.

In the meantime, here's some local coverage from WAFB TV in Baton Rouge. I tried to get something from the New Orleans Times-Picayune, but they haven't posted since the levee broke, which is ominous, indeed. Really, you may very well have already read this, because it's just a wire report, but I wanted to get some local flavor, and Baton Rouge's paper kind of sucks--however, TV news here has been wall-to-wall, so I want to give them a nod of the hat.

Blanco: Everyone in New Orleans Needs to Get Out

With conditions in the hurricane-ravaged city of New Orleans rapidly deteriorating, Governor Kathleen Blanco said Tuesday afternoon that people now huddled in the Superdome and other rescue centers need to be evacuated. She called the situation heartbreaking.

Because of two levees that broke Tuesday, the governor says the city is rapidly filling with water and the prospect of having power is a long time off. She also said the storm severed a major water main, leaving the city without drinkable water.

Blanco says that at midnight, all the boat operators trying to rescue people from rooftops were told to take a break, but they refused.

Click here for the rest.


New Orleans' Angel of Death: the levee breaks

I have to admit being freaked out by all this. I cannot explain how much I love New Orleans and what that place means to me--to some small extent, it's why I came to LSU. I will tell you one thing about our time on the road. In Tyler, the motel we found was full of evacuees from the Crescent City. I spoke with an older woman who told me that she had lost everything and that she was pretty sure that a couple of family members had drowned. What can you say to that? My simple statement, "that's terrible; I'm so sorry," seemed trite, especially because I then broke off the conversation because Becky and I had to check out to leave for our home in Baton Rouge. This is terrible, but it really is beyond my ability to truly articulate. It's horrible.

I managed to find a couple of blogs written by New Orleans residents who seem to be posting throughout the tragedy. I don't think they're actually there right now, but they seem to have some extra insight. Go check out on tender hooks and Looka!, and be sure to drop a comment in support.

UPDATE: Here's how these guys are posting in spite of the storm carnage; they're expatriates. The on tender hooks guy is in Lafayette, and the Looka! guy is in California. However, they've got what appear to be very close connections with the Big Easy, and are writing about Katrina's effects in a rather personal way. Very much worth checking out.

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SAFE AND SOUND IN BATON ROUGE

We have returned to virtually no damage and functional electric power!!! We haven't spent a single moment outside of air conditioning this whole time. Weird. When Alicia hit Houston back in '83, we were without power for over three weeks. I'll post about our rather pointless evacuation later tonight.

New Orleans looks bad.

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KATRINA

Mood Music.

From the Baton Rouge Advocate:

Kat could be big one in Big Easy

As Hurricane Katrina moved toward southeastern Louisiana and appeared to put New Orleans in her crosshairs Saturday, Mayor Ray Nagin urged residents in this sub-sea-level city to remain calm but take the powerful storm "very seriously."

"Ladies and gentlemen, this is not a test. This is the real deal," Nagin, flanked by Gov. Kathleen Blanco and other state and local leaders, said during an early afternoon news conference at City Hall. Workers boarded up windows at City Hall later in the day.

Click here for the rest.

Again from the Advocate:

Extended power outages expected in EBR

Parish officials warned the public Sunday that Hurricane Katrina will likely cause an extended period of power outages – something like that endured after 1992’s Hurricane Andrew.

Jay Grymes of the state Office of Climatology said Katrina is a lot like 1969’s Hurricane Camille, which devastated the Mississippi Gulf Coast – except Katrina is larger. Officials urged people who don’t have a reason to travel to stay off the streets from 7 p.m. this evening until the storm passes, which will likely be about sunset on Monday.

Basically, the parish will be shut down Monday and Tuesday, said parish Chief Administrative Officer Walter Monsour during a meeting of emergency response officials Sunday morning.

Residents are urged to be prepared to live without electrical power for a week or possibly longer in some cases.

Click here for the rest.

Consequently, expect Real Art to go dark for maybe a week or more. My Dad has strongly urged us to get out even though nobody else is: as a former phone linesman, he knows, so we're going. See you later.



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TWO FROM ALTERNET

Never Enough

Another aspect of how our lifestyle tends to erode our culture is that people are trying extremely hard to keep up -- not only with their neighbors, but also just the two jobs they have.

There's an amazing outbreak of amphetamines across the country that you've probably heard of. It's rampant across the country now. Everybody talks about marijuana being the problem. That's not the problem -- it's individuals who are essentially hijacking their pleasure centers, trying to stay awake.

Those types of erosions will, within a generation or two, have a massive effect upon what I consider to be the crucible of the culture: the stable family and community structures, which enable people to grow up and learn how it is to behave in a normal, balanced civil society. When you begin to get large numbers of people who are addicted to amphetamines or to material goods, this fragments families.

And once the family is fragmented and the community is fragmented, the next generation grows up with no real awareness of what it is that they need to do in order to be happy. So you get onto this strange treadmill situation -- it's even a slippery slope really -- where they fall into something without even realizing it's a genuine addiction.

Click here for the rest.

This is from an interview with an author of a book about rampant American consumerism, and the above excerpt illustrates but one of the many problems associated with it. Consumer debt, social alienation, anxiety, obesity, and depression are a few more. We've got to face the fact that the accumlation of things is simply not a desirable goal: getting off of the parental teat years ago and realizing that I was poor was probably one of the best things that's ever happened to me--once I could no longer afford them, I realized that I didn't really care about all the crap I had been buying at the mall for years on my folks' credit card. Happiness is about family, community, and friends, and you just can't buy stuff like that.

Investigating Pat Robertson

Despite his apology, Pat Robertson should still be investigated -- and potentially prosecuted -- for calling for the murder of a democratically elected head of state. Under Title 18 of US Code Section 1116, "whoever kills or attempts to kill a foreign official, official guest, or internationally protected person shall be punished." Section 878 of the same title makes it a crime to "knowingly and willingly threaten" to commit the above crime.

The US government is also obligated under international law to prevent and punish acts of terrorism against foreign heads of state, if those acts are conceived of or planned on US territory. The 1973 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Crimes Against Internationally Protected Persons makes it a crime to commit a "murder, kidnapping, or other attack upon on the liberty of an internationally protected person;" [including] a "threat to commit any such attack."

Click here for the rest.

That's good enough for me. Lock the murderous bastard up and throw away the key. Any moral American would agree.

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'Redneck Woman' to keep tobacco under wraps

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

Tennessee's attorney general had asked Gretchen Wilson not to pull out a can of smokeless tobacco during performances of her new song Skoal Ring because it glamorized tobacco use. A warning letter said the routine might violate the 1998 tobacco settlement, which forbids tobacco ads targeting young people.

Attorney General Paul Summers said the singer's representative apologized today and said Wilson would not use the Skoal can in concert again. It was not used at a Cincinnati concert Thursday night, his office said.

Click here for the rest.

It's possible that the reason I care at all about this is that I worked in Baytown for six years, and, well, redneck chicks have their appeal and all that. Putting aside any subconscious motivations I might have in blogging about the very hot trailer park diva Gretchen Wilson, however, still leaves a pretty weird story about a government official harassing an artist. Wilson, the story says, "has no relationship with" Skoal, and can in no way be understood to be advertising their "dip." How is it possible, then, for Tennessee's AG to imply a threat of legal action against Wilson? It's fairly easy to dismiss this as an example of anti-tobacco hysteria, which, as far as hysteria goes, is not unreasonable given the plant's massive death toll. However, the fact that the government has essentially bullied an artist into doing its bidding on dubious pretenses is quite disturbing.


"Redneck Woman" Gretchen Wilson

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FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING

Frankie



Paz



Phil



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DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC--->REPUBLIC
Leaderless on the left

From the London Guardian courtesy of BuzzFlash:

But unlike the Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry in his swift boat, Sheehan will not be blown off course quite so easily. The public mood in America is shifting consistently and decisively against the war and Bush's handling of it. Gallup has commissioned eight polls asking whether it was worth going to war since the beginning of the year: every time at least half have said no. For the first time, most people believe the invasion of Iraq has made the US more vulnerable to further attacks. The number of those who want all the troops withdrawn remains a minority at 33% - but that is double what it was two years ago, and still growing.

The reason Sheehan has become such a lightning rod is because that mood has found only inadequate and inconsistent expression in Congress. It has been left to her to articulate an escalating political demand that is in desperate need of political representation. This marks not only a profound dislocation between the political class and political culture but a short circuit in the democratic process. The mainstream has effectively been marginalised.

Click here for the rest.

I'll tell you why Congress is so out of touch.

From Merriam-Webster Online:

republic : a government in which supreme power resides in a body of citizens entitled to vote and is exercised by elected officers and representatives responsible to them and governing according to law

pure democracy : democracy in which the power is exercised directly by the people rather than through representatives

In the United States, we have something of a combination of these two systems of government, a "democratic republic." That is, the US is a republic, but the "body of citizens entitled to vote" is much larger than, say, the citizen elites who voted in the Roman republic or in the Renaissance Netherlands. In other words, the representatives in America are supposed to govern on behalf of average, ordinary citizens, not simply for blocks of societal wealth and power. That's what makes America a "democratic republic." It's kind of like pure democracy, but it's actually a republic. Supposedly.

What has happened is that, by multiple means, including campaign financing, media ownership, lobbying, and plain old bribery, America's wealthy elites have usurped the system, transforming our "democratic republic" into a simple republic. Our Congressional representatives no longer represent average ordinary citizens: they represent the powerful and wealthy, just as in ancient Rome. Obviously, US elites haven't quite yet decided that the Iraq adventure is a huge waste of life and money. Consequently, US policy is to "stay the course."

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MAUREEN DOWD'S EDGY FLUFF
My Private Idaho

From the New York Times courtesy of BuzzFlash:

For political reasons, the president has a history of silence on America's war dead. But he finally mentioned them on Monday because it became politically useful to use them as a rationale for war - now that all the other rationales have gone up in smoke.

"We owe them something," he told veterans in Salt Lake City (even though his administration tried to shortchange the veterans agency by $1.5 billion). "We will finish the task that they gave their lives for."

What twisted logic: with no W.M.D., no link to 9/11 and no democracy, now we have to keep killing people and have our kids killed because so many of our kids have been killed already? Talk about a vicious circle: the killing keeps justifying itself.

Click here for the rest.

Generally, I detest the way the New York Times' token female pundit stylistically emphasizes her fluffy status as a woman-among-men: that is, she's knows she's a token, and seems to play that role to the hilt. Sometimes, however, among the meaningless critiques of politicians' clothing and hair, she manages to make some good points. In this particular essay, she starts out in typical form, meditating on the President's vacation, but by the column's end she's Lady Macbeth, going for Bush's jugular. I do wish she'd drop the bullshit Melanie Wilkes routine more often because this is a good piece, much more worthy of Scarlet O'Hara. Indeed, I think Dowd has a bit of Molly Ivins deep inside her.

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RELIGIOUS NUT PAT ROBERTSON'S
FATWA AGAINST HUGO CHAVEZ

From the Houston Chronicle:

Pat Robertson ignites war of words

During Monday's broadcast of Robertson's show, The 700 Club , on the Christian Broadcasting Network, the 75-year-old host painted Chavez as a menace intent on spreading communism throughout the hemisphere.

Rather than waging a war, Robertson said, it would be cheaper and easier to assassinate the Venezuelan leader.

"I don't know about this doctrine of assassination. But if (Chavez) thinks we're trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it," Robertson said.

"We don't need another $200 billion war to get rid of one, you know, strong-arm dictator. It's a whole lot easier to have some of the covert operatives do the job," he said.

Click here for the rest.

Communism? Communism?!? Robertson wants us to assassinate a democratically elected leader in order to stop him from spreading communism??? That's almost funny: not even the Red Chinese are communist anymore--indeed, nobody's communist anymore, except for maybe Chavez's buddy Castro, but Cuba is something of a joke as far as global influence is concerned. Forgive me for pounding away at the obvious, but there is simply no such thing as a communist threat in the 21st century.

Robertson's clearly a total loon, but that doesn't make his decree any less serious.

From Democracy Now, a whole bunch of context:

The Cannon of Christianity

AMY GOODMAN: I just wanted to end by asking about this comment of the Venezuelan Ambassador to the United States being concerned in if and when Hugo Chavez comes to New York for the United Nations General Assembly meetings in September, as so many heads of state do from around the world, what this means for him. Will Pat Robertson be detained during that time because he presents a danger to a foreign president?

MICHAEL RATNER: You know, this is – you know this is – we should not underestimate the seriousness of what Robertson did. I mean, what we have here is a man with millions of adherents around the world, in this country, possibly in Venezuela and other places. And when that person says it's good to take somebody out, it's good to assassinate him, what is he saying to his adherents except go for this guy? So, when Robertson – when Chavez is in Venezuela, there may be some guys there, when he comes to the U.S., obviously, this is the heart and core of Robertson's support, and is that statement, are his strong statements about what this guy represents going to cause somebody to do something? So, they have cause – they have asked for real protection, if and when Chavez comes here.

CHRIS HEDGES: And I think we have to remember that the radical fringe of this movement is violent, that those who attack abortion clinics, those who embrace this creed and are members of militia movements are people who not only believe in the use of violence but practice the use of violence. So, what you have potentially is the incitement of these fringe groups within the movements who are happy and willing to use force.

Click here to read, watch, or listen to the rest of the report.

Despite Robertson's obvious insanity, he wields a great deal of influence. His death sentence against Chavez is no joke. But, wait! Robertson claims that he never actually said anything about assassinating Chavez. No, wait, scratch that. Robertson apologizes for his fatwa. I mean...oh, just read this bit from the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

Robertson apologizes for assassination remark

Religious broadcaster Pat Robertson apologized today for calling for the assassination of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, only hours after he denied saying Chavez should be killed.

"Is it right to call for assassination?" Robertson said. "No, and I apologize for that statement. I spoke in frustration that we should accommodate the man who thinks the U.S. is out to kill him."

And

Today, he initially denied having called for Chavez to be killed and said The Associated Press had misinterpreted his remarks.

"I didn't say 'assassination.' I said our special forces should 'take him out,'" Robertson said on his show. "'Take him out' could be a number of things including kidnapping."

Click here for the rest.

Well, actually, he did say "assassination," and made it completely clear that he wanted Chavez dead. I guess that's why he finally issued an apology. Ha! Still, despite the great fun it is seeing Robertson humiliate himself, this is no lauging matter.

Robertson is coming at the Venezuela issue from a decidedly fundamentalist point of view, seeing Chavez's leftist populism as an atheist threat to "Christian America," but that view reflects the much more sane, albeit evil, position of the wealthy elite. That is, it's pretty routine for the world financial establishment to punish third world nations that attempt to use what little wealth they have for much needed social reform by pulling out their capital. In other words, all international investment comes with strings attached: third world nations are to be run for the benefit of the global corporate elite alone; citizens be damned.

Oil-rich Venezuela is something of a wild card in this game. They can afford to tell foreign investors to go to hell, and build more schools and hospitals if they are so inclined. That might be okay because it's only one country out of hundreds, except for the fact that they set the wrong example for other third world nations. That's why the elites hate Chavez; that's why the US so quickly supported the failed coup there a couple of years back. That's the real threat, not communism.

Of course, Robertson isn't worried about that so much as he is working his own fundamentalist riff on the Chavez threat. But that doesn't really matter in this era of the pervasive conservative echo chamber: lots of Americans, fundamentalist and secular alike, probably agree with Robertson. And he just gave the true psychos among them the proverbial license to kill.

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IRAQ IS FAR WORSE THAN WE THINK
Two from Brit Reporter Robert Fisk

From ZNet, two essays by longtime British Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk.

What Does Democracy Really Mean In The
Middle East? Whatever The West Decides

In the weird, space-ship isolation of Saddam’s old republican palace, the Kurds and the Shia have been tearing Iraq apart, refusing to sign up for a constitution lest it fail to give them the federations - and the oil wealth - they want. They miss their deadline - though I found no one in "real" Baghdad, no one outside the Green Zone bunker, who seemed to care.

And that evening, I turn on my television to hear President Bush praise the "courage" of the constitution negotiators whose deadline Bush himself had promised would be met.

Courage? So it’s courageous, is it, to sit in a time capsule, sealed off from your people by miles of concrete walls, and argue about the future of a nation which is in anarchy. Then Condoleezza Rice steps forward to tell us this is all part of the "road to democracy" in the Middle East.

Click here for the rest.

Theme Park Death

He grasped my arm and looked into my face. "Mr Robert," he said, "do you realise I was kidnapped?" Every day now, I come across Iraqi acquaintances - or friends who have cousins or fathers or sons - who have been kidnapped. Often they are released. Sometimes they are murdered and I go to their families to express those condolences which are especially painful for me - because I am a Westerner, arriving to say how sorry I am to relatives who blame the West for the anarchy that killed their loved ones. This time my friend survived, just.

Another good friend, a university professor, visits me for coffee the next day. The absence of identities in this report tells you all you need to know about the terror which embraces Baghdad. "I was invigilating the last exams of term in the linguistics department and I saw a mature student cheating. I walked up to him and said I believed he was cribbing. He said he wasn’t. I told him I would take his papers away and he leant towards me and made it clear I would be murdered if I prevented him completing his exams. I went to the head of department. I thought he would discipline this man and take away his papers. But he talked to him and then said that he could continue the exam. My own head of department failed me completely." My professor friend loves English literature, but he has new problems.

Click here for the rest.

We all know it's bad over there. What we don't know is that it's absolutely awful, far worse than Saddam Hussein's tyranny ever was. In addition to the insurgency, power and food disruptions, and straight-up abuse of civilians by US soldiers, plain old fashioned crime is completely out of control, and Iraqis live in a constant state of terror--there's absolutely nothing the United States can do to make life in Iraq any better, that is, when it's not intentionally making life worse. I've been hearing a lot lately about people wanting to hear Bush's plans for withdrawal. Here's mine: get out right now and beg the UN to take over. Offer them anything they want. Give them complete control. Pay for the whole thing. There's really no other choice. We can't do it by ourselves and we can't do it with help. If Iraq is ever to become a peaceful place in the future, the US simply will not be a part of it.

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IT'S YOUR FAULT
Corruption in the Republic

From AlterNet:

Almost four in ten Americans find politics and government "too complicated to understand," and a similar number believed their families "had no say in what federal government does." They're right, of course, but it's nobody's fault but their own.

So who cares if politicians hand out hundreds of billions of dollars in corporate welfare to the boys down at the club while one in five American children lives in poverty? Nobody in America is paying attention anyway, even as the vultures continue to circle overhead. It is a mainstay of our political culture -- and the greatest victory that powerful corporate interests have ever achieved -- that we consider government as something apart from ourselves, and that we are powerless to change it.

And if you think the prescription is to elect more Democrats, as so many progressives do, the last week of business in the House should dissuade you of the perception. Forty-one Democratic members voted for President Bush's energy bill, about which the Washington Post carried the following headlines during the last week of July: "Energy Bill Raises Fears About Pollution, Fraud," "Energy Deal Has Tax Breaks for Companies," "Energy Tax Breaks Total $14.5 Billion" and "Bill Wouldn't Wean U.S. Off Oil Imports, Analysts Say."

Click here for the rest.

Okay, I agree that the dissolution of American democracy is ultimately the fault of its citizens, but there are mitigating circumstances. That is, the forces of corruption have been trying as hard as they can, marshalling vast resources, in order to lull Americans into their current Wizard of Oz style poppy sleep-trance. The structural model for public schools, originally adopted in order to create a compliant workforce, teaches children to do as they're told and to not question authority. The rise of the mass media has hit the nation with a double whammy of lulling entertainment and brainwashing propaganda known as advertising, both of which condition people to focus on their own personal circumstances without considering the bigger picture. Wealthy elites and massive corporations use always present loopholes to virtually buy politicians, doing an end run around the electorate. And the mainstream news media...well, they lie and distort all the time, and increasingly focus on celebrity scandals and missing white women. It's our fault, yes, but 21st century Americans have to deal with obstacles so sophisticated that they make good old fashioned tyrants look like school yard bullies. It is our fault for allowing this to happen, but how the hell could we have stopped it? How will we end it? Somehow, scolding people for not being more politically involved just doesn't seem to cut it.

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PROSPERITY FOR THE FEW
Why a booming economy feels flat

From the Christian Science Monitor courtesy of AlterNet:

Despite continued strong economic growth, this expansion is clouded with enough complications and uncertainties that, for many, it doesn't feel like good times.

The reason? A boom in corporate profits has not yet created a job market that makes workers feel secure, economists say. Hiring hasn't skyrocketed. Worse, wages are stagnant. This paycheck squeeze may prove more worrisome than soaring oil prices and concerns over a housing bubble. Some experts worry that wage stagnation may prove more permanent this time, because of an increasingly global market for labor.

And

Second, wage growth has been lackluster, despite strong gains in worker productivity.

Normally, as employees are able to produce more in each hour of work, the result is greater cash flow that can be divvied up between workers and owners or investors. In the long run, rising productivity means rising wages and living standards.

But in the short run, "most of the gains in the economy have gone into profits rather than wages," says Mr. Behravesh.

Click here for the rest.

This is bad news for most Americans, but it's good news for most business owners. Why? Stagnant wages mean lower operating costs, which is good for the bottom line, and that's the reason this news is so disturbing. Generally, as the article observes, a higher gross domestic product, that is, more economic activity, translates into higher wages as businesses expand, competing with other businesses to attract more employees, in order to take advantage of good economic times. That's been true enough throughout the 20th century. However, business would greatly prefer to have the best of both worlds, a better economy without having to pay higher wages: it now appears that they've found their holy grail. The weakness of labor as a political force combined with heavy "outsourcing" of both white and blue collar jobs to third world countries has created a situation where business can have its cake and eat it, too. Consequently, the economy has recovered, but only if you're already wealthy. If you're not with the "in crowd," you're still pretty nervous.

The long and short of this is that the conventional wisdom that a rising tide raises all the boats is no longer operative, and it may very well be structural, that is, permanent. Business wants this situation because it's good for business, and has been working diligently for decades to create it. Now that they've got it, they're not likely to give it up easily; with most of Congress in their pockets, it's even less likely. Unfortunately, while good for American business, it's obviously not good for most American citizens, and stands to get worse. As I've said before, what's good for Wall Street is not good for Main Street. The sooner that idea makes it into mainstream discourse, the better.

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"INTELLIGENT DESIGN" ATTACKS KNOWLEDGE ITSELF

From Mother Jones:

Which brings us to the last "phenomenon," the teachings of the bible. This evidence is inherently unscientific in that it has nothing to do with phenomena. There are no data or empirical observations that could in principle come into conflict with the claim of biblical truth.

And this is the scary part of the evolution-creationism debate. It is not about a particular set of ideas, with each one being tested for validity; it is about whether we should discount the scientific method on which modern society rests. It is about whether we should abandon skepticism, use of evidence, and the willingness to modify one's ideas in light of evidence.

It seems that our education system has produced a citizenry that would be as comfortable if their children debated how many angels could dance on the head of pin in science class rather than whether continental drift is a plausible theory.

The foundation of modern civilization in the United States appears to under attack, with a majority out of touch not simply with contemporary science but with the method of knowing that undergirds science.

Click here for the rest.

I've written numerous times about how the public school system is far less about learning and knowledge than it is about indoctrinating America's children into the elites' preferred culture of obedience and authority, so it's no surprise to me that so many Americans are not hostile to the idea of teaching "intelligent design" in biology classes right alongside the theory of evolution. The bottom line is that a vast segment of the population is educationally ill equipped as far as being able to distinguish fact from opinion--the easily believed lies supporting the US invasion of Iraq are a ready example, but there are about a billion other examples as well.

I remember the times evolution came up as a topic of conversation with my high school students. Generally, the position I advocated was that science is one way of understanding reality, and the Bible is another: without trashing the Bible's validity, I pointed out that, while they don't have to agree with everything they are taught, students do have to understand science, and using religion-based arguments to dismiss evolution in class is entirely missing the point of studying biology. So, too, with the evolution "debate" taking place nationally. Teaching "intelligent design" in a science class goes waaay outside of what science actually is. That is, it blurs the distinction between these two philosophies of reality, religion and science. "Intelligent design" makes much more sense in a general philosophy or comparitive religions class, but absolutely not in a science class; "intelligent design" is just not science, and pretending that it is does a disservice to the entire country and every individual in it. Indeed, it muddies the waters of reality itself, and that's kind of creepy.

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Hunter S. Thompson's ashes
shot from cannon in final farewell

From the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation:

As the ashes erupted from a tower, red, white, blue and green fireworks lit up the sky over Thompson's mountain home in Woody Creek near Aspen, Colorado.

The 15-story tower was modeled after Thompson's personal logo: a clenched fist rising from the hilt of a dagger. It was built between his home and a tree-covered canyon wall, not far from a tent filled with merrymakers.

The private celebration included actors Bill Murray and Johnny Depp, rock bands, blow-up dolls and plenty of liquor.

Click here for the rest.

Sounds like a party the good Doctor would have enjoyed. I'm especially happy to note the use of blow-up dolls, which always make for a memorable celebration. Here's what I wrote about him when he died last February. Here's a link to the first of a six strip Doonesbury series from last March showing how Duke deals with Thompson's death.



When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.

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KRUGMAN ON GOP VOTE FRAUD
What They Did Last Fall

From the New York Times courtesy of Working For Change:

But both reports show that votes were suppressed by long lines at polling places - lines caused by inadequate numbers of voting machines - and that these lines occurred disproportionately in areas likely to vote Democratic. Both reports also point to problems involving voters who were improperly forced to cast provisional votes, many of which were discarded.

The Conyers report goes further, highlighting the blatant partisanship of election officials. In particular, the behavior of Ohio's secretary of state, Kenneth Blackwell - who supervised the election while serving as co-chairman of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Ohio - makes Ms. Harris's actions in 2000 seem mild by comparison.

And then there are the election night stories. Warren County locked down its administration building and barred public observers from the vote-counting, citing an F.B.I. warning of a terrorist threat. But the F.B.I. later denied issuing any such warning. Miami County reported that voter turnout was an improbable 98.55 percent of registered voters. And so on.

Click here for the rest.

Krugman, like many moderates, isn't ready to say that the GOP stole the election in Ohio. Hell, for that matter, I don't really know myself--the only reason I'm willing to take the leap of faith is because I'm certain that they stole Florida in 2000; it's nice to know, at least, that Krugman agrees with me on that one. What Krugman does say about Ohio in '04 is that the Republicans tried as hard as they could to steal it, and that this seems to be business as usual for both parties. It just seems that the Republicans are better at it these days--indeed, it's been quite a while since JFK's father sent Frank Sinatra to the mob bosses in Chicago to rig the voting in Illinois back in 1960; the Dems haven't been quite as competent as that for many years. At any rate, if politics are this dirty, there's now one more reason, in addition to the ever present corrupting influence of corporate cash, among others, to believe that US democracy is a sham.

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LUNATICS WITH GUNS TO HUNT MEXICANS IN HOUSTON

From the Houston Chronicle:

Leaders of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps of Texas had earlier said volunteers observing Houston's day laborers in October would carry nothing but video cameras.

But leaders now say those involved in the operations targeting local illegal immigrants will be allowed to carry arms as long as they comply with all federal and state laws.

In fact, those who have a concealed-weapons permit are being offered a discount on joining the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps. An Arizona-based organization, the Minutemen started out by patrolling the Arizona-Mexico border in April to prevent illegal immigrants from crossing, but the group has announced it will conduct a variety of operations here this fall.

Click here for the rest.

This can come to no good end. Illegal immigration is a problem, indeed, and it won't stop being a problem until the government cracks down on the businesses that employ them, thereby ending a primary motivation to cross the border. Funny thing is, the feds purposefully turn a blind eye to the practice of employing illegals because they work for so darned cheap! In other words, Mexicans trying to find a better life in the United States aren't the problem: the problem is oppressive labor practices tacitly approved by our business dominated government. The elites want illegal immigration because it enables business to bypass labor law, keeping illegal workers in near slave-like conditions. Of course, the Minutemen are too fucking stupid to understand all that. In fact, the Minutemen are so fucking stupid that they're racists. So now H-Town has a bunch of stupid fucking racists running around with guns hunting Mexicans who just want jobs.

Man, this country...

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HELEN KELLER: REVOLUTIONARY

From ZNet:

In a textbook example of whitewashing, if today's America knows Helen Keller (1880-1968) at all, it's the easy-to-digest image portrayed in the 1962 film, "The Miracle Worker." Brave deaf and blind girl "overcomes" all obstacles to inspire everyone she meets. "The Helen Keller with whom most people are familiar is a stereotypical sexless paragon who was able to overcome deaf-blindness and work tirelessly to promote charities and organizations associated with other blind and deaf-blind individuals," writes Sally Rosenthal in Ragged Edge.

But, in 1909, Helen Keller became a socialist. Soon after, she emerged as a vocal supporter of the working class and traveled the nation to voice her opposition to war. "How can our rulers claim they are fighting to make the world safe for democracy," she asked, "while here in the U.S. Negroes may be massacred and their property burned?"

Click here for the rest.

I first read about Keller when I was in the third grade, seven or eight years after her death. Her struggle against her disabilities was engaging enough to keep me away from the television and playground while glued to her biography. But I didn't learn about the really fascinating aspects of her life until I read Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States back in the late 90s. It strikes me as amazing that, if Keller is an important enough figure to be a part of every public school history curriculum in the United States, her influential adult career as a left-wing political activist is not mentioned at all!!! It is impossible that such an omission is simply some sort of an oversight; it is too consistent, too across-the-board, too cut-and-dry. There's only one explanation of the historical eradication of Keller's leftism: it is deliberate political censorship, performed by numerous individuals over the years, acting individually. Keller's values would be disruptive to the unjust American social structure, and therefore inappropriate for school.

What might this tell us about how public school handles history in general?

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FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING

Paz and Frankie



Phil



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The Wal-Mart Thought Police

From AlterNet:

As you have probably heard, the "everyday low prices" at these concrete boxes of utopian consumption have tremendous costs for our environment, our workers, our wages, our communities, and the public coffers. But they also come at the expense of free speech and artistic expression, as the corporation targets items that often include progressive criticism of conservative values.

Based in Bentonville, AR, the brand behemoth has become the self-appointed culture police by screening the music, books and magazines that many Americans will be able to access -- in a number of communities, Wal-Mart is the only convenient store in the area stocking culture products.

Click here for the rest.

This was the issue that first got me hating Wal-Mart back in the mid 90s. Since then, much more has come to light about how and why the vast retail chain sucks the big one, like their crappy pay rates, sexist employment practices, and lack of health insurance for most employees, but the censorship issue coupled with their advancement of conservative philosophy is still what gets under my skin the most. Of course, Wal-Mart is a private entity, and legally is entitled to sell or not sell whatever products it likes, but that doesn't change the fact that their behind-the-scenes manipulation of people's perceptions of reality is a major factor in the so-called "culture wars." As the article observes, the retailer is the biggest CD seller in the world: in many locations, Wal-Mart is the only place to buy books, movies, and music. Because their corporate version of "family values" is often the only version available, their power to affect American understanding of important issues becomes almost as strong as the mass media's, and easily as rightwardly skewed as Fox News.

My, oh my, how Wal-Mart sucks.

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Kissinger Compares Iraq to Vietnam

From the Progressive:

It is apparent now to everyone: A majority of the American public sees the Iraq war as a dreadful mistake. Remember the outrage at the suggestion that Iraq might become a quagmire? Yesterday Henry Kissinger drew a parallel between Iraq and Vietnam, acknowledging the public's reluctance to "stay the course" with the President in what looks like a hopeless situation

"If a radical government emerges in Baghdad or if any part of Iraq becomes what Afghanistan used to be, a training ground for terrorists, then this will be a catastrophe for the Islamic world and for Europe, much as they may -- reluctant as they may be to admit it -- and eventually for us," Kissinger told CNN's Wolf Blitzer.

Click here for the rest.

During the waning days of the Johnson administration, Kissinger made sure that the South Vietnamese rejected a peace plan sponsored by the White House that had a good chance of ending the war--indeed, the treaty the Nixon administration finally used to pull out our troops was almost identical to the one Kissinger scuttled. The idea was to make sure that the unpopular war dragged on, increasing Nixon's chances of winning, which he did easily after Johnson dropped out.

During his campaign, Nixon offered voters "peace with honor," which actually meant "victory." In other words, Nixon and Kissinger wanted to fight a war that Johnson's advisors had already decided America couldn't win because they thought were smarter and would succeed where the pansy Democrats failed. Of course, they were wrong, but Kissinger will never admit it. To this day he believes the reason we lost in Vietnam is because the public wouldn't support doing what it would take to win. In other words, he doesn't think we lost; he thinks we quit. Now it sounds like he thinks we're about to quit again. My bet is that his weird strategic brain has developed a special power--Kissinger is psychically sensitive, no doubt, to American disgust with immoral and illegal wars.

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POSSIBLE HIV CURE IN CROCODILE BLOOD?

Mood music.

From CNN courtesy of AlterNet:

Scientists in Australia's tropical north are collecting blood from crocodiles in the hope of developing a powerful antibiotic for humans, after tests showed that the reptile's immune system kills the HIV virus.

The crocodile's immune system is much more powerful than that of humans, preventing life-threatening infections after savage territorial fights which often leave the animals with gaping wounds and missing limbs.

"They tear limbs off each other and despite the fact that they live in this environment with all these microbes, they heal up very rapidly and normally almost always without infection," said U.S. scientist Mark Merchant, who has been taking crocodile blood samples in the Northern Territory.

Click here for the rest.

Well, I've heard about possible HIV cures before, and it always comes to nothing. But, then, scientists have been trying to figure out this Gordian Knot of a virus for a couple of decades now, so why not crocodile blood? Here's hoping there's something to it. Not only would a cure save millions of lives worldwide, it would also go a long way toward removing the sex=sin=death moral meme that the religious right has effectively used to virtually destroy the very serious conversation about sexual health this nation was having before AIDS hit the scene.

Of course, a possible downside is that any crocodile blood cure might inadvertantly turn humans into mindless lizard creatures who want to slash us all to death, which is exactly what happened to Peter Parker's professor friend Dr. Connors.



Okay, I'm just kidding. And maybe giving away the plot to the next movie.

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ONLY WAR SUPPORTERS CAN MOURN FALLEN SOLDIERS

Apparently. From the Daily Kos:

Late Monday night, a man, now confirmed by the media as Larry Northern, age 46, decided to run over the over crosses at Camp Casey that serve as a memorial to the soldiers who have died in the war in Iraq.

According to TexasLady at DemocraticUnderground as well as Ernest Hancock from Air America affilliate KXXT, the man was soon caught and arrested by the Crawford police. Hancock stated on Air America Radio's "Mike Malloy" program, "He had some crosses in the undercarriage of his pickup truck, and he's been arrested".

Click here for the rest.

If I understand this correctly, this guy is a conservative who disapproves of Cindy Sheehan's anti-war vigil outside Bush's vacation ranch in Texas, and his protest of her protest was to desecrate a row of small monuments to fallen American soldiers. Now, I understand all the nuances at play here, how a war supporter would think that Sheehan is crassly capitalizing on her son's and other soldiers' deaths in order to advance a political position that, from a pro-war point of view, is bogus. I understand how this guy's perspective paints Sheehan's anti-war memorial as nothing but an insult to the soldiers who it ostensibly honors. I get it--after all, I used to be conservative, myself; I think I have some insight. But how could this guy completely miss the fact that the image he sent out to America is of a frothing, war-lusting, lunatic mowing down little crosses for dead American soldiers? Some conservatives really are nuts.


photo courtesy of Democratic Underground

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CINDY SHEEHAN: It's about accountablility

Seattle area journalist David Neiwert on Sheehan's mainstream media critics. From Orcinus:

I mean, just how is it that the nation isn't really aware of the contents of the August 6, 2001, Presidential Daily Briefing? How is it that, nearly a year after both the 9/11 Commission Report and the Duelfer Report, most Americans still believe Iraq was connected to 9/11? How did it happen that a guy who certifiably skipped out on his military commitment was able to run a campaign that slandered his war-hero opponent's record? How is it that the Downing Street Memo is still just a rumor for most Americans?

I'll tell you how: Because the traditional media have completely fallen down on the job. The public isn't getting this information because guys like Robert Jamieson and his editors have decided they have, um, "other priorities."

Sure. While the threat of terrorism was building both at home and abroad in the late 1990s, these are the same folks who thought it worth the public's while to devote most of our attention to prurient allegations regarding the president's private life. Some priorities.

The song and dance continues: Michael Jackson. Scott and Laci Peterson. Robert Blake. Terri Schiavo. An endless circus of freak shows, bread and circus for the masses. Let's not be bothered by the inescapable reality that the United States invaded another nation under false pretenses, and almost certainly in violation of international law. Oh, and don't look over there at those photos from Abu Ghraib, either, or the reports out of Gitmo.

Click here for the rest.

In short, not a single mass media reporter has any right whatsoever to negatively criticize this woman. They bear almost as much responsibility for the quagmire in Iraq as Congress and the White House, perhaps more, because without their enabling propaganda in support of the invasion, the American public probably wouldn't have swallowed all the lies. Indeed, the press' responsibility was to debunk the lies, not spread them. This wasn't a journalistic failure: it was an assault on the nation itself, perhaps on the entire world. These guys are sick in the head.

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US TORTURE IS GLOBAL AND BRUTAL
Examiner testifies detainee's muscles falling apart

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

An Afghan detainee who was beaten in military custody and later died had injuries so bad that the muscles on his legs were falling apart, an Air Force medical examiner testified today in the trial of a soldier accused in the beating.

And

The defense has said Brand was ill-trained for the situation and was simply following orders. Prosecutors say Brand was never taught or ordered to abuse prisoners.

No officers in charge of training soldiers involved in the abuse cases or those who oversaw operations at Bagram airfield in Afghanistan have been charged.

Click here for the rest.

From Guantanamo to Iraq to Afghanistan, US torture goes all the way around the world, and it's increasingly clear that there are far more than "a few bad apples" involved. If we are to buy the rationale that all these instances are simply the actions of rogue soldiers, what does that say about the military as a whole? Why can't they control their guards, prisons, and holding facilities? Why are torture techniques used in one place so similar to those used elsewhere? Obviously, as I have been saying for months, torture is Pentagon policy, not aberration. When it's already been well established that Bush's former counsel, current Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, has written briefs on the subject of avoiding the legal consequences of torture, and that the CIA is flying detainees to other nations for even harsher "interrogation," there can be no doubt that the White House wants to torture US prisoners, and has been lying to the American public about it from the get-go. There's no way to understate this: our country is being run by deeply immoral men.



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DeLay won't be indicted

From the Daily Kos:

A source close to the investigataion says it won't happen, and the reason is a technicality. Earle's jursidiction on election law violations extends only to the Travis County borders, and DeLay's home base is outside of Houston. DeLay would have to be investigated and indicted by the Fort Bend County DA. And given that he is a Republican, it ain't gonna happen.

Click here for the rest.

Well, that sucks. It's not surprising, but it sucks. Meanwhile, the House Ethics Committee still seems to be deadlocked on dealing with DeLay, so I don't expect much there, either. The good thing is that we can, according to Kos, "expect an avalanche of indictments" of DeLay associates soon. Hopefully, such a stink will turn into enough Democratic votes in Sugarland to unseat the slimy Lizard King in November of '06. Maybe it will even set a fire under the collective GOP rump of the Ethics Committee such that they will feel forced to do something about their dear leader.

Look, I'm trying to be optimistic, okay?

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Terror's Greatest Recruitment Tool

The Nation's Naomi Klein on the cyclical pattern of Islamic terrorism's history:

A movement for an Islamic state was transformed into a violent ideology that would lay the intellectual groundwork for Al Qaeda. In other words, so-called Islamist terrorism was "home grown" in the West long before the July 7 attacks--from its inception it was the quintessentially modern progeny of Colorado's casual racism and Cairo's concentration camps.

Why is it worth digging up this history now? Because the twin sparks that ignited Qutb's world-changing rage are currently being doused with gasoline: Arabs and Muslims are being debased in torture chambers around the world and their deaths are being discounted in simultaneous colonial wars, at the same time that graphic digital evidence of these losses and humiliations is available to anyone with a computer. And once again, this lethal cocktail of racism and torture is burning through the veins of angry young men. As Qutb's past and Osman's present reveal, it's not our tolerance for multiculturalism that fuels terrorism; it's our tolerance for the barbarism committed in our name.

Click here for the rest.

I didn't realize that the intellectual father of radical Islam had briefly lived in the United States and was heavily influenced by its racism and cavalier attitudes about the oppression of the Palestinians: amazingly, the same forces that helped birth what right-wingers call "Islamofascism" are still helping to inspire Muslims to become "Islamofascists" today, only on a much grander scale. If the injustice of torture and oppression are not persuasive enough to make Americans insist that US policy in the Middle East is wrongheaded, then perhaps the simple argument that such policy is counterproductive might do the trick. If only mainstream discourse on the issue didn't marginalize that thought.

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Being a Protestant Fundamentalist

From ZNet:

When I hear Jim Wallis (God's Peoples) call himself an evangelical, I have to laugh. I know what he means: Christianity inherently is evangelical, but he is no fundamentalist. Wallis tries to convince his ignorant, liberal, secular audience that his kind of "evangelism" can challenge the "bad" kind. Not a chance. I wish it were so. I tried to make the transfer when I was nineteen years old. I fell in love with a fellow Oklahoman my age who was an atheist. Fortunately, for me, he did everything he could to free me of my fundamentalism, which took about six months. It was like what I have read about cult de-programming. He had read the Bible (he was raised Christian in a liberal family) and could argue me down mostly using arguments from science, particularly evolution and astronomy. Scientific knowledge became more majestic to me than the Book of Revelation and the Rapture. It is no wonder that fundamentalists insist on getting evolution out of the schools. The Chronicle of Higher Education recently reported that forty percent of biology teachers in the public schools avoid teaching evolution, not all because of their beliefs, rather to avoid harassment from fundamentalist groups and parents.

Click here for the rest.

Great essay. Check it out.

It took me, personally, years of associating with outspoken atheists and free-thinkers for me to get over my own Christian fundamentalism. When I finally decided that I was no longer a Christian, I realized that it had really all been about my identity from the get-go, instead of actual belief: I had my feet in two worlds, the rational, fact-based world, and the mytho-psychotic fundamentalist world. Fortunately, good friends made me see that, and the hardest part of my "coming out" was declaring that I was no longer part of a group of people for whom I had genuine affection. Fundamentalism is one tough nut to crack, and I really do get the feeling that most liberals just don't understand it. They try to use reason, but showing fundamentalists the error of their ways will never be accomplished through public discourse. It's got to be face to face. If we ever want to get anywhere with fundamentalists, we're going to have to be friends with them. Scary, huh?

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THE MYTH OF LAWSUIT "ABUSE"

From the LA Times courtesy of Crooks and Liars:

For example, a survey conducted for the American Tort Reform Assn. in 2003 found that by a ratio of 2 to 1, respondents believed that lawsuits were harming the economy and stifling job creation. In a survey released in June by Common Good, a conservative legal reform group, 83% of respondents said it was too easy to file invalid lawsuits, and 55% agreed with the statement that "many people use the justice system almost like a lottery — they start lawsuits to see if they can win millions."

Such fears, fanned by anecdotes like the Grazinski tale, have no empirical basis, said Joanne Doroshow, executive director of the Center for Justice and Democracy, a consumer group that opposes the agenda of the business groups. "The data tends not to support the allegation that there is an out-of-control crisis with the legal system," she said.

She and others point to surveys by the National Center for State Courts and the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics showing an apparent decline in personal injury suits and in the size of jury awards to successful plaintiffs.

But, hey, what about that McDonald's hot coffee case? Wasn't that clearly an example of a judicial system gone mad?

According to popular accounts of the lawsuit, Liebeck coaxed nearly $3 million from an Albuquerque jury in 1994 after being scalded by McDonald's coffee she spilled on herself while riding in a car. These are the story's best-known elements, but filling in the missing facts puts the case in a different light.

Trial testimony showed that at 180 to 190 degrees, McDonald's coffee was much hotter than that served by other restaurants or by people in their homes. The fast-food chain had received at least 700 complaints about hot coffee in the previous decade and had paid more than half a million dollars in settlements, according to trial testimony cited by the Wall Street Journal.

Liebeck's injuries were hardly minor. She suffered third-degree burns on her thighs and groin area, was hospitalized for a week and had to undergo painful skin grafts. Before filing a lawsuit, she wrote McDonald's requesting that it lower the temperature of its coffee and cover her uninsured medical bills and incidental costs of about $20,000. McDonald's offered $800.

Click here for the rest.

Becky and I saw Ralph Nader speak at the University of Houston back in 2000. When he started talking about "tort reform" and how it's based on bogus "evidence," he deftly demonstrated his point. He asked the audience, easily over 1,000 people which is enough for a statistical sample, to raise their hands if they had ever been sued or had sued somebody else. Surprisingly, absolutely no one raised a hand. Nader went on to observe that the "rash" of frivolous lawsuits we constantly hear about in the mainstream media is a complete fabrication. What it's really all about, he told us, is business trying to abolish citizens' only way to redress grievances against the powerful. At that point, my mind flashed back to a billboard I had seen many times on the way to Austin on F.M. 2920 near Tomball advertising what appeared to be a grassroots organization called "Citizens Against Lawsuit Abuse." When we got home, I looked the group up and found out that it was actually an organization of businesses, not citizens. Of course, there will always be anecdotal evidence of weird lawsuits, but a few random cases here and there in no way amount to an epidemic. The statistical data clearly show that there is no rash of frivolous lawsuits: "tort reform" is about screwing over average ordinary people, and that's a fact.

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FOX'S TEXBOOK LIBERAL SMEAR TECHNIQUE

I don't get the Fox News channel anymore since I downgraded my cable to "limited basic." But the always video-fabulous Crooks and Liars feeds me the most outrageous bits, so I'm still able to get a buzz from my O'Reilly outrage whenever I want. Indeed, it was an O'Reilly sub, John Gibson, who recently went past outrage into far flung absurdity.

It was a Cindy Sheehan hatchet job. You know, the media darling mother of an American soldier, who died during the invasion of Iraq, who is currently holding an anti-war vigil outside the President's ranch in Crawford, Texas. Since it has become obvious that the press is taking her seriously, the right wing has gone into overdrive in their frenzy to discredit her. Gibson's approach was to tie her to as many hot-button liberal words and names as he could, you know, the standard right wing traitor list: the Communist Party, MoveOn, Michael Moore, George Soros, Bill Clinton, rock throwing anarchists from the 1998 WTO protests in Seattle (accompanied by footage of black-masked weirdos running around the streets menacingly), that sort of thing. Gibson's guest consultant flatly stated that her supporters "want socialism," and believe that her image is much more appealing than that of an "eighth year Ph.D student in a nose ring and ponytail," because they don't want to show their "real face."

It was textbook right-wing propaganda, using buzz words and images that have worked for them in the past. The only weakness is that it was so over the top, but I'm sure that Fox's regular devotees didn't notice. In fact, I'm pretty sure that this segment was aimed at the faithful, lest the media deluge of stories about a grieving mother should make them faint of heart. At any rate, it's quite amusing. Check it out.

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21 Administration Officials Involved In Plame Leak

From Think Progress courtesy of Eschaton:

The cast of administration characters with known connections to the outing of an undercover CIA agent:

Karl Rove
I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby
Condoleezza Rice
Stephen Hadley
Andrew Card
Alberto Gonzales
Mary Matalin
Ari Fleischer
Susan Ralston
Israel Hernandez John Hannah
Scott McClellan
Dan Bartlett
Claire Buchan
Catherine Martin
Colin Powell
Karen Hughes
Adam Levine
Bob Joseph
Vice President Dick Cheney
President George W. Bush

Then it goes on to give quick factoids on each of the individuals involved, detailing exactly what their connections to the scandal are. Click here for the rest.

By no means are all of these individuals guilty of leaking Plame's name. However, Rove and Libby had to get their information from somewhere, and if the leak was a planned event, there's quite a good chance that they weren't the only ones involved--this is probably a good pool of both potential conspirators and well-meaning dupes. What's fascinating is that this article does a good job of showing just how wide-ranging Fitzgerald's investigation has become, going much further than anybody could have possibly predicted two years ago. As I've said before, this investigation seems to have the potential to blow the whole lid off of not only the Bush administration's smear operations, but also the seemingly unstoppable lie machine that got us into the illegal and unwinnable quagmire in Iraq. I don't expect this to happen, but I am keeping my fingers crossed.

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THE BEST JAZZ STATION I'VE EVER HEARD
And it's streaming over the Internet, for free!

Over the last few years, I've become a big fan of internet radio. There's not much in the way of popular music radio on the 'net, which I believe has something to do with exorbitant licensing fees, but that's okay with me given the swill the recording industry has been ramming down our throats for the last decade or so, coupled with the over-saturation of the oldies and classic rock tunes I used to not be able to get enough of. What you will find, however, is the typical obscure stuff at college stations, blues and jazz, classical, news and opinion, and buttloads of public radio, which is fabulous for me because that's where I'm at right now. You may have noticed the internet radio links section I've placed over in the left-hand column for your perusal; check them out when you get the chance--there's nothing like an endless stream of cool jazz when you're laboring over a meaningless spreadsheet at your work station; it makes the drudgery less tedious.

Anyway, I wanted to promote a station I've found in the San Francisco Bay area, San Mateo Community College's KCSM. I've been listening to it, almost exclusively, all summer long. Their format is mainstream jazz, meaning stuff in the small combo tradition of the 50s and 60s, but they do have some time slots dedicated to the blues and other jazz styles.

From their site:

KCSM Jazz 91 also broadcasts 24 hours a day and has a growing audience that currently numbers more than 200,000. According to Arbitron, the station is among the top 35 "most listened to" non-commercial stations in the United States. An affiliate of Public Radio International and National Public Radio, KCSM is the only station in the Bay Area with a 24-hour jazz format. Hosts of the various programs KCSM produces include veteran jazz musicians, educators, seasoned jazz broadcasters and often a combination of the three.

As a big jazz fan myself, it's pretty clear that these people have great love and respect for this uniquely American art form. If you like jazz at all, I strongly urge you to give them a listen. Like the title to this post says, it's the best jazz station I've ever heard. You can listen to it here.


My favorite tenor sax player, Dexter Gordon

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FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING

Paz



Phil



Frankie



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Novak Freaks on the Set!

Just in case you didn't get to see it yet. From Crooks and Liars:

As has been reported, Robert Novak stormed off the set of " Inside Politics" today during a session with James Carville while they were talking about Katherine Harris.

And

He yelled " This is bullshit" and walked off the set after Carville did his usual ribbing of Novakula. Do you think the Valerie Plame affair is stressing out Bob? James didn't even give it to him like he usually does.

Click here to see the video, and for links to numerous commentaries on the event.

My buddy Shane's got some more info over at Archon of Amble if you're interested. The rampant speculation of left-wing bloggers is that Novak's outburst had much less to do with Carville's ribbing and more to do with the host's plans to quiz him about his role in the Rove scandal--apparently Novak saw a copy of Who's Who, from which he claims he first learned CIA agent Valerie Plame's name, sitting on the table during the interview; it appears that his story was about to be put to the test, and he got out of it the only way he knew how. Sounds like he's nervous about something.

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Poll: Less than half in U.S. think Bush is honest

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

Less than half of Americans now say they think President Bush is honest, according to an AP-Ipsos poll taken at a time of increasing concerns about Iraq, a potential problem for a president who won re-election declaring that "people know where I stand."

The percentage of people who say they consider Bush honest has dropped slightly from the start of the year. In January, 53 percent described him that way in the AP-Ipsos poll, while 45 percent said they did not believe he was honest. Now, people are just about evenly split — 48 percent saying he's honest and 50 percent saying he's not.

"Whether you agree or disagree with him, the president has taken a pounding on perceptions of his honesty," said Karlyn Bowman, a public opinion analyst at the American Enterprise Institute. She cited as one example the administration's claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, but none have been found.

A solid majority still see Bush as likable and a strong leader, but a growing number view the president's confidence as arrogance, up from 49 percent in January to 56 percent now.

Click here for the rest.

I've been meaning to post this since last week. Better late than never, I suppose.

The only reason this is surprising is because of the bizarre attitudes of the US public these last four years or so. That is, of course a majority of Americans distrust Bush: he's lied about everything from weapons of mass destruction to John McCain to global warming, and he's closely associated with sleaze-balls like Karl Rove. Thing is, this has been known for most of the time he's been in office, but only now are people coming to their senses. The truly surprising thing about all this is how the man was so consistently deified in the wake of 9/11 and for years afterward. How can so many people be so naive? Well, Americans may be rubes, but it appears that they also embrace the old "fool me twice" maxim that Bush so marvelously garbled not too long ago. 'Bout time.

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Fifth U.S. soldier in a week killed in Afghanistan

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

A U.S. service member was killed by a roadside bomb in eastern Afghanistan, the military said today, raising to five the number of Americans killed in less than a week as violence escalates ahead of next month's parliamentary elections.

Elsewhere, an Afghan villager claimed a woman and child had died in a coalition airstrike during fighting earlier in the week.

The bomb exploded Tuesday near a vehicle in eastern Ghazni province where an American unit was conducting operations to "disrupt enemy activity in the region," the military said.

Two American troops were evacuated to the main U.S. base at Bagram, north of Kabul; one died shortly after arrival while the other was in stable condition.

Click here for the rest.

What the hell is going on over there, anyway? It seems like everybody, myself included, has become so obsessed with Iraq that White House policy on Afghanistan gets a pass. This is bad because it appears that the situation there is only slightly better. I mean, US soldiers are dying, the national government only seems to have control over Kabul, and we let bin Laden get away. Is Afghanistan a quagmire, too? It sure does look like it.

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Widespread Ignorance

From AlterNet:

More than 50 percent of Americans have a "negative" or "highly negative" view of people who do not believe in God; 70 percent think it important for presidential candidates to be "strongly religious." Because it is taboo to criticize a person's religious beliefs, political debate over questions of public policy (stem-cell research, the ethics of assisted suicide and euthanasia, obscenity and free speech, gay marriage, etc.) generally gets framed in terms appropriate to a theocracy. Unreason is now ascendant in the United States -- in our schools, in our courts, and in each branch of the federal government. Only 28 percent of Americans believe in evolution; 68 percent believe in Satan. Ignorance in this degree, concentrated in both the head and belly of a lumbering superpower, is now a problem for the entire world.

Click here for the rest.

Jeez. There's any number of places I could go commenting on this--it's actually a rather profound statement, and it's not simply about religion, either. My own bias is to blame public education, which, contrary to the conventional wisdom, teaches people that critical thinking is a punishable offense. But there's much more to it than that. The news media distort reality on a regular basis, as do entertainment media. Most politicians on both the left and right are in on it as well. Celebrity nuts like Tom Cruise don't help much either. In short, reality is under a sustained assault by several powerful institutions, and it doesn't appear that an end is in sight. Like I keep saying, we're all in big trouble.

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Is My Child Becoming Homosexual?

From the ultra right-wing fundamentalist Christian organization Focus on the Family, courtesy of Balloon Juice, courtesy of Crooks and Liars:

Evidences of gender confusion or doubt in boys ages 5 to 11 may include:

1. A strong feeling that they are “different” from other boys.

2. A tendency to cry easily, be less athletic, and dislike the roughhousing that other boys enjoy.

3. A persistent preference to play female roles in make-believe play.

4. A strong preference to spend time in the company of girls and participate in their games and other pastimes.

5. A susceptibility to be bullied by other boys, who may tease them unmercifully and call them “queer,” “fag” and “gay.”

6. A tendency to walk, talk, dress and even “think” effeminately.

7. A repeatedly stated desire to be — or insistence that he is — a girl.

If your child is experiencing several signs of gender confusion, professional help is available. It’s best to seek that help before your child reaches puberty.

Click here for the rest.

Part of me wants to laugh; part of me wants to scream and yell. What's important is that there is no such thing as "professional help" for children who might be gay, at least no legitimate "professional help." Over three decades ago both the American Psychiatric Association and the American Psychological Association declared that homosexuality is most decidedly not a mental illness: any "professional" who claims to be able to "treat" people for the "disease" of homosexuality is simply a snake oil salesman. That includes Focus on the Family founder, Christian "psychologist" Dr. James Dobson. It amazes me that fundamentalists continue with this crap. Even though I'm not happy with it, I greatly prefer the Catholic take on gayness that homosexuals should simply resist their urges because the Bible says acting on them is sinful. The fundamentalist take, however, tries to place a pseudo-scientific veneer on their opposition to homosexuality, which causes real psychological harm in the long run. Of course, this is totally in keeping with their general opposition to and twisting of true science in numerous areas, from evolution to AIDS prevention to global warming. How can so many lunatics have so much influence?

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GREAT CONVERSATION ON NEWS MEDIA

From last week's episode of PBS's Now, an interview with media activist Robert McChesney:

ROBERT MCCHESNEY: Yeah. I think journalism that does real investigative work, that goes out and examines how power works in the society and how it affects everyone in the community, that costs a lot of money to do. That's very expensive.

BRANCACCIO: You're telling me?

ROBERT MCCHESNEY: Yeah. You know that better than anyone. Anyone involved in the journalism side understands this immediately. And, the worst part of it from a owner's perspective is if it's good journalism, it's probably gonna piss off someone in power. That's not good for business either.

So, there's a strong commercial political pressure by media owners to do the easy stuff, the celebrity stories, the scandals, that give the illusion of controversy, but they're politically trivial. And, they're very inexpensive to cover. You just send a reporter to Aruba to interview people about Natalie Holloway. That's a lot easier than going and covering the toxic dump, or who some developer paid off a politician to build something outside of town and change the tax basis in the community. These are the issues we need journalism for. They're going by the wayside. They're just not being done in this country.

Click here for the rest.

If I had to give someone some introductory material about the myriad ways that mainstream journalism in this country is screwed up, this interview would easily qualify. It's all over the place, from blogs to media ownership to media economics to framing stories only in terms of what "officials" say. Great stuff; go check it out.

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CIA Commander: U.S. Let bin Laden Slip Away

From Newsweek via MSMBC courtesy of the Daily Kos:

But in a forthcoming book, the CIA field commander for the agency's Jawbreaker team at Tora Bora, Gary Berntsen, says he and other U.S. commanders did know that bin Laden was among the hundreds of fleeing Qaeda and Taliban members. Berntsen says he had definitive intelligence that bin Laden was holed up at Tora Bora—intelligence operatives had tracked him—and could have been caught. "He was there," Berntsen tells NEWSWEEK. Asked to comment on Berntsen's remarks, National Security Council spokesman Frederick Jones passed on 2004 statements from former CENTCOM commander Gen. Tommy Franks. "We don't know to this day whether Mr. bin Laden was at Tora Bora in December 2001," Franks wrote in an Oct. 19 New York Times op-ed. "Bin Laden was never within our grasp." Berntsen says Franks is "a great American. But he was not on the ground out there. I was."

Click here for the rest.

This is not surprising at all. Armando over at the Daily Kos speculates that the reason the Pentagon didn't send troops after bin Laden is because they were being held in reserve for the Iraq invasion, and of course, that's entirely possible. My thinking, however, is that Bush doesn't really want to capture the 9/11 mastermind: bin Laden is far more useful politically as a supervillain who strikes fear in the hearts of Americans; ideally, frightened Americans will vote for Republicans, who have done a great job over the years of cultivating a reputation as hardcore badass motherfuckers who can kick Muslim butt far more effectively than the pussy-boy Democrats. After all, this is old hat to the Republicans; they used the same kind of fear mongering in the 80s substituting the word "communism" for "terrorism," and it worked really well. My prediction is that bin Laden will die a natural death, a free man, still US enemy numero uno. That's just the way the White House wants it.

For further explanation of all this, check out what I wrote last June, here and here.

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AMERICANS LOVE AUTHORITY

From bmj.com courtesy of J. Orlin Grabbe:

Milgram's interest in the study of obedience partly emerged out of a deep concern with the suffering of fellow Jews at the hands of the Nazis and an attempt to fathom how the Holocaust could have happened. His researches, like Freud's, led to profound revisions in some of the fundamental assumptions about human nature.

Milgram's experiments suggested that it was not necessary to invoke "evil" as a concept to explain why so many ordinary people do terrible things. Instead his work, and that of other social psychologists, suggested that much of what we do, we do automatically. Evil often occurs simply because we do not question our acts enough; instead our rationale arises from our trust in authority figures who are in "charge."

The subjects in Milgram's original series of tests believed that they were part of an experiment dealing with the relation between punishment and learning. An experimenter—who used no coercive powers beyond a stern aura of mechanical and vacant eyed efficiency—instructed participants to shock a learner by pressing a lever on a machine each time the learner made a mistake on a word matching task. Each subsequent error led to an increase in the intensity of the shock in 15 volt increments, from 15 to 450 volts.

Click here for the rest.

I'm really coming to the conclusion that all the lore about the individuality and rebelliousness of Americans is simply a useful illusion. That is, when I look around for signs of any true individuality, any true rebellion against conventional wisdom, all I see are posers. True, most Americans feel like individuals, feel like they are their own masters, but how can that possibly be true? Most Americans work in jobs that either bore them or that they hate, oftentimes in places that they don't really like that much. Most Americans are in debt or living paycheck-to-paycheck. Most Americans have virtually no influence over the governmental and economic institutions that control society. Most Americans buy what advertisers say they should buy, watch the entertainment that the mass media rams down their throats, and measure their lives in terms of these mass media images and ideas. Where's the individuality? Where's the rebellion? American life is much more like being herded to the packing plant. I admit that there are certainly several kinds of "rebel" archetypes in American culture, from rock and roll bad boy to disdainful art snob, but to what avail? Susan Faludi observes in her book Stiffed that popular culture, controlled by media moguls, has essentially absorbed and channelled in useless directions the archetypal American individualist: the model for today's bad boy is Howard Stern. Like I said, useless.

So in the United States we have this cultural dynamic where millions of people feel like individuals, are seen by others as being individuals, but really aren't individuals, or, at least, their sense of individuality is ultimately without consequence. In reality, we do as we are told as long as we don't feel like it's stepping on our toes. The amazing hyper-patriotism in the wake of 9/11 is a prime example of this. In their abject fear, the vast majority of Americans were totally willing to do exactly what their leaders commanded, to believe exactly what their leaders commanded. Despite the fact that the entire educational establishment serves to focus and strengthen this sense of servility, submissiveness seems to be a preexisting part of human nature, and Americans are no different from anybody else in that respect, which includes Germany under the Nazis. However, human nature is not the same thing as destiny: individualism is also human nature, which is also the root of democracy. That is to say, if our entire culture is geared toward cultivating citizens' desire to obey such that they don't really realize it, American "democracy" has a severe problem.

But then, I've been saying that for years.

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"ADDICTED TO RUSH"

I heard something rather amazing on the radio last night. The station I was listening to carries lots of conservative talk shows, you know, Hannity, O'Reilly, and of course, Rush Limbaugh. So it wasn't at all surprising to hear a thirty second spot promoting Rush's show. What was surprising to me was the angle the ad took. Robert Palmer's 80s pop-rock hit "Addicted to Love" played continually in the background, but the lyrics were slightly altered such that the word "love" was changed to "Rush." Get it? "Addicted to Rush." Cute. The idea is that Limbaugh's show is so great that it's simply impossible to stop listening. Over the music, snippets of callers talking about how much they love the show alternated with snippets of Rush's typical yammerings . That's how it became downright surreal: one of Rush's lines was something like "the only positively healthy addiction out there." Pretty wild, huh?

What makes this particularly amazing is that there was absolutely no sense of irony--just in case you haven't heard, Rush is still caught up in a Florida criminal investigation of how, exactly, he was able to feed his very real Oxycontin addiction. There was no radio equivalent of a wink-wink, no little jokes to let the listener understand they were riffing on the scandal. Nothing like that at all. Just the cutesy "Addicted to Rush" theme. Does Rush even understand this? Do his listeners? After years of hearing the wildest contradictions coming out of the right wing, I'm really coming to the conclusion that conservatives just don't understand irony.



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Theories of humour

From the Economist courtesy of J. Orlin Grabbe:

THE true story of how your wife's stalker rang her to discuss killing you isn't supposed to provoke mirth. But when John Morreall, of the College of William and Mary in Virginia, related the events last week to a group of scholars in Tuebingen in Germany, they were in stitches as he divulged the details of how his wife tried to dissuade the confused young man by pleading that her mortgage was too large to pay without her husband's help.

So why did they laugh? Dr Morreall's thesis is that laughter, incapacitating as it can be, is a convincing signal that the danger has passed. The reaction of the psychologists, linguists, philosophers and professional clowns attending the Fifth International Summer School on Humour and Laughter illustrates his point. Dr Morreall survived to tell the tale and so had an easy time making it sound funny.

Click here for the rest.

I remember reading years ago something by Larry Niven set in his "Known Space" universe. One of his aliens, a "Pierson's Puppeteer," offhandedly remarked that human laughter is the result of an "interrupted defense mechansim," or something to that effect. I'm still not quite sure what that means, exactly, but it sounds like it's along these lines. At any rate, I've always thought, myself, that a joke isn't really funny unless someone gets hurt in some way, usually their feelings, but bones and organs work just as well, which also seems to be along these lines. In other words, real humor needs to have danger in some way. It's just not funny unless disaster is lurking nearby.

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Widespread environmental damage seen from shuttle

From Reuters courtesy of J. Orlin Grabbe:

Commander Eileen Collins said astronauts on shuttle Discovery had seen widespread environmental destruction on Earth and warned on Thursday that greater care was needed to protect natural resources.

Her comments came as NASA pondered whether to send astronauts out on an extra spacewalk to repair additional heat-protection damage on the first shuttle mission since the 2003 Columbia disaster.

Discovery is linked with the International Space Station and orbiting 220 miles (352 km) above the Earth.

"Sometimes you can see how there is erosion, and you can see how there is deforestation. It's very widespread in some parts of the world," Collins said in a conversation from space with Japanese officials in Tokyo, including Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi.

"We would like to see, from the astronauts' point of view, people take good care of the Earth and replace the resources that have been used," said Collins, who was standing with Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi in front of a Japanese flag and holding a colorful fan.

Click here for the rest.

Amazing. Environmental destruction is now visible from space. What's it going to take to convince the corporate elites that they're essentially destroying their opportunity to make more and more money? Sometimes I just don't get it.



Monkey: (looking out window towards earth) So beautiful, so fragile.

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WAR ON TERROR--->
GLOBAL STRUGGLE AGAINST VIOLENT EXTREMISM

Another essay from linguistics professor George Lakoff via AlterNet:

The phrase "War on Terror" was chosen with care. "War" is a crucial term. It evokes a war frame, and with it, the idea that the nation is under military attack -- an attack that can only be defended militarily, by use of armies, planes, bombs, and so on. The war frame includes special war powers for the president, who becomes commander in chief. It evokes unquestioned patriotism, and the idea that lack of support for the war effort is treasonous. It forces Congress to give unlimited powers to the President, lest detractors be called unpatriotic. And the war frame includes an end to the war -- winning the war, mission accomplished!

And

It is important to note the date on which the phrase "war on terror" died and was replaced by "global struggle against violent extremism." It was right after the London bombing. Using the War frame to think and talk about terrorism was becoming more difficult. The Iraq War was declared won and over, but it became clear that it was far from over and not at all won and that it created many new terrorists for every one it destroyed. The last justification - fighting the war on terror in Iraq so it wouldn't have to be fought at home -- died in the London bombing.

Click here for the rest.

Yeah, this is pretty weird. The only conclusion I can come to is Lakoff's: the messy political reality of terrorism is now becoming so extraordinarily obvious that the White House feels forced to attempt to subtly alter voters' expectations. This is bound to be a failure: even Bush can't seem to get away from using the phrase "war on terror," and I'm betting that Fox News, which quickly jumped on the fucking stupid term "homicide bomber" as a replacement for "suicide bomber" when Bush started using it, will decide that "global struggle against violent extremism" is too cumbersome for their rapid-fire approach to the "news." At any rate, it's clear that the White House is getting desperate, and that's fine by me.

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THE FIRST AND ONLY NUCLEAR WAR
The Worst Terror Attacks in History

From CounterPunch courtesy of J. Orlin Grabbe:

They found that three days before Hiroshima, Truman agreed at a meeting that Japan was "looking for peace''. His senior generals and political advisers told him there was no need to use the A-bomb. But the bombs were dropped anyway. "Impressing Russia was more important than ending the war'', Selden told the New Scientist.

While the capitalist media immediately dubbed the historians' "theory" "controversial", it accords with the testimony of many central US political and military players at the time, including General Dwight Eisenhower, who stated bluntly in a 1963 Newsweek interview that "the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing''.

Truman's chief of staff, Admiral William Leahy, stated in his memoirs that "the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender.''

At the time though, Washington cold-bloodedly decided to sweep away the lives of hundreds of thousands of men, women and children to show off the terrible power of its new super weapon and underline the US rulers' ruthless preparedness to use it.

Click here for the rest.

Most of my life, like most Americans, I've bought the storyline that the Japanese were bound and determined to fight to the very last man, woman, and child, and that the nuclear nightmare we unleashed on them was actually saving more lives in the long run. Not any longer. Putting this new information together with what I already know about the end of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War, it makes much more sense that dropping the bomb was in reality more of a statement to the Soviets than a brutal necessity to force Japanese surrender. The Russians, fully mobilized after defeating the Nazis in Europe, were moving troops and resources to the east in order to enter the war against Japan. At that point, the Pacific belonged to the United States, and there was no desire to see Stalin horn in their territory: it was clear that the White House wanted to end the war quickly in order to keep the Soviets out. Thus, we dropped the bomb. Of course, it was also a message to the Reds, the first shot fired in the Cold War. And it killed tens of thousands of innocent civilians who had nothing to do with it all. When you get right down to it, it was terrorism directed at Russia, plain and simple. Yet another sick stain on our nation's history.


Hiroshima, 1945

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FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING

Phil



Paz



Frankie



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Documents Tell of Brutal Improvisation by GIs

From the Washington Post courtesy of the Daily Kos:

The circumstances that led up to Mowhoush's death paint a vivid example of how the pressure to produce intelligence for anti-terrorism efforts and the war in Iraq led U.S. military interrogators to improvise and develop abusive measures, not just at Abu Ghraib but in detention centers elsewhere in Iraq, in Afghanistan and at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Mowhoush's ordeal in Qaim, over 16 days in November 2003, also reflects U.S. government secrecy surrounding some abuse cases and gives a glimpse into a covert CIA unit that was set up to foment rebellion before the war and took part in some interrogations during the insurgency.

The sleeping-bag interrogation and beatings were taking place in Qaim about the same time that soldiers at Abu Ghraib, outside Baghdad, were using dogs to intimidate detainees, putting women's underwear on their heads, forcing them to strip in front of female soldiers and attaching at least one to a leash. It was a time when U.S. interrogators were coming up with their own tactics to get detainees to talk, many of which they considered logical interpretations of broad-brush categories in the Army Field Manual, with labels such as "fear up" or "pride and ego down" or "futility."

Other tactics, such as some of those seen at Abu Ghraib, had been approved for one detainee at Guantanamo Bay and found their way to Iraq. Still others have been linked to official Pentagon guidance on specific techniques, such as the use of dogs.

And

"The interrogation techniques were known and were approved of by the upper echelons of command of the 3rd ACR," Cassara said in a news conference. "They believed, and still do, that they were appropriate and proper."

Click here for the rest.

Three important points. First, American torture is far more widespread than Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib; indeed, it seems to be everywhere. Second, the Pentagon lies about it until they're caught, and simply cannot be trusted when it comes to information about torture, or anything else for that matter. Third, the first two points make it more clear than ever that torture is US policy, and not the result of "a few bad apples," which continues to be, against all logic, the rhetorical defense employed by the White House and Pentagon. Never mind that torture is problematic at best as an intelligence gathering tool--psychologists have observed that, generally, people being tortured will say whatever their captors want to hear in order to end their torment. What's important here is that torture is wildly immoral. Consequently, our nation is now wildly immoral: as Republican Senator John McCain recently observed, it's about "who we are," and what is now obviously an intentional national policy of brutality and evil is making "who we are" heinously wicked on a massive scale.

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Moral Victory or Another Lost Opportunity?

The always wise Rob Salkowitz of Emphasis Added on the near win of a Democrat in a special House election last Tuesday in a very Republican district:

Here’s the thing. Putting a scare into right-wing Republicans doesn’t work. They are not scared unless they are beaten. If they win by one vote, that’s enough to govern as though God had put them into office personally. Moreover, they see victory by any means as vindication of the rightness of their most extreme positions, and they view their opponents, no matter how many of them turn up at the polls, as fundamentally more dangerous to (their vision of) America than terrorists. If that sounds extreme, listen to their radio shows. Read their books. There is no such thing as a moral victory against people who are so certain in the infallibility of their ideology and their leadership that the entire purpose of their “governance” is simply to reward their friends and punish their enemies.

Click here for the rest.

Salkowitz is quite right in his analysis of GOP delusions of grandeur. Schmidt's near loss in Ohio will most likely not scare the pants off of the party faithful. However, I tend to look at this from the other way around. That is, I think that the real power of Hackett's near win is that it unequivocally illustrates to Democrats that beating the hell out of the Republicans in 2006 is not only possible, it's probable. Remember, this Ohio Congressional district has been in GOP hands for over twenty years; it's something like 70% Republican, and this upstart Democrat came within four points of winning. That means that many Republicans were willing to jump ship and vote for the kind of person who has been vilified continually for years as anti-American. No, most of the right wing will probably not understand the significance of this, but the left wing will: many conservatives are fed up with Bush's bullshit, and are willing to consider near-radical alternatives. Congress now belongs to the Democrats; all they have to do is claim their prize, and the unapologetic, straight-talking, Bush-bashing Paul Hackett has shown them how to do so. But will the wussified Democrats be willing to take the risk?

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MEANWHILE...
Explosion kills 14 Marines in Iraq

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

Fourteen U.S. Marines were killed today when a huge bomb destroyed their lightly armored vehicle, hurling it into the air in a giant fireball in the deadliest roadside bombing suffered by American forces in the Iraq war.

The deaths brought to 23 the number of Marines killed in the past week in fighting along the volatile Euphrates Valley of western Iraq and marked one of the bloodiest periods for U.S. forces in months.

In all, 44 American service members have died in Iraq since July 24 — all but two in combat.

Click here for the rest.

Never mind the WMD fabricatons, the bogus Al-Qaeda connection, and the lies about how easy it would be to establish a democracy in Iraq. The biggest lie of all is that these dead soldiers were told they were fighting for freedom and America. And they probably believed it to their final moments among the living. It's just awful: they didn't die for their country. They died in the service of a failed plan hatched by arrogant and amoral men to take control of Iraq's oil reserves and establish American hegemony over the Middle East, all for the benefit of wealthy and powerful elites who don't give a shit about a single one of them. In other words, they died in vain. And that makes me sick to my stomach.

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Big Brother Nixes Happy Hour

From American Rights at Work courtesy of Slashdot courtesy of This is not a compliment:

It is a regular pastime for co-workers to chat during a coffee break, at a union hall, or over a beer about workplace issues, good grilling recipes, and celebrity gossip. Yet a recent ruling by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) allows employers to ban off-duty fraternizing among co-workers, severely weakening the rights of free association and speech, and violating basic standards of privacy for America's workers.

Click here for the rest.

I suppose I would be less outraged by this if these workers were adequately compensated for their off-the-clock duties. That is, it's one thing to be paid for following employer rules when you're not at work; it's quite another to be expected to obey your boss on your own time, for free. This is really one of the same principles behind my opposition to employee drug testing: if part of the job, staying "drug free," encompasses the totality of an individual's life, including time when he is not actually working, he should be paid accordingly for it; unfortunately, such a concept is so insanely far off Corporate America's radar screen, that it's probably not even worth a joke to them.

That the federal agency charged with protecting worker rights is okay with this says a lot about the priorities of the current administration. That is, Bush thinks that shit-wages are too much: workers should work for free. Bastards.

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My epiphany about NASA, before countdown or foam

From the Houston Chronicle op-ed section:

No, my epiphany came on Monday of last week, the day before the launch, when space agency officials said they were prepared to bend their safety rules to get the shuttle off the pad and into orbit.

That's when I knew that all the stuff NASA said in 1986 after the shuttle Challenger exploded during takeoff, and repeated in 2003 when the shuttle Columbia disintegrated during re-entry, was and is malarkey.

The fact that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration was willing to launch Discovery without knowing why one of its fuel sensors was acting up and without knowing whether the problem had been fixed says it all: If it's not inconvenient, safety is important; but getting the shuttle launched is the driving force behind NASA's decisions.

Ironically, that same philosophy drove the Challenger's ill-fated launch in 1986. After repeated delays, and despite some concerns about low temperatures that morning, the agency OK'd the launch. Less than two minutes later, the seven astronauts aboard were dead.

An extensive investigation revealed weaknesses in NASA's decision-making and the fact that the agency's culture doesn't encourage its workers to voice doubts, fears and suspicions about flight readiness. NASA officials apologized and promised they'd change their ways.

Click here for the rest.

My thoughts exactly. I was also very troubled by the decision to launch without knowing what was up with the fuel sensors. Clearly, NASA, which has been for years in the sights of both liberal and conservative legislators seeking drastic funding cuts, is under a great deal of political pressure to produce results on the cheap. Obviously, that makes for slipshod work, which has already resulted in the deaths of two shuttle crews in less than two decades. As much as I love the space program, I cannot support such recklessness with our astronauts' lives. Congress needs to either get serious about supporting NASA, or just end manned space travel for good. I have no desire to see a third shuttle crew blasted to bits on television.

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The Debate That Wasn't

From AlterNet:

For believers in unfettered "free" markets, it is simply a matter of faith that the logic of the private sector will eventually lead to greater prosperity for all, even if some are steam-rolled in the process.

Job displacement and economic insecurity are simply the results of increased productivity, technological advances and the availability of cheaper labor overseas -- all part of the Natural Order of Things and a consequence of economic progress that is to be embraced rather than questioned. The belief is immune to contradictory data, and its adherents have little patience for dissent, and they have the budgets to render it irrelevant anyway.

And they don't face much dissent. Democrats, as a result either of being cowed by big-business's powerful echo-chamber or out of loyalty to their corporate sponsors, have offered tepid opposition to the status quo, occasionally attempting to craft a vaguely populist message like candidate Kerry's lame "Benedict Arnold CEO" line, but never questioning what underlies the New Economy.

That non-debate has been a decades-long double-whammy for average Americans. On the one hand, they've had to adapt to a free-wheeling, world-wide cowboy economy, without insulation from global competition and facing the prospect of seeing their jobs outsourced and off-shored. With the decline in unions, more and more of the jobs that are out there have lower wages, are less secure and don't come with the same benefits the parents of today’s workers took for granted.

Click here for the rest.

"Non-debate" is so very right. It's amazing, in fact, how many Americans continue clinging to the old and outmoded concept of "the American dream." True, some people are still able to work hard and prosper: the vast majority of Americans, however, have rather grim prospects for, say, sending their children to college, buying a home, or retiring comfortably. We simply no longer live in the nation glorified by high school American history texts. Most US citizens are now commodities, labor capital to be bought and sold in the "labor market;" we're not people, anymore. The maddening thing is that it doesn't have to be this way. Our current economic predicament is the result of specific and conscious governmental policy decisions; such policies could easily change if the public demanded it. Unfortunately, most American workers, that is, the ones who bother to study economics, have bought the corporate line that what's good for business is good for the nation as a whole. While that's true to some extent, it's become quite clear these last twenty years or so that business is quite capable of prospering while the general population stagnates and rots. All my life, it seems, I've been promised that allowing business to do as it pleases will ultimately result in economic prosperity for all. That hasn't happened yet, despite a couple of decades of wild-eyed deregulation, and I've been paying pretty close attention since the early 80s. It's time to face the facts: it's not ever going to happen.

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A REAL FREE MARKET WOULDN'T NEED SOLDIERS

From Talking Points Memo courtesy of This is not a compliment:

There is one thing, however, that this line of reasoning misses: political violence. Which is, after all, the grand-daddy of extra-economic inputs.

You can't make a solid argument that wages in other countries have found their natural level if one of the major 'inputs' is organized political violence to keep wages low and labor activism inert.

To put it more concretely, one part of a real market in labor is the ability for people to protest conditions, either actively (through organizing) or passively (through quitting or refusing to work). But if people who try to form labor unions are murdered then that whole theory falls apart.

Click here for the rest.

This is also at play, to a lesser extent, here in the United States: the Wagner Act, passed in the 1930s, makes it illegal to fire workers who are trying to unionize; nonetheless, the federal government has refused to enforce the law since the Reagan administration. Indeed, the deck is completely stacked against labor here, and most workers not already in unions understand that--soldiers aren't needed to keep Americans from demanding their rights. Third world laborers, however, have to be taught what's what at the end of a gun barrel. Obviously, there's nothing free about these "free markets" either at home or abroad.

You can easily take this one step further. There is no such thing as a "free market." It is an artificial construct which only exists because of massive state intervention going way beyond what Milton Freidman and his neo-liberal apostles say it should. The violent coercion of labor about which Josh Marshall writes in the above excerpt is but one example. Another is how the billions of tax dollars annually pumped into the the military-industrial complex essentially serve as a crutch, an old fashioned Keynesian stimulus, to bolster American capitalism as a whole, which cannot survive on its own. Capitalism is just one big lie after another: it simply doesn't work the way they insist it does, and it is most definitely not a natural manifestation of freedom and democracy--in reality it's quite the reverse.

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GOP TORTURE DEBATE: Who We Are

From the New York Times' Bob Herbert courtesy of the Daily Kos:

But the three Republican senators are giving the White House fits with their attempt to get legislation approved that would expressly prohibit cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment of detainees in U.S. custody.

There was a dramatic encounter during the floor debate last week when Senator Jeff Sessions, a Republican from Alabama, spoke out against the legislation, saying there was no need for it because, as he put it, the detainees are not prisoners of war, "they are terrorists."

Senator McCain, of Arizona, argued that the debate "is not about who they are. It's about who we are." Americans, said Mr. McCain, "hold ourselves" to a higher standard.

Click here for the rest.

Because the Republicans hold all three branches of government, this is really the first relevant and public debate about the White House's gleeful use of torture--until now, most critics of Bush's torture policies were Democrats and consequently have been dismissed as partisan hacks. The fact that this debate is about actual legislation is all the more stunning: it's pretty clear that the mounting casualties in Iraq, the London terror bombings, and the Rove scandal have worked in tandem to greatly weaken the White House's political influence even among party loyalists. McCain smells blood and is moving in for the kill. Good show. And it's all the more wonderful that his chosen weapon is an issue that is central to American identity. He's quite right when he shreds the standard Republican rhetoric on torture by reminding his fellow Senators that it's "not about who they are. It's about who we are." Real Americans aren't barbaric sadists; I think most of us can agree on that.

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TWO FROM KRUGMAN

A couple of always relevant essays from the New York Times' resident Princeton economist and one-time Bill O'Reilly scourge, Paul Krugman.

First, courtesy of WorkingForChange, Krugman opines on French economic trade offs that disgust the US elite:

French Family Values

Americans are doing a lot of strutting these days, but a head-to-head comparison between the economies of the United States and Europe - France, in particular - shows that the big difference is in priorities, not performance. We're talking about two highly productive societies that have made a different tradeoff between work and family time. And there's a lot to be said for the French choice.

First things first: given all the bad-mouthing the French receive, you may be surprised that I describe their society as "productive." Yet according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, productivity in France - G.D.P. per hour worked - is actually a bit higher than in the United States.

It's true that France's G.D.P. per person is well below that of the United States. But that's because French workers spend more time with their families.

Click here for the rest.

I've hit on this theme before, myself. If somebody who loves his work wants to spend every waking minute devoted to his job, that's okay; it's what seems to make him happy. Most Americans, however, hate their jobs, or are, at least, bored by them, and that's okay too, because we all must work in order to make civilization function. Unfortunately, when we get home from those awful jobs every evening it seems that we only have enough energy and mental focus to turn on the TV, microwave a lame-ass pasta box, and collapse into the couch: in the United States you are your work, and if your job sucks, then your life sucks. The French seem to understand this trap and have arranged their society such that life is actually worth living. Sure, they're slightly less well off than we are on the whole, but their lives are much richer, being spent with friends and family, on personal interests, generally making their nation a better place. In France, workers are human beings; in the US, they're robots. It doesn't have to be like this.

Next, Krugman again exposes the Bush administration's parasitical "governance." Courtesy of BuzzFlash:

Triumph of the Machine

The campaign for Social Security privatization has degenerated into farce. The "global war on terrorism" has been downgraded to the "global struggle against violent extremism" (pronounced gee-save), which is just embarrassing. Baghdad is a nightmare, Basra is a militia-run theocracy, and officials are talking about withdrawing troops from Iraq next year (just in time for the U.S. midterm elections).

On the other hand, the administration is crowing about its success in passing the long-stalled energy bill, the highway bill and Cafta, the free-trade agreement with Central America. So is the Bush agenda stalled, or is it progressing?

The answer is that the administration is getting nowhere on its grand policy agenda. But it never took policy, as opposed to politics, very seriously anyway. The agenda it has always taken with utmost seriousness - consolidating one-party rule, and rewarding its friends - is moving forward quite nicely.

Click here for the rest.

It's been clear for some time that the White House approach to politics has nothing to do with the standard American conservative-liberal ideological divide. Sure, BushCo exploits rank-and-file political points of view, but they're definitely not liberal, and they're definitely not conservative--after all, Bush spends tax dollars like a drunken sailor, and uses the military to play global games of cowboys and indians. Call it what you want; that's not conservative. So what are they about? Obviously, they're about gaining and holding power and Krugman illustrates that rather nicely.

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