It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown
That's right: I've found the video on YouTube! But first, this from Wikipedia:
It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown is a critically-acclaimed and very popular animated television special based on the comic strip Peanuts by Charles M. Schulz.
The special depicts one Halloween night in which Linus Van Pelt, Charlie Brown's security blanket-toting best friend, eagerly awaits the arrival of "the Great Pumpkin", who Linus believes to travel around the world each Halloween giving toys to all the good little children (in the manner of Santa Claus each Christmas).
It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown was the second Peanuts special to be produced and animated by Bill Melendez. Its initial broadcast took place on October 27, 1966, on the CBS network; CBS re-aired the special annually through 2000, with ABC picking up the rights beginning in 2001.
The program was nominated for an Emmy award.
Click here for more.
Along with the Christmas special and the Thanksgiving special, It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown rounds out the great trilogy of Peanuts holiday shows from the 60s. I don't have a personal favorite because they're all great, with their fantastic Vince Guaraldi cool jazz soundtracks, and a modernist sensibility about the animation--it's really hard to say "this is the best." I suppose it depends on the time of year, so, for the moment, I'm into this one most. Then it'll be Thanksgiving, but not just yet. Anyway, who couldn't be emotionally affected by Linus' fatal fight with disillusionment? Who couldn't have some sympathy for Charlie Brown only getting rocks in his trick or treating bag or his badly botched ghost costume? If you don't like this, you're an inhuman monster.
Click here to watch it.
Happy Halloween!
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Monday, October 30, 2006
Pentagon memo reveals launch of new PR war
From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:
The Pentagon is buttressing its public relations staff and starting an operation akin to a political campaign war room as Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld faces intensifying criticism over the Iraq war.
In a memo obtained by the Associated Press, Dorrance Smith, assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, said new teams of people will "develop messages" for the 24-hour news cycle and "correct the record."
And
Ruff said today that the reorganization, spearheaded by Smith, will help the department "set the record straight" and provide accurate, timely information.
He denied that the effort was set up to respond to the eroding public support for the war, or that it was aimed at helping in next week's elections. He also said he would not call it an "information operations" program, which generally refers to a propaganda-type campaign.
Click here for more.
From Merriam-Webster Online:
public relations: the business of inducing the public to have understanding for and goodwill toward a person, firm, or institutionYou know, in the media saturated culture in which we live, it only makes good sense for any large institution to have an office of some sort for dealing with the press. On the other hand, this new Pentagon thing is something entirely different; it's "akin to a political campaign war room," which means that the military is getting into the business of politics. That's very disturbing. There are some extraordinarily good reasons that our founding fathers deliberately made the military obey a civilian commander-in-chief. First and foremost is the fact that the armed services are an incredible concentration of power, highly organized and efficient. We've seen throughout history numerous instances when such concentrations of power simply take over, and why not? They've got the strength to do it. By design, the US military is totally banned from any interference in the civil political system. It's too much of a slippery slope--how much interference is too much? Clearly, the people who established our nation believed that any interference is too much. After all, once you've crossed one line, what's the difference in crossing the next one? Rumsfeld is playing with fire here. This is really fucking dangerous.
propaganda: ideas, facts, or allegations spread deliberately to further one's cause or to damage an opposing cause
Never mind the fact that Pentagon PR is bound to be just a bunch of feel-good, pro-war bullshit.
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GAO chief warns economic disaster looms
From the AP via Yahoo courtesy of AlterNet:
Why is America so fiscally unprepared for the next century? Like many of its citizens, the United States has spent the last few years racking up debt instead of saving for the future. Foreign lenders — primarily the central banks of China, Japan and other big U.S. trading partners — have been eager to lend the government money at low interest rates, making the current $8.5-trillion deficit about as painful as a big balance on a zero-percent credit card.
In her part of the fiscal wake-up tour presentation, Rogers tries to explain why that's a bad thing. For one thing, even when rates are low a bigger deficit means a greater portion of each tax dollar goes to interest payments rather than useful programs. And because foreigners now hold so much of the federal government's debt, those interest payments increasingly go overseas rather than to U.S. investors.
More serious is the possibility that foreign lenders might lose their enthusiasm for lending money to the United States. Because treasury bills are sold at auction, that would mean paying higher interest rates in the future. And it wouldn't just be the government's problem. All interest rates would rise, making mortgages, car payments and student loans costlier, too.
A modest rise in interest rates wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, Rogers said. America's consumers have as much of a borrowing problem as their government does, so higher rates could moderate overconsumption and encourage consumer saving. But a big jump in interest rates could cause economic catastrophe. Some economists even predict the government would resort to printing money to pay off its debt, a risky strategy that could lead to runaway inflation.
Click here for the rest.
The above excerpted article reports that there is only one tonic for all these economic woes, cutting social services and raising taxes dramatically, which is pretty much all I ever hear anyone in the American mainstream suggest as far as curing the deficit goes. That's pretty weird because there is one very easy and rather painless solution staring us all right in the face. I mean, it really is an elephant in the middle of the living room: cut defense spending massively. The bottom line is that, while we do need some kind of military for protection, what we have now is so insanely huge that it can only be used for imperial purposes. That is, we just don't need it anymore, and imperial wars these days, as amply illustrated by first the Vietnamese and now the Iraqis, are by and large unwinnable, and therefore a waste of money. Besides, with so many arms on hand, the temptation to use them is seemingly overwhelming. It's time to end America's role as defender of corporate globalism and start tending to our needs right here at home. Hell, we don't even have to say goodbye to the corporate system: all we have to do is start working in tandem with--gasp!--other nations to ensure business security.
Face it, our huge military is a near total waste of money, and it threatens the entire economic system that it exists to protect. Christ, our leaders are so fucking stupid.
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Workers' Rights Are About Dignity As Much As Wages
From AlterNet, an essay by Nickel and Dimed author Barbara Ehrenreich:
Something similar goes on in the case of the laid off and unemployed, thanks to the prevailing Calvinist form of Protestantism, according to which productivity and employment are the source of one's identity as well as one's income. Not working? Then what are you? And to put the Calvinist message in crude theological terms: Go to hell.
In case anyone fails to feel their full measure of shame over unemployment, there is an entire shame industry to whip them into shape: the career coaches, self-help books, motivational speakers, and business gurus who preach that whatever happens to you must be a result of your own attitude. Laid-off and coming up empty on your job search? You must be too negative, and hence attracting negative circumstances into your life. To paraphrase one career coach I encountered during my research for Bait and Switch: We're not here to talk about the economy or the market; we're here to talk about you.
Click here for the rest.
Yeah, well, obviously it's not all thanks to Protestantism, although its pre-existing strain infecting our culture made fertile ground for what's really going on: all these motivational speakers and career coaches are just one part of a massive propaganda campaign to make individual economic circumstances all about you, the individual, rather than about the overall economic context. That is, how many times have you heard someone say that labor unions were once a very good thing, but that their time has passed? That's the conventional wisdom shared by countless journalists, politicians, and pundits, which dominates the US political discourse. The corporate news media simply don't cover labor issues, at least, not in the way they cover business issues--one half of the equation is simply off the table. Add to all that the fact that the labor movement and the importance of collective bargaining are always taught in public schools in the most boring ways possible. I vaguely remember covering labor in the US history class I took when I was a junior in high school; I remember very clearly, however, all the war stuff, and what badasses Americans are when they shoot foreigners.
If you're out of work, or suffering in a low-paying, no-benefit job you hate, there's a very good chance it isn't your fault: most likely, you're a pawn caught up in a power game waged by people who don't give a rat's ass whether you live or die. I mean, if you're a lazy fuck who just resents having to work, well, go to hell; I'm not talking about you. But if you're honestly trying, trust me, you're getting fucked over, and it's not your fault if you feel like you're failing.
And voting for Democrats probably isn't going to do much to help you.
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Sunday, October 29, 2006
Democrats Get Late Donations From Business
From the New York Times courtesy of AlterNet:
Corporate America is already thinking beyond Election Day, increasing its share of last-minute donations to Democratic candidates and quietly devising strategies for how to work with Democrats if they win control of Congress.
The shift in political giving, for the first 18 days of October, has not been this pronounced in the final stages of a campaign since 1994, when Republicans swept control of the House for the first time in four decades.
Though Democratic control of either chamber of Congress is far from certain, the prospect of a power shift is leading interest groups to begin rethinking well-established relationships, with business lobbyists going as far as finding potential Democratic allies in the freshman class — even if they are still trying to defeat them on the campaign trail — and preparing to extend an olive branch the morning after the election.
Click here for the rest.
No surprise here. The corporations don't really care which party is in power as long as they're beholden to corporate interests. Bunch a fucking sleaze bags. But just because it's no surprise is no reason not to worry. The GOP dominated Congress' biggest problem isn't that they are conservative, although that is a problem: their biggest problem is that they absolutely depend on corporate campaign contributions in order to stay in power; obviously, such money comes with many strings attached. Democrats are no different. They need that money, too, so they'll take it. And, once elected, they will continue to need that corporate money continually coming in, which means that they won't do anything to offend their money tree. In other words, we may be looking at the seeds of Democratic self-destruction, which is something that they're pretty good with all by themselves. And you can bet your butt that the Republicans aren't going to be as timid as their opponents when it comes to attacking the majority party on corruption. If the Dems take over, it could get pretty bad.
At least I'll have plenty to blog about.
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FROM THE REAL ART SPORTS DESK
From the AP via ESPN:
Every four years for the past 12,
It looked like that trend might continue Saturday night when
But the No. 5 Longhorns overcame four turnovers and erased the big deficit to beat the Red Raiders 35-31.
"This team doesn't know how to quit," said
The Longhorns (8-1, 5-0 Big 12) won their 20th straight conference game and 17th consecutive road game.
Click here for the rest.
Man. Looks like I missed another nail-biter. I don't even know if this was on television, but it doesn't matter because I was in rehearsal all day long. It's probably just as well that I didn't watch. I'm pretty much always nervous about Texas Tech. They don't always show up for a game, but when they do, they're pretty great, which means there's always a chance they can beat the Longhorns, especially in
Anyway, after last week's comeback against
I'd love to see the Doctor get a second chance to give a sedative filled hypo to
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Friday, October 27, 2006
Economic growth worst in more than 3 years
From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:
Economic growth slowed to a crawl in the third quarter, advancing at a pace of just 1.6 percent, the worst in more than three years.
The latest snapshot of the economy, released by the Commerce Department today, showed that the slumping housing market figured prominently in the economy's dramatic loss of momentum. Investment in homebuilding was cut by the biggest amount since early 1991.
The reading on gross domestic product was weaker than the 2.1 percent pace many economists were forecasting.
"The housing bubble burst and that really knocked down growth," said Joel Naroff, president of Naroff Economic Advisors.
Click here for the rest.
Of course, it's not all about the housing bubble: the article goes on to mention a host of issues, including inflation, that are making the overall economy sluggish. And that's exactly what the economy has been since Bush became President, sluggish. They say that you can't really blame the President one way or another for economic performance, but Bush is a special case. He's had Congress completely in his pocket for five and a half years now--they generally take his lead on most issues, especially the economy. That is, Bush wields more power in this area than pretty much any of his predecessors. That's why it's safe to say that this is all his fault.
And really none of this is surprising. Like I said, the US faces some pretty complicated economic problems, but Bush has gone after them with single-minded simplicity: cut taxes for the wealthy. I'll be the first to admit that some tax cuts can provide some stimulus for some parts of the economy. That is, tax policy needs to be in terms of incentives, wisely targeting cuts like a surgeon cutting out a tumor. Bush, on the other hand, lives in right-wing fantasy land, where handing over big sacks of money to the already wealthy somehow results in good times for all. Obviously, things don't work that way in the real world. Tax cuts are not a miracle cure for the economy. We need to be doing much more.
So, expect this kind of sluggishness to continue. I think that White House economic policy probably is capable of getting some short term growth going by its gratuitous use of smoke and mirrors, which is what's been happening since 2001, but it always falls short, and any gains made are always erased. What we need is some serious economic policy, that takes into account the fact that economics is complicated business. Sadly, the last word anyone would ever use to describe President Bush is "complicated."
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FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING
Frankie and Sammy
Paz
Phil
Be sure to check out Modulator's Friday Ark for more cat blogging!
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Cops crash a country show at Walter's
My buddy Adam over at Shattered Soapbox, a musician now studying music at the University of New Orleans, who has gigged around H-Town with his punk band, and knows Walter's well, weighs in on the infamous cop raid there a couple of weeks ago:
Here's how it plays out in my head: you're up on the stage playing your guitar, the bright stage lights make it difficult to see anyone in the crowd, you seem to be ignoring the cop because you CAN'T FUCKING SEE HIM, so he gets up on the stage and approaches you; if you're facing away from the crowd (to the side in this case), you probably can't see him even after he comes up onto the stage so you accidentally run into him as you turn back to face the crowd.
Basically, if Stephens really did run into that cop first, it was quite likely just an accident, and this cop flipped out.
Click here for the rest.
That's pretty much my opinon, too, but it's good to get the perspective of a guy who's in a position to better know the overall context. Indeed, the overall context actually makes the cop look worse. I had forgotten the kind of sensory mayhem that takes place onstage during a live music show, but that fact alone makes it clear that these musicians were probably more confused by what was going on than anything else. They certainly weren't the aggressors here. Which makes Officer Rodriguez a big fat liar.
And an asshole, to boot.
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"SLOWLY I TURNED": A PIECE OF AMERICA'S POP CULTURE
Mood music here.
From the Niagra Falls Reporter:
The skit, which was well known on the vaudeville circuit, goes something like this: A bedraggled man buttonholes a stranger and tells him a tale of betrayal and vengeance. A rogue seduced his sweetheart. He trailed the miscreant from town to town, finally catching up with him in Niagara Falls, where he pummeled him mercilessly. The hearer of the story haplessly says the magic words, "Niagara Falls," causing the man to turn on him and mete out the same punishment.
And
That same year, the Three Stooges incorporated it into their short feature, Gents Without Cents. In this episode, the Stooges are out-of-work actors who meet three dancing girls in similar circumstances. They all get a job in a show, where they perform the routine. The Stooges marry the ladies and honeymoon in (where else?) Niagara Falls. This time, Curly is the Stooge who exclaims "Niagara Falls!" making himself the target of Moe and Larry's wrath.
Click here for more.
Without a doubt, this is my favorite Three Stooges sketch of all time. Granted, I'm not a huge fan of the comedy trio, but then, hey, who doesn't like the Three Stooges? "Slowly I Turned" wasn't an original--it's actually an old Vaudeville routine performed by the likes of Lucy and Abbot and Costello. In my opinion, however, the Stooges did it best: you can just see their comedic craft executed extraordinarily well, honed for years in seedy burlesques and nightclubs. Since I first saw it when I was a young child, maybe four or five, the phrase "Niagra Falls" has meant much more to me than simply a romantic vacation getaway. It means wacky revenge, which is, obviously, the best kind of revenge.
Now, thanks to my buddy Mike over at This is not a compliment, you can see on your computer the greatest Three Stooges sketch of all time. Click here to watch.
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Wednesday, October 25, 2006
N.J. court grants rights to gay couples
From the AP via the
New Jersey's highest court ruled today that gay couples are entitled to the same rights as heterosexuals, but that lawmakers must determine whether the state will honor gay marriage or some other form of civil union.
Advocates on both sides of the issue believed
Instead, the Supreme Court stopped short of fully approving gay marriage and gave lawmakers 180 days to rewrite marriage laws to either include gay couples or create new civil unions.
Click here for the rest.
Okay, this isn’t quite the same thing as
This is a ticking time bomb. We will see gay marriage in all fifty states within my lifetime, and it doesn’t matter one bit what all the homophobes think or feel. Heh. I love it.
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Existing-house prices drop at a record rate nationwide
From the AP via the
The median price of a single-family home fell to $219,800 last month, a drop of 2.5 percent from the price in September 2005. That was the biggest year-over-year price decline in records going back nearly four decades.
Housing, which had set sales records for both new and existing homes for five consecutive years, has been rapidly loosing altitude this year, as consumers were battered by rising mortgage rates, soaring energy prices and a slowing economy.
However, economists with the Realtors said they believed the housing decline could be hitting bottom.
Click here for the rest.
Yeah, well, it's no surprise that economists working for realtors think they're hitting bottom--their livelihood depends on good forecasts.
I prefer economists who are a bit removed from the middle of things. This price drop is definitely the sound of a bubble bursting. All of this has been predicted for at least a couple of years now, if not more. Princeton economist Paul Krugman has been talking about it for quite a while, insisting that what’s been keeping the
You know, if Krugman is right about how the economy has been driven these last few years by housing, then there may very well be another recession in the works. Frankly, I just don’t understand right-wing economics anymore.
Hunting Gays In Iraq: How the Death Squads Work
From ZNet:
"Every gay and lesbian here lives in fear, just pure fear, of being beaten or killed," says Ahmad, a 34-year-old gay man, via telephone from his home in Baghdad. "Homosexuality is seen here as imported from the West and as the work of the devil."
Ahmad is masculine and "straight-acting," he says. "I can go out without being harassed or followed." But that's not the case for his more effeminate gay friends. "They just cannot go outside, period," he says. "If they did, they would be killed." To help them survive, Ahmad has been bringing food and other necessities to their homes. "The situation for us gay people here is beyond bad and dangerous," he says.
Life for gay and lesbian citizens in war-torn Iraq has become grave and is getting worse every day. While President Bush hails a new, "democratic" society, thousands of civilians are dying in a low-level civil war -- and gays are being targeted just for being gay. The Badr Corps -- the military arm of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI for short), the country's most powerful Shiite political group -- has launched a campaign of "sexual cleansing," marshaling death squads to exterminate homosexuality.
And
All Hussein thinks about is getting out of Iraq. "Things were bad under Saddam for gays," he says, "but not as bad as now. Then, no one feared for their lives. Now, you can be gotten rid of at any time."
Click here for the rest.
We already knew that democracy and freedom in Iraq are a big joke, but this is very disturbing news indeed. Apparently, it's open season on homosexuals in over there, and, as the article notes, many of the death squads are working within the government. The government we created. This is truly fucked. Imagine Fred Phelps' gang of psychos taking control of the US. But this is worse. Phelps is an idiot and an incompetent, good only for pissing people off: the SCIRI is the exact opposite; they're efficient, cold, and brutal killers.
We're responsible for this shit--like the man says, it was bad before, but not like this.
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GORE VIDAL INTERVIEW
A new one from the Progressive:
Q: You’re a veteran of World War II, the so-called good war. Would you recommend to a young person a career in the armed forces in the United States?
Vidal: No, but I would suggest Canada or New Zealand as a possible place to go until we are rid of our warmongers. We’ve never had a government like this. The United States has done wicked things in the past to other countries but never on such a scale and never in such an existentialist way. It’s as though we are evil. We strike first. We’ll destroy you. This is an eternal war against terrorism. It’s like a war against dandruff. There’s no such thing as a war against terrorism. It’s idiotic. These are slogans. These are lies. It’s advertising, which is the only art form we ever invented and developed.
But our media has collapsed. They’ve questioned no one. One of the reasons Bush and Cheney are so daring is that they know there’s nobody to stop them. Nobody is going to write a story that says this is not a war, only Congress can declare war. And you can only have a war with another country. You can’t have a war with bad temper or a war against paranoids. Nothing makes any sense, and the people are getting very confused. The people are not stupid, but they are totally misinformed.
Q: You’ve called the country “The United States of Amnesia.” Is this something in our genes?
Vidal: No, it’s something in our rulers. They don’t want us to know anything. When you’ve got a press like we have, you no longer have an informed citizenry.
I was involved somewhat with Congressman Conyers on what happened in Ohio during the last Presidential election.
Conyers is the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, and he went up there with a bunch of researchers. They went from district to district, and they found out how the election was stolen. He wrote a report that was published by a small press in Chicago. To help out, I said I’d write a preface for him on how the election was stolen. We were thinking that might help. But The New York Times and The Washington Post were not going to review the book about how we had a second Presidential election stolen. They weren’t going to admit it.
A huge number of Americans still believe that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11. You have a people that don’t know anything about the rest of the world, and you have leaders who lie to them, lie to them, and lie to them.
It’s so stupid, everything that they say. And the media take on it is just as stupid as theirs, sometimes worse. They at least have motives. They are making money out of the republic or what’s left of it. It’s the stupidity that will really drive me away from this country.
Click here for more.
No sparkling commentary from me on this: Vidal speaks very clearly for himself, which is why I like him so much, and anything I might say would be like drooling gibberish compared to his wonderful use of the English language. However, I would add to his statement about the press and how the ruling elite don't want us to know anything that the schools play a key role in the creation of American ignorance as well, of which I'm sure Gore is quite aware. But I don't have any more to say than that. Really, I'm just posting this interview because he so clearly and concisely articulates the major problems facing the US today that it is well worth the read.
I mean, what can one say about the man who once pissed off conservative godfather William F. Buckley so much that he threatened to "sock [Vidal] in the goddamn teeth" live on national television? What a mighty good man!
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Tuesday, October 24, 2006
SKILLING GETS 24 YEARS IN
PRISON FOR ENRON FRAUD
From the Houston Chronicle:
"This is not an easy decision,'' Lake said. "Sentencing is the most difficult and least pleasant part of my job Mr. Skilling has a family who loves him.''
He added, however, "His crimes have imposed on hundreds if not thousands, a life sentence of poverty."
Lake's sentence, more precisely 292 months, also ordered Skilling to participate in alcohol and mental health programs. He also approved the forfeiture of $45 million to be distributed to Enron employees.
And
To others, the timing of Skilling's sentencing, after most of the other large corporate scandals such as WorldCom and Adelphia have played out, brings a tidy end to an era of white-collar crime.
Click here for the rest.
Okay, I can accept this as justice. I mean, how do you really determine what amount of time ought to be served for giving "hundreds if not thousands, a life sentence of poverty?" I suppose life wouldn't be out of line. Certainly not death: I don't approve of that for anybody, no matter what their crime. Still, twenty four years is a long time, especially for a guy at Skilling's age. And it's hard time--the judge rejected Skilling serving out his sentence in one of those cushy mimimum security prisons. The forfeiture is icing on the cake, but won't do nearly enough to help out the investors and employees that he robbed. So cool. I guess.
But what bugs me about this is that anyone at all thinks this means the end of "an era of white-collar crime." That's just so fucking stupid. The GOP Congress passed only what amounted to window dressing in terms of reform after all the scandals broke, which means that, legally, the stage continues to be set for more fraud. Sure, yeah, the capitalist crowd is being more careful these days--the only reason all these guys got busted in the first place was that the conventional wisdom was such that they had all the authorities in their pockets, and would never be held accountable. Well, guess what? They still have all the authorities in their pockets and the Enron induced fear over Wall Street is only going to last another couple of years at most.
None of this even addresses the fact that the vast majority of immoral corporate acts are already perfectly legal because they've written all the laws! The era of white-collar crime has only just begun.
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Monday, October 23, 2006
Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives
has done more for politics than poverty
From Working For Change, the Boston Globe's Ellen Goodman:
Abroad, a recent Boston Globe series on foreign aid showed how, through a series of executive orders, religious groups have obtained hundreds of millions of dollars in government funding -- 98.3 percent of it to Christian charities. Your tax dollars are at work, sometimes changing the message that comes with American aid, even promoting the healing powers of a Christian God.
In one hospital in the ultra-sensitive Muslim turf of Pakistan, the X-ray machine, the blood bank refrigerator and the radiology computer bear the USAID sticker, "From the American People." In the waiting room of this underutilized hospital "The Jesus Film" is shown.
At home, The New York Times reported at length that religious organizations are not only exempt from taxes but increasingly from civil rights laws. A church may now use its tax-free dollars to build retirement communities where the average resident's net worth is $1 million.
Finally along comes David Kuo, once the No. 2 man in the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. In his book, "Tempting Faith," he recalls how the stars in the religious right's firmament were described by White House honchos as "nuts," "goofy," "boorish." He confesses that the office did more for politics than poverty. How values voters were valued only for their votes.
Click here for more.
"Compassionate conservatism" was a joke from the moment the term was coined. After all, compassion has never been something that conservatives have really ever mixed with their politics, making the concept a bizarre oxymoron at the very least. But that didn't make it okay. My problem with the whole faith-based thing was that, by its very nature, it would serve as a major erosion of the separation between church and state.
Of course, the thing I never understood until lately is that Bush was never serious about it. That is, he wasn't serious about it in terms of actually doing what he said he was going to do: "compassionate conservatism" is simply a political ploy, a chunk of red meat thrown to fundamentalists in order to get their votes. So, yeah, some money has been diverted to religious charitable organizations, not nearly as much as the White House promised, but just enough to be able to say that they were helping out their zealot-brothers in faith.
Fortunately for the nation, the faith-based initiative didn't turn out to be the intermingling of government and religion that I had feared. Unfortunately for fundamentalist voters, they've been played for fools. Somehow, it's not very easy for me to feel sorry for them.
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Sunday, October 22, 2006
Did VA Hide Figures Showing 1 in 4 US Veterans
of Iraq and Afghanistan Disabled From Service?
From Democracy Now:
PAUL SULLIVAN: It means, in simple terms, that it appears the administration was playing a definitions game. Right now, if you read the report, Amy, from the Veterans' Benefits Administration, it says that there is actually no official definition for the global war on terror. The global war on terror, or GWOT, has several other names: the war in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan, Operation Iraqi Freedom, Operation Enduring Freedom. So, depending upon how a reporter asked the question, the administration has a tremendous amount of flexibility in what kind of answer they want to provide.
Let me give you an example. Right now, the Department of Defense, if you ask them how many service members are in Iraq, they’ll answer 150,000. However if you ask the question, “How many service members are now deployed to the global war on terror, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan?” the number is actually 250,000. The higher number takes into account service members in places like Kuwait, Qatar, Diego Garcia and the nations surrounding Iraq and Afghanistan and aboard ships. So, what VA and DOD are doing is they’re playing a definition game. If someone doesn’t ask for exactly the right kind of report and the right kind of statistic, then the Department of Defense or the Department of Veterans’ Affairs can simply say the report doesn’t exist.
AMY GOODMAN: Paul Sullivan, what does this mean for costs? What does it mean for all of the disability costs?
PAUL SULLIVAN: What it means is, in terms of how much money the Iraq and Afghanistan war will cost taxpayers, the war will cost billions per year well out into the future.
Click here to watch, read, or listen to the rest.
The conventional wisdom is that the lessons coming out of the Vietnam are something along these lines: have clear, achievable goals, use massive force, don't attempt to "nation build," and have a full understanding of what you're getting into. Or something to that effect. The White House, however, clearly is working out of a different textbook. Their Vietnam lessons: don't let the US public know how bad it really is by keeping the press far away from actual fighting or the returning bodies of dead soldiers, playing numbers games with dead and wounded, and plain old fashioned Nixonian lying. This report from Democracy Now isn't surprising at all. In fact, it's totally in keeping with what we've seen from the Oval Office thus far.
What surprises me is the figure: one out of every four Iraq/Afghanistan vets is now disabled. One out of four. That boggles my mind. I've seen a few TV reports about how field medicine is so advanced nowdays, that hundreds of soldiers who would have died on the battlefield in past conflicts actually survive in this one. But the other side of that success seems rarely discussed: they live, yes, but they're coming back home with disabilities. That's just not acceptable. We're crippling--what?--thousands of young men. What, exactly, are the numbers on this?
Maybe the anti-war movement should start talking about all these disabled vets when they're talking about how many soldiers we've lost. It seems significant.
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FROM THE REAL ART SPORTS DESK
MUSTANGS UPSET #5 WILDCATS
From the Houston Chronicle:
Kingwood stonewalls 2-point try, beats Humble
Kingwood upset No. 5 area-ranked Humble with defense as the Wildcats failed on a 2-point conversion with 55 seconds left in regulation and then missed a 45-yard field goal with 10 seconds left.
Click here for the rest--there's not much more, but you can read about how Baytown Sterling, where I used to teach, lost to Beaumont Westbrook. Here is the box score.
Well, in the grand scheme of things, the Mustangs are no LSU or UT, but they are the team I used to root for when I attended Kingwood High School back in the 80s. And the Humble Wildcats were the team we always wanted to beat; they were, and still are, the big cross town rival. Unfortunately for Kingwood, Humble is in the middle of something of a dynasty, highly ranked in the Houston area for these past seven or eight years, usually making the playoffs--Kingwood, on the other hand, only occasionally puts together a winning record these days; indeed, this win against the Wildcats brings the Mustangs to .500 for this season.
But what the hell! We beat Humble! This must be what it's like to be an Aggie for one of those rare wins against the Longhorns. Actually, it feels pretty good.
Go 'Stangs!
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I Won't Support Hillary Just Because She's a Woman
From AlterNet:
I don't think it's the height of feminism to have a woman president. I think it's the height of feminism to be able to look at presidential candidates as people who will or will not meet our needs and serve our interests. Regardless of whether those candidates are men or women, black or white, Hispanic or Asian.
And looking solely at Mrs. Clinton's political credentials, she's not the candidate for me.
She's too centrist. I'm a bleeding-heart, borderline-socialist, anti-war liberal who believes corporate wealth is the source of most of the country's problems. Hillary never met a credit card company lobbyist she didn't like, she won't push for legalization of equal rights to marriage for all, she concentrates her attention on a culture of sex and violence in the media instead of on the culture of corruption and violence in Washington today.
She represents a Democratic ideology of the past. The 1990s were fun. I was in college then, and I enjoyed the tech boom that had people fighting for my job skills when I graduated. I loved that period of my life. But it's over, and so is the political climate that made her and her husband's bipartisan compromising palatable to most Americans.
Click here for the rest.
"Centrist?" Uh, try "conservative" instead. Not conservative like the near-fascists who make up today's GOP leadership, but old school conservative, like Nixon or Goldwater. I, too, had great affection for Hillary back in the 90s, back when I just assumed that Rush Limbaugh was right about her lesbian-loving, spell-casting ways. I even wrote a cute little song praising her. I figured that she was liberal and that her association with the pro-corporate DLC was simply due to political expedience. But her antics in the Senate have really made me reevaluate that point of view. She votes and talks like a corporation lover, and her support for the war, which everybody thinks is about shoring up her security credentials for her inevitable presidential run, is, at this point, unconscionable. Today, I have no idea why anybody, let alone right-wingers, thinks she's liberal.
Well, fuck her. Her chameleon-like politics sicken me. And her "liberal" smugness gives me gas. For my own reasons, I now join with millions of conservatives by declaring that Hillary's just a big bitch. There's no fucking way I'm voting for her for dog catcher, let alone president.
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Saturday, October 21, 2006
FROM THE REAL ART SPORTS DESK
TEXAS BEATS NEBRASKA
LSU BEATS FRESNO STATE
From the AP via ESPN:
Horns slip past Huskers on walk-on kicker's game-winning FG
The Huskers were on the verge of pulling the upset after taking a 20-19 lead with 4:54 left. But Texas caught a huge break when receiver Terrence Nunn fumbled as the Huskers were trying to kill the clock. Marcus Griffin recovered at the Nebraska 44 with 2:17 left.
Colt McCoy, with a 20 mph wind in his face, snow flurries swirling and Vince Young looking on from the sideline, drove the Longhorns to the Nebraska 5 .
Nebraska (6-2, 3-1) tried to ice Bailey when coach Bill Callahan asked officials to review the previous play to see if the Huskers may have intercepted a pass by McCoy in the end zone. Replays clearly showed that the ball bounced on the ground, however, and Bailey didn't seem to mind the delay.
After getting a good-natured slap on the helmet from Brown, he trotted back out onto the field and calmly made the kick.
Click here for the rest.
Sounds like it was a great game. Unfortunately for me, I didn't realize it was an early game and didn't turn on the television until there was, well, only 2:17 left on the clock. Yeah, that's right, I started watching right after Texas recovered the fumble that allowed them to win the game. So no anxiety for me, no thrills, no nail-biting. Just the very satisfying feeling that we had it in the bag. I mean, those last couple of minutes were somewhat exciting. The announcers kept going on and on about how the Longhorns' starting kicker had blown it three times already. Then Coach Brown brought in the walk-on guy, and Nebraska's coach used his time outs to try to ice him. But, you know, he kicked from like the seven yard line. It wasn't that exciting.
But, what the hell, it's a win against a conference opponent, in the snow, and Nebraska's pretty damned good this year. I'll take it.
Again from the AP via ESPN:
Bowe ties LSU receiving record in rout of Fresno State
Dwayne Bowe caught a 58-yard touchdown pass to tie the LSU record for career scoring catches and ice the No. 14 Tigers' 38-6 victory over Fresno State on Saturday night.
And
JaMarcus Russell was 15-of-19 passing for 210 yards and two touchdowns, playing into the fourth quarter at home for the first time this season.
LSU (6-2) has registered lopsided victories in all six of its home games, but this one was closer than the others for the better part of three quarters.
Fresno State kicker Clint Stitser made field goals of 35 and 29 yards, the second one getting the Bulldogs (1-6) as close as 17-6 midway through the third quarter.
But the Tigers responded with a six-play, 67-yard scoring drive capped by Broussard's score as the Tigers began to pull away. Bowe scored on LSU's next drive, then Russell hit Davis to make it 38-6 with just under 10 minutes remaining.
Click here for the rest.
So it was a blowout, but not until the fourth quarter. Fresno State was in it until close to the end. Unfortunately, I didn't get to see this one either. Totally blacked out on TV here in Baton Rouge, and I'm still not sure how the ticket lottery works here anyway. So I just kind of kept track of the score online. You know, I'd bitch about how LSU keeps playing these lesser opponents, but, apparently Fresno State was pretty good a couple of years ago. I suppose who ever does the scheduling was expecting a better match. Oh well, it's a win.
Just not an SEC win, and the Tigers sure could use a few more of those.
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We refuse to work for homosexuals
From the Houston Chronicle:
At 9:08 a.m. Farber, who together with her husband, Todd, owns Garden Guy Inc., a landscaping company on Hillcroft, hit "send" on a message that delivered a painful blow with the verbal equivalent of a smiley face.
"Subject: Cancel Appt - Garden Guy
"Dear Mr. Lord,
"I am appreciative of your time on the phone today and glad you contacted us. I need to tell you that we cannot meet with you because we choose not to work for homosexuals.
"Best of luck in finding someone else to fill your landscaping needs.
"All my best,
"Sabrina"
Click here for the rest.
The article notes that the owners of Garden Guy are Christians, and their website has a statement about how "the God-ordained institution of marriage is under attack," complete with a link to an anti-gay marriage site. So I guess the Farbers' understanding of the Bible is that homosexuals ought to be shunned.
Hmmm...let's see. Jesus dined with tax collectors, who were hated and reviled throughout Judea. Jesus befriended prostitutes. Jesus rescued an adulteress from a psychotic mob of fundementalist weirdos. Jesus told the parable about the good Samaritan--Samaritans were the Palestinians of their day, hated and reviled even more than tax collectors. Jesus associated with lepers, who were even more shunned than AIDS patients were in the 80s. As he was dying on the cross, Jesus told the criminals who were being executed next to him that they would stand beside him in Heaven when it was all over. In short, Jesus was constantly reaching out to the most marginalized people in society, especially those who were universally condemned by the moral authorities.
I'm so sick of this shit. These Farbers aren't followers of Jesus, no matter how they self-identify: they're simply prejudiced assholes.
I'm personally certain that there is no such thing as Hell because no just God would ever create such a place. But sometimes I like to fantasize that there is, and the most satisfying part of such a fantasy is imagining the look on the faces of people like the Farbers and the Falwells and the Dobsons and the Robertsons when they realize how badly they'd fucked up right before fire and brimstone make their heads melt like that guy in the first Indiana Jones movie.
From the Book of Matthew:
21Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven.
22Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works?
23And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity.
Heh. I love that passage.
(Thanks to my old pal Anne, a fellow former Southern Baptist, and theater goddess of my Houston art-home, dos chicas, for sending this story my way.)
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Friday, October 20, 2006
FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING
Sammy
Phil
Frankie
Paz
Be sure to check out Modulator's Friday Ark for more cat blogging!
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QUIS CUSTODIET IPSOS CUSTODES
MEANS "WHO POLICES THE POLICE?"
From the Houston Chronicle, a classic tale of cops and rock and roll:
Noise complaint at bar leads to melee
McDuell said Stephens, whose guitar was hanging from a neck strap, then used a sexual obscenity and shoved the officer with his shoulder.
McDuell said the officer then tried to arrest Stephens for assault and forced him to the stage floor of the stage.
Stephens, a 25-year-old from San Francisco, said that is "absolutely" not what happened.
Stephens said he was sideways and singing on the stage just before he turned around and saw the officer, who then shined a flashlight at him and said, "Stop."
Stephens, who denied shoving the officer, said he responded, "Why?"
He said the officer moved closer to him and yelled, "Stop!"
Stephens said he again asked why and that the officer then grabbed him by the neck and forced him to the floor.
Accounts vary, but apparently several people then charged the stage, there was a lot of pushing and shoving, and the officer called for backup.
HPD's McDuell said several people were grabbing the officer from behind when he felt someone grab his pistol.
Click here for the rest.
Wait. Now, what happened? The main thrust of the Chronicle article is that nobody can really say at this point who's at fault, despite the fact that there were dozens of witnesses, some of whom were taking photos and shooting video. Frankly, I think the Chronicle, in a misguided attempt at "balance" isn't really doing the kind of reporting it ought to be doing. Here's my version of "balance," another account of the incident from the music news site Pitchfork courtesy of the Houston Chronicle's music scene blog Handstamp:
Two Gallants Speak Out About Houston Incident
According to McDuell via the Houston Chronicle, Stephens "used a sexual obscenity and shoved the officer with his shoulder."
"There's no way I shoved him at all," Stephens said. "I think anyone with a little bit of reason, if you just picture the situation, we're there to play music, not to attack police officers. We're playing music and a cop comes in, we had no idea what was going on, why in the world would we immediately attack a police officer for walking into a venue while we're playing? We're not on tour to take down law enforcement. It's just ridiculous to me that someone would make up that rumor, because why would anyone do that? He completely took the first offensive move by throwing us to the ground."
Vogel said, "I never pushed that guy. Neither did Adam. We were just so confused about what was going on. We didn't have time to be angry or want to start a fight."
"All I remember being on the ground was trying to get back up," Stephens continued. "I didn't swing at him. I remember trying to push him up off of us, because there was no reason we should have been on the ground. We didn't do anything at all! I still feel like it's in my right to defend myself if I feel like I've done absolutely no crime. I didn't swing at him, I didn't do anything in any way to attack him. But I think we were doing what anyone would have done in that situation, just trying to get back up, try to get back our footing."
The Chronicle also reported that Rodriguez "suffered bruises and cuts on his arms," which Two Gallants deny. "He had blood on his shirt, but that was from me," Vogel explained. "I cut myself a lot when I'm playing, so my hands were bleeding when he pushed me. And when we were down at the jail, waiting for everything to be processed, we saw him hanging out, going about his business, and nothing was wrong. He wasn't hurt at all."
Click here for more.
Yet another account posted on a myspace site alleges this: "An Ex-Walter’s employee claims Rodgriguez 'always came around with a chip on his shoulder, being very confrontational to patrons of Walter's shows.'" For me, that pretty much encapsulates what was really going on.
Forgive me for jumping to conclusions here, but given the fact that none of the people involved in the "melee" are actually criminals, and that they were obviously just trying to play a gig, the burden is on the Houston Police Department to explain why things went so badly. I mean, a fourteen year old kid who wasn't even inside the venue was tasered, for crying out loud! And it's not like these were hardcore punks or death metal rockers; this was a mellow country band. For that matter, the cop version of the story just reeks of CYA--"felt someone grab his pistol" ranks right up there with "I thought I smelled marijuana." Further, even if the cop story is absolutely true, what the hell did they think they were doing sending a single officer into what they say they believed was a crazed and drunken crowd of wild rock and rollers? It doesn't add up. Their version is bullshit at face value.
Clearly what happened was that a dick cop came in there to throw around his au-thor-i-tay. When band members, who were right in the middle of a song, didn't immediately get down on their knees and suck his big hard cop dick, he freaked, going into typical cop manly-violence mode. This kind of thing happens all the time. It's just that such stories aren't usually in front of masses of witnesses and on videotape, and cops who are often drunk on their own sense of power and self-righteousness are able to get away with it scot-free. Events like this are inevitible because pig-headed police attitudes are heavily encouraged by police culture. I think it's safe to say, however, that, eventually, Rodriguez is going to be in a bunch of trouble--too many people saw what happened.
But it will happen again. And again and again. The only thing that can stop it is to require an overhaul of the culture in which cops operate. The "us versus them" attitude has got to end. The cult of authority-worship has got to end. The "code of silence" that requires good cops to look the other way when bad cops do bad things has got to end.
I've said many times before that society needs police protection, but not from guys like this. Goddamned pig.
Two skinny, vegan, 100 pound band members "assault" a 250 pound cop from underneath him
Click here or here for video.
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Thursday, October 19, 2006
TWO FROM ALTERNET
TWO FROM HOWARD ZINN
Busy tonight. But I am linking to, via AlterNet, an interview with and essay by radical historian Howard Zinn, who changed everything for me about what it means to be an American.
Howard Zinn on Our 'Addiction to Massive Violence'
What is an issue on which your opinion has changed, and what have you learned from the change?
Certainly my opinion changed from the time I was a bombardier that there was such a thing as a good war, and I now know that there is no such thing. I also thought we had a democratic society and government, with checks and balances. I now believe only in the movements of the people that can change history.
Are popular resistance movements different now than in the past?
I think that the mobilization of people is not fundamentally different. Very often, people will get frustrated that the movement isn't succeeding in stopping the war. They think there must be a better way, that there must be some magic new way to organize, but it takes time and patience; there's no magic to it. There's no cause for despair that we have not yet seen results yet; it's a matter of continuing to do it because people are basically decent and don't want war.
Should there be limits on free speech in higher education?
Professors and students should be express whatever opinions they want. Our culture is dominated by certain ideas: the ideas of patriotism, nationalism, ideas of capitalism and success in terms of wealth and prestige; students are already exposed to all sorts of ideas. Professors should be free to express their ideas because it serves as an example to students. For them to bring their ideas into the classroom is to bring their own cart to the marketplace of ideas. Professors need to express those opinions; when a professor holds back and is timid, he is setting an example of timidity in the classroom.
Click here for the rest.
War-Mongering America Terrorizes the World
There is something important to be learned from the recent experience of the United States and Israel in the Middle East: that massive military attacks, inevitably indiscriminate, are not only morally reprehensible, but useless in achieving the stated aims of those who carry them out.
The United States, in three years of war, which began with shock-and- awe bombardment and goes on with day-to-day violence and chaos, has been an utter failure in its claimed objective of bringing democracy and stability to Iraq. The Israeli invasion and bombing of Lebanon has not brought security to Israel; indeed it has increased the number of its enemies, whether in Hezbollah or Hamas or among Arabs who belong to neither of those groups.
Click here for the rest.
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Wednesday, October 18, 2006
"Ghetto Fabulous" Parties: the New Face of White Supremacy
From CounterPunch, my favorite journalism professor, UT's Robert Jensen, on the administrative reaction to a racist party thrown by some University of Texas law students:
Racist, sexist, and heterosexist images and words are a problem not merely because they offend but because they help keep non-white people, women, and lesbians and gays in subordinated positions. Framing the problem of oppressive systems as a question of offensiveness often leads people to argue that the solution is for the targets of the offensive speech or actions to be less sensitive, rather than changing the oppressive system. Sager's email doesn't suggest that, but it could play into that common feeling among people in the dominant classes. We live in a world in which the legitimate concerns of non-white people about racist expression and actions are often met by white people saying, "Stop whining -- get over it." In such a world, white people trying to resist racism should be careful not to do anything that could contribute to that.
Click here for more.
I forget where I originally read it, but this quote has stuck with me for years: "The University of Texas has been described as both the nation's biggest white university and the nation's whitest big university." If the racial makup of the student population at Texas is approximately the same now as it was when I was an undergrad there in the late 80s and early 90s, I'd say that quote is right on. Especially when compared to what I see here at LSU. Lots of non-white faces here, but relatively very few at my old school. It seems to me that what amounts to near racial exclusivity at Texas only makes such scandals inevitable. They happened back when I was there and they're happening now. UT's really got to clean up its act.
Anyway, the excerpt above reminds me of a controversy I inadvertanly caused when I was teaching high school in Baytown. Some student, I forget who, asked me during a class discussion why it is socially acceptable for black comedians to make fun of white people but not the reverse. I laid out what I believe to be a pretty much indisputable case: there is a long history of racism in this nation, which heavily infected American entertainment, and continues to do so today. I talked about the minstrel shows. I talked about Gone with the Wind. I talked about racial stereotyping in recent films. Then I explained how there is no such history, in terms of scale, when it comes to portraying whites, and that, by and large, whites continue to be the major power holders in America. My conclusion, that it doesn't really matter if black comedians make fun of whites, but there is a great deal at stake when the tables are turned, really ruffled some feathers. White feathers, that is--my African-American students, on the other hand, totally understood what I was getting at.
I mean, some of my kids were really pissed off at me. One of them even tried to get me fired. No one who disagreed with me, unfortunately, really tried to address or understand my arguments; they just couldn't seem to get out of their limited perception of fairness: "if they can make fun of us, then we should be able to make fun of them."
What I learned when the heat had died down was that many, many white Americans have absolutely no understanding of the racial dynamics in this country. They don't really know the history, or seemingly even care to know. All they know is that racism is bad, and because they're good people they can't be racists or engage in racist behavior or thinking. At the same time, however, they appear to be mired in an "us versus them" mindset, utterly oblivious to the fact that whites continue to enjoy great privilege in America relative to people of color. The bottom line is that buttloads of white Americans just don't get it. They think racist speech is all about being offensive, which it is, but, of course, that's simply one tiny corner of the entire situation: racist speech is far more about indoctrination into and legitimizing of the racist power structure that rules the nation.
Try explaining that to a pissed off fourteen year old who claims to only want equality, which, to her, means the right to make fun of black people. Sometimes I fear we're never going to change.
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Discontent with GOP finds way into Texas
From the AP via Yahoo courtesy of AlterNet:
Three weeks to the midterm elections, GOP discontent is seeping into the home state of
President Bush, where every statewide elected official is a Republican.
The state's Republican House members were supposed to be protected from such voter mood swings by the 2003 redrawing of the state's congressional districts, orchestrated by former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay.
But largely because of DeLay, who resigned in June embroiled in scandal, Texas this year unexpectedly is one of the states that could help Democrats wrest control of the House from the GOP this November. Races for three of the state's 32 congressional seats are considered competitive.
Click here for the rest.
Well, three out of thirty two doesn't at all mean that my home state is turning liberal. I mean, that's just an absurd notion on its face. Given the above mentioned redistricting, however, and how it really has made it virtually impossible for Texas' Congressional delegation to tilt Democrat, this is significant: when Texas Republicans start dissing the GOP, you know people in this country are totally pissed off. 'Bout time.
Good Lord, we've come a long way since March of '03.
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Monday, October 16, 2006
Ex-FDA chief charged in conflict of interest case
From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:
Former FDA chief Lester Crawford was charged today with lying about his ownership of stock in companies regulated by his agency.
The Justice Department accused the former head of the Food and Drug Administration with falsely reporting that he had sold stock in companies when he continued holding onto shares in the firms governed by FDA rules.
Click here for the rest.
This kind of thing is totally inevitable when the staffing pool for federal regulatory agencies consists of executives drawn from the industries that are being regulated. The whole trend started under Clinton, but, of course, it has ballooned under Bush. A couple of decades ago we had some pretty darned good oversight of industry in this country--for instance, back in the late 50s the FDA was pretty much the only agency in the world that held off on approving the sedative thalidomide, which ended up causing great masses of severe birth defects worldwide, but not in the US. Today, however, that's not the case. What were once regulatory agencies are now little corporate helpers, seeing their mission as one of enabling and aiding the industries they are required by law to police. Unfortunately, conflict-of-interest cases are not the worst possible result from this crazy-ass situation: real people get hurt and real people die when industry goes unregulated. It took over a hundred sick and three dead before Americans understood that spinach isn't safe to eat right now. If our FDA was worth a damn, that wouldn't have happened. American citizens ought not be reduced to the proverbial canary in the coal mine so that corporate fat cats can get fatter.
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FROM THE REAL ART SPORTS DESK
TEXANS BEWARE: AGGIE
ARROGANCE RETURNING SOON
From the Houston Chronicle:
A day after upsetting previously undefeated Missouri 25-19 at Kyle Field, the Texas A&M Aggies were rewarded Sunday with appearances in the Associated Press and ESPN/USA Today Top 25 polls.
Click here for the rest.
You know, it's been nice these last few years. Aggies everywhere knew their football team sucked and so they kept their damned mouths shut. None of that stupid "t.u." shit. Now this. All they did was beat a greatly over rated Missouri team by a couple of field goals, but if the Aggies are true to form, and they most definitely always are, they're going to start believing that they can win the frickin' national championship. Seriously. I know how these people think. If they're not getting it on with sheep and cows, they're drooling over their football team--when their team isn't worth drooling about, however, they just get it on with more sheep and cows. But, whoa, they're number 23 now! Put that sheep down and come over here right now and start making fun of UT! I mean "t.u."
Look out home state: the Aggie-dicks are back.
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DEMOCRACY IN IRAQ WAS, IS, AND WILL
CONTINUE TO BE A BIG FUCKING JOKE
From Crooks and Liars courtesy of AlterNet, some video of the Washington Post's conservative columnist David Brooks asserting that the White House is considering dissolving the Iraqi government:
Matthews: David, do you believe the President is looking for an out from his doctrinaire policy of staying the course?
Brooks: Not really, no I don't. I think they're looking at policy options. One of those options is trying to replace the current government which seems to be doing nothing.
Click here to see the video.
I completely agree with the notion that Iraq's government is nothing but a paper tiger--the real power brokers over there are the insurgents, the militias, and, of course, the US military. But if Brooks is right about Bush's desire to simply scrap the much ballyhooed election results and start over, what does that mean about "spreading democracy" and all that good stuff? Answer: absolutely nothing. Anybody with half a brain already knows that spreading democracy was never a US goal in Iraq. Doing away with the elected government may very well be bad PR for Bush, but it's certainly not a change of direction for American policy.
What will be interesting, if this happens, is to see if anyone in the press or in Congress has the balls to point out the utter hypocrisy here. I give even odds that nobody in the mainstream says anything at all.
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In Houston, wages don't always pay the rent
From the Houston Chronicle opinion section:
A much larger hump on the income curve is the number of people employed in Houston making $6 or $7 an hour, or maybe $60 a day.
Doing the math is pretty easy.
Sixty dollars times five days is $300 per week. Four weeks per month means $1,200 per month of total income. Since half the households in Houston are composed of one or two persons, this means total household income for a substantial portion of our residents is just that: $1,200 per month. With the cheapest apartments renting for $500 per month plus utilities, many families double up, live in cars, or make the tradeoff between food and electricity.
Drive in some neighborhoods and you'll notice the large number of little hibachi grills in the front yards of apartment units. Barbecue lovers? No. People without electricity.
Click here for the rest.
And this bind isn't simply in H-Town; it's in pretty much every city in the country. The bottom line is that, unless you've got one of those increasingly rare good-paying jobs, it is impossible to exist in our "free market" economy. As soon as I'm out of grad school, that's precisely the position in which I'll find myself.
I remember when I lived in Austin during the early 90s, at the beginning of the tech boom. There was a housing shortage then, and rents were skyrocketing. At one point, I was comforted by an article proclaiming that developers were planning to build buttloads of apartment units. As I continued to read, however, my comfort turned to anxiety when I realized that all those new apartments were aimed at upscale white collar workers, and rents were priced accordingly. That is, if you were working as a waiter or in some other crappy low wage job, you were shit out of luck. Fortunately, I managed to worm my way into a roommate situation with an informal landlord who was charging us waaay less than the market was dictating at that point. In other words, I got lucky.
But most people in such a predicament aren't lucky.
You know, this housing problem, and how most new housing is aimed at the high end, is a pretty darned good example of how the "free market" most certainly does not take care of average ordinary people in the long run. Indeed, the "free market" doesn't care about average ordinary people at all, which is why America really, really, really needs to revisit many of its assumptions about the way things work.
'Cause this is a bunch of bullshit.
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Sunday, October 15, 2006
Bush keeps revising war justification
From the AP via Yahoo courtesy of AlterNet:
President Bush keeps revising his explanation for why the U.S. is in Iraq, moving from narrow military objectives at first to history-of-civilization stakes now.
Initially, the rationale was specific: to stop Saddam Hussein from using what Bush claimed were the Iraqi leader's weapons of mass destruction or from selling them to al-Qaida or other terrorist groups.
But 3 1/2 years later, with no weapons found, still no end in sight and the war a liability for nearly all Republicans on the ballot Nov. 7, the justification has become far broader and now includes the expansive "struggle between good and evil."
Republicans seized on North Korea's reported nuclear test last week as further evidence that the need for strong U.S. leadership extends beyond Iraq.
Bush's changing rhetoric reflects increasing administration efforts to tie the war, increasingly unpopular at home, with the global fight against terrorism, still the president's strongest suit politically.
Click here for the rest.
I wrote this in Real Art comments yesterday:
I often wonder if Bush's advisors are smarter than we give them credit for, if they're playing some entirely different game, with lots of misdirection. Do you ever wonder why we really invaded Iraq? Surely not for WMD, which they must have known weren't there. Surely not to get access to Iraq's oil reserves because we have fairly safe and stable access in other countries. And surely not to "spread democracy" because that's just fucking stupid on its face.I would add to that comment that we are surely not there to fight terrorism, either: in fact, the war is doing precisely the opposite; it's creating terrorism, and we know that now for sure. My own bet continues to be on the "control the spigot" theory, that the idea is to transmute our awsome military power into massive economic leverage by exercising hegemony over the Middle East from huge bases in Iraq, making all other industrial powers kiss the US imperial ring in order to get cheap and plentiful oil. But who really knows? Bush certainly isn't saying, and it's very possible that he actually believes his own bullshit, but someone working in the White House must know, and, ultimately, your guess is as good as mine about what they're really up to.
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FROM THE REAL ART SPORTS DESK
BLOWOUT WEEKEND III:
LONGHORNS, TIGERS KICK ASS ON WEAKLINGS
From the AP via ESPN:
McCoy breaks Texas TD record in bashing of Baylor
Colt McCoy already had a really cool name for a Texas quarterback. Now he's written it into the Longhorn record book.
Next, he probably needs a nickname. "Six Shooter" maybe?
McCoy threw for a school-record six touchdown passes Saturday night and No. 6 Texas recovered from an early 10-point deficit to roll to a 63-31 victory over Baylor, seizing sole possession of first place in the Big 12 South.
With a 50-yard fourth-quarter strike to Limas Sweed, the redshirt freshman from West Texas put his name above James Brown and Chris Simms who shared the school single-game record of five.
And yet when it was over, all McCoy wanted to talk about was his slow start: His lone interception -- "dumb" -- and a scoring throw that probably should have been picked off if not for a great catch by tight end Jermichael Finley.
"I shouldn't have thrown that," McCoy said. "Their secondary did a good job."
Really?
Click here for the rest.
My vote for Colt McCoy's nickname would be "The Doctor," as in "Doctor McCoy." I'm sure it'll never happen. Anyway, it's cool that our new QB broke the TD record and all, and after winning the OU game last week he's really starting to look like the real deal, but, to me, what's interesting about this latest Longhorn blowout is that the Baptists of Baylor scored 31 points. In Austin. I mean, thesed guys haven't been competitive, really, since there was such a thing as the Southwest Conference, and even then they always had a tendency to choke when playing in the Texas stronghold. I've heard rumors that the Bears are much better this year, which is fine by me. It's just makes Texas look all the better when they beat 'em.
Again from the AP via ESPN:
Bowe's 3 TDs highlight LSU's rout of Kentucky
Dwayne Bowe caught three touchdown passes to move into second-place on LSU's career list, highlighting a 49-0 victory over Kentucky on Saturday night.
Bowe caught six passes for 111 yards to spearhead the No. 14 Tigers' fifth blowout in as many home games. His first two touchdown receptions, thrown by JaMarcus Russell, went for 7 and 48 yards. Backup quarterback Matt Flynn threw the last from 8 yards out in the third quarter, making the score 42-0.
And
LSU (5-2, 2-2 SEC) has struggled in both of its road games, losing the first 7-3 at Auburn and the second 23-10 last weekend in Florida -- a game decided in large part by five LSU turnovers.
That sloppiness prompted biting criticism on local sports call-in shows throughout the past week, and LSU responded by scoring touchdowns on its first four possessions to jump out to a 28-0 lead by halftime.
Click here for the rest.
Ho hum. Another Saturday, another blowout. Don't get me wrong: it's an SEC win for the Tigers and all, but I sometimes wonder what Kentucky thinks it's doing in the conference--I suppose for basketball, but why field a football team? There's no way blowing out Kentucky is going to shut up the radio rednecks on the airwaves here in the Red Stick, all of whom think they'd be much better coaches than, you know, the ones who actually make a living doing it. Only a bona fide national title run will close their bug traps, and I'm starting to realize that's not such an easy thing for an SEC team to do, even a truly great team. I think that after Auburn's upset of Florida today that the conventional wisdom on campus is getting to me: the SEC is the toughest conference in the nation, Kentucky's pathetic play notwithstanding, and if any of its teams can make it to the end of the always brutal and bloody season undefeated and without injury, the national championship game is simply a formality.
Of course, LSU already has two conference losses...
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Saturday, October 14, 2006
ROCK AND ROLL SHOW OFFS:
FRANK ZAPPA AND STEVE VAI
I recently found yet another fantastic clip on Youtube, and I figured I'd better post it sooner rather than later, assuming that the popular video website is eventually going to have pull its best stuff due to various lawsuits, if they don't cut some fantastic deals first.
Anyway, the clip is taken from Video from Hell, FZ's promotional video for his tour supporting the album Jazz from Hell back in the mid 80s. I saw it years ago when I was an undergrad at UT and barely remember it. That is, I barely remember it except for this particular live performance, which has taken on near-icon status in the section of my brain reserved for Frank Zappa worship. The studio version of the song, "Stevie's Spanking" from the 1984 album Them or Us, is typical Zappa fare, a simple but infectious groove, lots of ornamentation, with naughty, near-obscene lyrics, all serving as an excuse for long and complex guitar solos. The "Live duet version" played at a 1982 concert in Rome, however, does away with the lyrics entirely and just goes for the jam.
And what a jam it is! It opens with about twenty seconds of FZ guitar fanfare, essentially musically introducing then wunderkind Steve Vai's solo, approximately two minutes of sheer guitar virtuosity. They hit the hook and then go into Zappa's solo, which isn't as good as Vai's, and certainly isn't the best I've ever heard from FZ, but still pretty great nonetheless. Ultimately, none of that matters one way or the other because those first two solos are only the warm up for the duet. Three minutes into Zappa's guitar meanderings, he steps over into Vai's spotlight and the two play together for the rest of the eight minute song. And lemme tell ya, it's fucking magic.
It's so weird that what first attracted me to Zappa when I was a kid were his funny lyrics and bizarre compositions. Of course, I still love those aspects of his work, but what's kept me with him for so many years is the incredible playing on every single song he's ever done. Eat your heart out, Eric Clapton. Bite me, Jimmy Page. Take some heroin, Duane Allman. Go to hell, Randy Rhodes. Zappa and his crew were always better than everybody. If you consider yourself a rock music fan at all, you simply must go check out this performance of "Stevie's Spanking."
Click here to rock the fuck out.
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Friday, October 13, 2006
FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING
Frankie
Phil
Paz
Sammy
Be sure to check out Modulator's Friday Ark for more cat blogging!
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HOMELAND SECURITY KEYSTONE COPS
From the Houston Chronicle:
Officer demands apology in airport case
A TSA report obtained by the Houston Chronicle appears to blame Reece for the incident, which began when screeners at a checkpoint asked Bataineh whether he had a laptop computer in a computer bag.
Bataineh shook his head, but an X-ray machine operator detected a laptop and alarm clock with a nine-volt battery taped to it. They also said Bataineh was wearing shoes that they suspected had been "gutted out."
"The shoes had been tampered with and there were all the components of (a bomb) except the explosive itself," according to the report.
Instead of detaining Bataineh or calling the FBI as they could have and should have done according to security officials, a TSA official asked Reece to investigate.
Reece examined the shoes and found no reason for concern, then put the battery in the clock and found that it functioned properly, according to Hoffman.
Reece found no reason to detain Bataineh and allowed him to enter the boarding area over the protests of screeners, according to the report.
Click here for the rest.
This is classic Bush stuff. Fail, without even following your own procedures, and then blame someone else. Fortunately, people, even patriotic cops, aren't falling for that ploy much these days. Still, this story is disturbing, if only because it reinforces what a joke homeland security is under the Bush administration. They swore to protect us, but all the agencies charged with doing so appear to be in total disarray. The chemical plants are still wide open. The borders are still wide open. And FEMA...well, nuff said on that.
What is Bush doing to protect us from terrorists?
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E. coli strain found in cows near spinach field
From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:
Investigators still do not know how the feces could have contaminated the spinach implicated in the bacterial outbreak. They also do not know if the ranch used manure from the cattle to fertilize its fields. Nor is there evidence that livestock entered the spinach fields on the ranch. However, wild pigs roamed the property, they said.
"There's lots of wildlife and lots of potential for breakdown in the fencing," Reilly told reporters.
The strain of pathogenic E. coli O157:H7 was found in three cattle fecal samples collected at the ranch, one of four under investigation, the officials said. It matched the strain found in sick patients and in bags of recalled spinach.
Investigators continue to look at irrigation water and the hygiene of farm workers as potential sources of the bacteria.
Click here for the rest.
An AlterNet article I read a couple of weeks ago, for which I cannot seem to find the link at the moment, speculated on exactly this cause. However, the writer was willing to go where this AP writer is unwilling to go. That is, he suggested a cause: cattle waste doesn't simply drop on the ground these days; it's held in massive cesspools that tend to spring leaks fairly regularly. The idea is that the leaks were absorbed into the water table. That water was then used to irrigate the spinach, and, bang, we have an E coli outbreak. No matter how you look at this, it's the result of a lax regulatory environment in Washington. I suppose it's nice and all that modern agri-giants are making lots of money, but that's no cure for the couple of hundred people sickened by E coli, or for the three people killed. Ultimately, greed, and nothing else, made this happen.
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Wednesday, October 11, 2006
FAREWELL MADONNA
Okay, I'm really sad right now because I just got off the phone with my mom who told me the details about how she put her dog Madonna to sleep today, so this is the only post I'm making tonight. Madonna was old, fourteen, and it was definitely time for her to go. She had been suffering from repeated strokes for the last couple of years, and, really, it was amazing that she had been doing so well for so long under the circumstances. I mean, that girl just kept bouncing back, almost like a cat with nine lives. But her luck finally ran out, no bouncing back this time, and my parents had to make what I believe to be one of the hardest decisions a person can make, euthanizing a loved one. So now she's buried in same backyard in which I played as a child.
I only lived with her for a couple of short spans in the early and then late 90s when I had boomeranged back home to take stock of my life, and she was a great comfort to me in my depressions. I grew to love her very quickly. My cats Giskard and Alec, on the other hand, hated her, of course, which was a drag because all Madonna ever wanted to do with them was hang out--the two felines terrorized the dog, despite her size and strength advantage. I did my best to keep them apart. She and I went for countless walks on the Kingwood bike trails of my childhood; she would always go into a tripped out frenzy whenever I grabbed the leash and said the word "walk."
I always walked her whenever I visited later--I allowed myself the vanity of thinking that she liked my walks better than anybody else's; she sure did act like it, but I know that she was really always my mother's dog. I am really going to miss her presence next time I'm home. The house just won't be the same without her.
Damn, I'm missing her right now even though I haven't seen her since August. The poor girl.
Me and a fairly young Madonna back in the early or mid 90s
A more mature Madonna for the new millenium
Farewell, Madonna. The world has lost a wonderful being.
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An Open Letter to James Dobson
From God's Politics courtesy of AlterNet:
You see, I'm an evangelical Christian, and an ordained minister in the Church of the Nazarene. As you know, we share a common Nazarene heritage that introduced both of us to a relationship with Jesus Christ, nurtured us in the development of our faith, and educated us through their colleges.
And
But somewhere along the way, I fear you have lost your way. Your message of hope has turned into a message of partisan politics. Instead of words of encouragement, your words seem to continually blame someone else for the problems of the world.
I just read your words that were posted on your Web site on Friday about the Foley scandal, and I must say I was very disappointed, but not surprised. While thankfully you did condemn the acts of Rep. Foley, you spent the majority of your time attacking "the liberal media," the Democratic party, and gay people, who according to your thinking are the real problem in America.
Unfortunately, I don't think your statement rings true for millions of evangelical Christians, who believe in the bodily resurrection of Jesus and the plenary inspiration of the Holy Scriptures ... inerrantly revealing the will of God concerning us in all things necessary to our salvation (Church of the Nazarene Manual). Your statement comes across as the same kind of partisan rhetoric that you claim to be fighting. More hubris than humility. More politics than principle.
Click here for the rest.
I've been wondering for years when something like this was going to happen. The minister who wrote this letter is, like Dobson, a fundamentalist: I'm sure that he doesn't have the influence or power that Dobson has, but the fact that this has been written at all is significant. The problem facing fundamentalists today is that they don't really seriously advocate or adhere to the most central principles advanced by their Lord, you know, love, forgiveness, tolerance, compassion for the poor, refraining from judgment, that sort of thing. I'm not sure why all these people have essentially warped Jesus into his exact opposite--perhaps the strange bedfellow alliance with the cutthroat capitalists of the GOP bears the most responsibility. But, once the change was complete, it was only a matter of time before one of them actually read the Bible and noticed what was going on. That is, the seeds of fundamentalism's destruction were there from the beginning of the movement back in the 70s. The harshness of fundamentalism is simply incompatible with the teachings of Jesus, and therefore, anti-Christian. Finally, it looks like these people are waking up.
I sure hope this becomes a movement.
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What the Amish Are Teaching America
From AlterNet:
When the Amish were suddenly pierced by violence, how did they respond?
The evening of the shooting, Amish neighbors from the Nickel Mines community gathered to process their grief with each other and mental health counselors. As of that evening, three little girls were dead. Eight were hospitalized in critical condition. (One more girl has died since.) According to reports by counselors who attended the grief session, the Amish family members grappled with a number of questions: Do we send our kids to school tomorrow? What if they want to sleep in our beds tonight, is that OK? But one question they asked might surprise us outsiders. What, they wondered, can we do to help the family of the shooter? Plans were already underway for a horse-and-buggy caravan to visit Charles Carl Roberts' family with offers of food and condolences. The Amish, it seems, don't automatically translate their grieving into revenge. Rather, they believe in redemption.
Meanwhile, the United States culture from which the Amish are isolated is moving in the other direction -- increasingly exacting revenge for crimes and punishing violence with more violence. In 26 states and at the federal level, there are "three strikes" laws in place. Conviction for three felonies in a row now warrants a life sentence, even for the most minor crimes. For instance, Leandro Andrade is serving a life sentence, his final crime involving the theft of nine children's videos -- including "Cinderella" and "Free Willy" -- from a Kmart. Similarly, in many states and at the federal level, possession of even small amounts of drugs trigger mandatory minimum sentences of extreme duration. In New York, Elaine Bartlett was just released from prison, serving a 20-year sentence for possessing only four ounces of cocaine. This is in addition to the 60 people who were executed in the United States in 2005, among the more than a thousand killed since the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976. And the president of the United States is still actively seeking authority to torture and abuse alleged terrorists, whom he consistently dehumanizes as rats to be "smoked from their holes," even without evidence of their guilt.
Click here for the rest.
Our supposed Christian nation seems to greatly prefer the wrathful God of the Old Testament to the forgiving and loving God of the New Testament. I remember being taught in Southern Baptist Sunday school many years ago when I was a teenager that Jesus came not only to save our souls, but to free humanity from the strict and harsh laws that had bound his children for centuries before. In other words, Christ's messages of peace and tolerance supercede the violent code that came before him. Of course, I'm certainly no Christian in any religious sense these days, but I do find myself as an adult to be an adherent to much of the philosophy espoused in the Gospels: "love your neighbor as yourself." It's absolutely wonderful to see that the Amish take such words seriously; it is extraordinarily disheartening to know that most American Christians do not.
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Monday, October 09, 2006
WASHINGTON STATE HIGH SCHOOL
CANCELS ANTI-GAY BASHING PLAY
From KIMA TV courtesy of Orcinus:
Prescott and several drama club students decided to do the Laramie Project last month at the start of the school year. It's a play about the aftermath of a young Laramie, Wyoming man brutally murdered by two men for being gay.
But soon after, controversy erupted in the high school's community with students, their parents and even staff.
"When I read the play I didn't have a similar reaction," said Lee Maras, principal of Davis High School. "But the ones I did talk to didn't even want to read it, didn't even want to look at it - just felt it was inappropriate for our school."
Click here for the rest.
Since when is opposition to brutality controversial? Only when you hate the victims of such violence, I suppose. I've never seen The Laramie Project, but it has a great reputation--they even did it here at LSU a few years back, and everyone involved seemed to have a great experience with it. My understanding is that there's really nothing controversial about it; it's not even particularly pro-gay. But producing it at a high school, one of the final frontiers of rampant American homophobia, creates a situation such that public education's true purposes become obvious.
If this school was really concerned with education, there would simply be no question about performing the play, controversy be damned. But the job of public school administrators is to make sure that the wheels of the authority indoctrination machine keep moving while making it appear as though children are learning. Because the quasi-governmental nature of the school system makes everybody with a cause think they have a say in what's happening in the schools, a big part of keeping the machine functioning is playing public relations games. This school's principal sounds genuinely sympathetic to the play's message, but his job dictates that he keep all controversies minimal: consequently, PR trumps educational concerns, and that's okay because authority indoctrination, schools' main thrust, not only doesn't suffer, it is actually enhanced by arbitrarily ordering these thespians around.
This is all no surprise to me, especially after my six years inside the machine as a theater teacher, myself. Still sucks, though.
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"...and President Bush's private
mood has blackened accordingly."
From the New York Daily News via AlterNet:
First Lady Laura Bush, who is even more in demand than her husband on the political stump this cycle, also was telling aides she thought the tide had finally turned.
Now, however, friends, aides and close political allies tell the Daily News Bush is furious with his own side for helping create a political downdraft that has blunted his momentum and endangered GOP prospects for keeping control of Congress next month.
Some of his anger is directed at former aides who helped Watergate journalist Bob Woodward paint a lurid portrait of a dysfunctional, chaotic administration in his new book, "State of Denial."
In the obsessively private Bush clan, talking out of school is the ultimate act of disloyalty, and Bush feels betrayed from within.
And
Bush has complained, these sources said, that the scandal torpedoes furious GOP efforts to reenergize a dispirited political base - especially Christian conservatives.
"There's steam coming out of his ears over the Foley thing," someone who talks to the President regularly said. "The base is starting to get turned off again."
Click here for the rest.
It's hard for me to get past the Bush archetype in my brain, you know, the one established fairly early on in his first administration, after 9/11: the guy who doesn't read newspapers, who's seemingly invulnerable to criticism, if only because he's too stupid or oblivious to understand. But that storyline comes from years ago. What's been happening in his primate skull since the war in Iraq turned sour? How's he really been dealing with the bashing he took after FEMA's failure in the wake of Hurricane Katrina? Haven't his chronically bad approval ratings rattled him a bit? I'm afraid that most people really don't know.
I've heard rumors that he's started drinking again, always a very bad thing for a recovering alcoholic to do. Personally, I think Bush should start boning up on Louis XVI's final days; maybe he'll find some enlightening info.
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Criticizing Cheney to His Face Is Assault?
From the Progressive:
“I didn’t even know he was in town,” Howards says. “He was walking through the area shaking hands. Initially, I walked past him. Then I said to myself, ‘I can’t in good conscience let this opportunity pass by.’ So I approached him, I got about two feet away, and I said in a very calm tone of voice, ‘Your policies in Iraq are reprehensible.’ And then I walked away.”
Howards says he knew the Administration has a “history of making problems” for people who protest its policies, so he wanted to leave off at that.
But the Secret Service did not take kindly to his comment.“About ten minutes later, I came back through the mall with my eight-year-old son in tow,” Howards recalls, “and this Secret Service man came out of the shadows, and his exact words were, ‘Did you assault the Vice President?’”
Click here for the rest.
Well, this kind of bullshit is now pretty much par for the course. Republicans have been harrassing and intimidating their critics for years now--don't forget how the White House capitalized on the Plame leak in order to punish former Ambasador Joseph Wilson for daring to debunk the Niger-Iraq uranium connection. The article explains how this guy who criticized Veep Cheney to his face was arrested for it, in front of his kid, at a public shopping mall. Fortunately, the "assault" charges were eventually dismissed, and Howards is now suing the agent who cuffed him, but, needless to say, no American citizen should have to put up with this crap.
Especially from a guy who shot his best friend in the face.
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We Had Abortions
From Ms. Magazine via AlterNet:
At the time of the original Ms. petition, illegal abortions were causing untold suffering in the United States, especially for poor women who had to resort to unsafe self-induced or back-alley abortions. Today, in the developing nations, approximately 70,000 women and girls die each year from botched and unsafe abortions. Another 500,000 needless maternal deaths occur. Most of this suffering and loss could be prevented. U.S. international family-planning policies contribute to the death toll: first, by conditioning U.S. aid on a global gag rule that prevents medical workers from even giving out information on abortion (let alone providing the service); second, by withholding or providing inadequate funds; and finally, by funding "abstinence-only" rather than comprehensive sex education.
We are now starting a new petition, beginning with the names of some of the original 1972 signers. They signed "to save lives and to spare other women the pain of socially imposed guilt." Their purpose was "to repeal archaic and inhuman laws." They recognized that because of the "social stigma still wrongly attached to abortion" many would not be able to sign publicly. But they invited all women to sign-"to help eliminate the stigma."
Click here for the rest.
Okay, this is great. It reminds me of the "I had an abortion" t-shirts that have been available for a couple of years now. There needs to be much more activism along these lines. While I applaud the numerous efforts across the country and over the years to keep abortions rights, or what I like to think of as the right, for all Americans, both men and women alike, to control one's own body, on the books and an important part of civil and human rights in general, the sad truth is that the war of ideas is being lost. There are enormous pockets around the country, Baytown, Texas, for instance, where the conventional wisdom is that abortion is a horrible, awful thing. When I was teaching in Baytown, I was aghast at first about how many teenaged girls, seemingly the overwhelming majority, were pro-life. Later, I accepted it as reality, which made it only slightly less disturbing, and had little success in persuading people that women couldn't truly be equal in our culture unless they had complete control of their bodies. In short, the "immorality" of abortion is fast becoming a dominant idea, and there's no way to combat that when abortion rights supporters squeamishly hide behind euphemisms like "pro-life," when women who have had abortions feel too stigmatized to freely speak about it. The bottom line here is that abortion is good when freely chosen--of course, birth control is better, but I'll save that talk for another post. For now, I have to say that Ms. is kicking ass.
You go, girls!
I'm probably going to be slapped for saying that someday.
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Sunday, October 08, 2006
AMERICA LOVES THE COCK
From AlterNet:
Let's Face It, Penises Dominate American Politics
Thank God for Mark Foley.
It proves that the American people still care about something.
It happens to be penises. But still.
They care about who talks about them, who plays with them, who covers them up, who uncovers them, who covers up the uncovering of them.
Even Jon Stewart put the big penis cover-up ahead of the fact that this government just passed a law that says that George Bush can say, "Hey you, you're an enemy combatant, "and once he says that they can whisk you away.
And
Anything else, in between penises, is just marking time. Fail to get bin Laden, who cares? Discover proof that the administration made up stories so they could have their war in Iraq, no big deal, not even news, according to the New York Times. Best estimate is that US bombs and artillery killed 100,000 Iraqi civilians, it would be rude to mention it. Then there's all that money that disappeared. Paul Bremer blew through twenty billion (yes, Billion) dollars that was supposed to be held in trust for the Iraqi people and there's no records and nothing to show for it. After that was gone, the occupation authorities blew through another twenty billion that was supposed to go for the reconstruction of Iraq. Let's not ask where the money went -- no major media outlet has.
If you're in the cable news business, you're happy. This is the first really good penis since Bill's.
Click here for the rest.
Well, it's not fair to say that America loves the cock, although many individual Americans do, and there's certainly nothing wrong with that in the personal realm: it's more like politicians, pundits, and reporters love the cock. They love the cock so much that it drowns out everything else, especially important political and economic issues, with big huge wads and wads of steaming hot semen.
To be honest, if the American people suddenly decided to start sexually objectifying men instead of women, demanding that the seemingly endless media display of breasts be replaced with a seemingly endless media display of penises, things here in the US might become really interesting. Maybe men might become more concerned with something besides dominating the people around them. Maybe men would finally decide to make love, not war.
Actually, that would probably drive lots of American men stark raving mad.
But that's not what this is about at all. The political and journalistic classes aren't really obsessed with penises. They just don't want to talk about the issues that are important to real people's lives because that would make obvious how our current political arrangements favor them and the wealthy elite for whom they work, but nobody else really. Penis talk is simply a sick substitute for political discussion. Nobody really cared that Bill Clinton was getting it on with Monica Lewinsky, but they needed something to pretend that they were doing their jobs, and striking out with Whitewater and a bajillion other bogus scandals, blowjobs did the trick nicely. And that's what's happening right now with this Foley scandal. Sure, there's definitely an issue there, but, ultimately it pales when compared to everything else.
But the Democrats, like the Republicans, are far more comfortable being outraged about penises than torture. Sick fucks, if you ask me.
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Saturday, October 07, 2006
FROM THE REAL ART SPORTS DESK
TEXAS BEATS ARCH RIVAL OKLAHOMA, LSU LOSES
From the AP via ESPN:
Frosh QB plays like a vet as Horns handle Sooners
Now, it's the No. 14 Sooners who are finding ways to lose -- like having their best player give up on a loose ball near his end zone with the game still on the line in the fourth quarter.
Adrian Peterson thought the ball bouncing off his hands meant an incomplete pass, not a fumbled lateral. Texas cornerback Aaron Ross wasn't sure, but scooped it up and scored just in case, and wound up with the touchdown that sealed a 28-10 victory Saturday in the 101st edition of the Red River rivalry.
And
Ross' first interception with more than seven minutes began an exodus of Oklahoma fans. The rest began heading out when Paul Thompson -- who was 15-of-27 for 209 yards -- was picked off by Ross again, drawing chants of "Poor Sooners" from the Longhorns fans.
Click here for the rest.
Heh. "Poor Sooners" indeed. God I love this. I just love beating Oklahoma. By the way, here's an old joke: why doesn't Texas fall into the Gulf of Mexico? Because Oklahoma sucks! Ha! And suck is what the Sooners did today at the Cotton Bowl. They sucked in spades. Sucked, sucked, sucked. Well, okay, they played just well enough to make it worth watching for the average football fan--they even had a three point lead at halftime. Other than that, however, they just sucked. I guess it's not going to be Bob Stoops' year to win the national championship. Or the Big 12. Or even the division. Again. Ha! When Peterson dropped that ball that Ross returned for a TD, they all looked like the bunch of big, dumb Okies they are.
And now Texas has the inside track to win the conference. Again.
Hook 'em 'Horns!
Texas coach Mack Brown is dunked after Texas beat Oklahoma 28-10 in their football game, Saturday, Oct. 7, 2006, in Dallas. (AP Photo/Tony Gutierrez)
Meanwhile, in Florida...again from the AP via ESPN:
Tebow, Gators dominate LSU, 6-0 for first time since '96
Backup quarterback Tim Tebow threw two touchdown passes, including one on a play that could have came from basketball coach Billy Donovan's playbook, and ran for a score to give the fifth-ranked Gators a 23-10 win against No. 9 LSU on Saturday.
And
LSU's quarterback has had better days. Russell finished 24-of-41 for 228 yards with a touchdown. But he also had four turnovers.
Click here for the rest.
I'm lucky these two games were on at the same time. Defaulting to my real team, Texas, meant that I didn't have to watch my current school get its clock cleaned by what appears to be an extraordinarily good Florida team. LSU had a total of five turnovers, equaling OU's number in that category, and, like OU, they lost. I'm traditional on interception and fumble philosophy: if you turn the ball over five times, you don't deserve to win. Not that I wanted them to lose, mind you, it's just that losing is the only outcome possible when you can't seem to hold onto the ball.
What really bums me is that the know-it-all sports radio blowhards here in Baton Rouge were already highly critical of LSU coach Les Miles, who I consider to be pretty damned good, in the weeks following the Auburn, loss and I'm sure this loss is going to send them into chattering hysterics. Miles, I think, just needs another couple of years to get it going--remember, former coach Nick Sabin was unable to repeat his disputed National Championship run during his last year here, and lost a couple of big games he was supposed to win; Miles was given a good program, but it was not completely without problems, and he needs some more time to fine tune the Tigers to his own style. Goddamned radio fuckers, fucking calling him out for running the damned ball on first down. "This ain't the Big 12, yuck, yuck," they said. Stupid bayou trash motherfuckers. Got live crawfish infesting their brains, if you ask me.
Anyway, the Tigers need to deal with the turnover issue, for sure, but they'd better not fire Miles after only two seasons. Nothing like disharmony in a college town where they expect you to win the national championship every damned year.
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Friday, October 06, 2006
ON THE OTHER HAND...
From ABC News courtesy of Eschaton:
Three More Former Pages Accuse
Foley of Online Sexual Approaches
"I was seventeen years old and just returned to [my home state] when Foley began to e-mail me, asking if I had ever seen my page roommates naked and how big their penises were," said the page in the 2002 class.
The former page also said Foley told him that if he happened to be in Washington, D.C., he could stay at Foley's home if he "would engage in oral sex" with Foley.
And
The page said Foley maintained e-mail contact with him even after he started college and arranged a sexual liaison after the page had turned 18.
Click here for the rest.
Well, this appears to be the serious solicitation that seemed to be missing from the im's and emails reported earlier in the week. At this point, I don't think a criminal investigation of Foley is out of line, nor are demands for the resignations of Republican Congressional leaders who acted to hush all this up.
I mean, this new information, along with the fact that he's been doing this for eleven years and has yet to be actually accused by a victim, also indicates that Foley was careful to some extent about actual attempts to hook up, waiting as he did for this one page to turn eighteen, which suggests that he was trying to stay away, at least as far as having sex is concerned, from the underage boys with whom he was corresponding. Maybe he was grooming these kids to be potential future sex partners, but it seems certain that he was attempting to set up liasions, one way or the other. It's not unreasonable to imagine that this particular dirty old man was up to something more than simply being a dirty old man. I'm not sure about specific legalities here, or what constitutes probable cause for an investigation of statutory rape, but "come to my place for oral sex" strikes me as being much better than the old "I thought I smelled marijuana" line cops use to justify searching hippies' cars.
So, okay, I am now officially ready to jump into the feeding frenzy.
Nonetheless, I still stand behind everything I've said about the Foley scandal thus far. The issue of Republican hypocrisy is extraordinarily big, and I'm afraid that what I believe to be a major key to discrediting the Conservative Movement overall is being lost in the stampede to unseat the Congressional leadership. Also, the Democrats went for the jugular on this way too quickly, making great use of, and thereby legitimizing, the conservative and fundamentalist continuing crusade to drive mainstream American culture into hysterics over sex crimes and sex in general: the words "predator" and "molester" were being thrown about by Democrats, as well as the corporate news media, well before they had any real reason to use them--strengthening anti-sex hysteria can only come back to haunt the so-called liberal party. Finally, it's quite disgusting that this, a trashy sex scandal, is the only issue about which Democrats feel moved to display brazen and righteous indignation. As if torture, illegal wiretapping, illegal invasion, election tampering, environmental destruction, coddling the rich while screwing the poor, failure to protect us from terrorists, a seemingly infinite number of lies, and on and on, wasn't enough.
This Foley scandal, however it ends up, has taught me a great deal about how politics in this country actually work, and I already thought I knew a lot. I didn't think it was possible, but I think I'm becoming even more cynical.
CODA: If you still think I'm foolish for being cautious about calling Foley a "predator" or "child molester" for some quick and cheap political gain, check out these two Wikipedia articles here and here about a couple of enormous scandals from years gone by that ended up being totally bogus. And that's just two; there have been and will be many more. It's always good to withhold judgment, especially when nobody else is.
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FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING
Paz
Frankie
Sammy
Phil
Be sure to check out Modulator's Friday Ark for more cat blogging!
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Outrage as Misdirection: The Real Scandal Isn't Foley
From Smirking Chimp courtesy of AlterNet:
It's a sad commentary on the state of American democracy, on the instincts of the American citizenry, and on the standards and judgment of the American newsmedia that the unsavory advances of a pathetic Forida congressman can have the nation in high dudgeon, while the ramming through of a patently illegal piece of legislation undermining a crucial 13th century civil liberty (habeas corpus), and the Fourth and Eighth Amendments of the constitution, and the secret planning for an illegal and catastrophic attack on Iran, both merit almost no complaint or mention.
Far be it from me to complain if Rep. Mark Foley's sexual obsession with teenage boys ends up sinking Republican hopes for hanging onto the House and Senate. But how sad that it would be if it is this, and the coverup of his crimes by the Republican leadership, that undoes the Bush administration, when its real crimes are of such grandeur and seriousness?
And
At least the Foley saga makes it clear why the farcical impeachment of Bill Clinton for his extramarital escapade moved forward through the House to a Senate trial, while George Bush, whose crimes far exceed those of any president before him, including Richard Nixon, and place the whole American experiment in jeopardy, has not even faced censure, much less a bill of impeachment.
Democratic Congressional leaders Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid should be ashamed of themselves for leaping so boldly to the attack over Foley's crime and the Republican leadership's cover-up, while continuing to assert that there will be no effort to impeach the president for his own crimes even if they manage, with Foley's assistance, to wrest control of the House November 8.
Click here for the rest.
And there you have it. Due to the entertainment and ratings focus of the news media, not to mention the careerist and power-seeking behavior of politicians from both parties, public discourse in the US has degenerated so much that issues are completely irrelevant: political debate today, and for some years now in fact, is only in terms of sex and bullshit. I mean, it's nice to see the Democrats pull up their sleeves and come out swinging, but it is remarkable that they waited for years until they had a sex scandal as good as Bill and Monica to get to work. It's as though this Foley scandal is the only thing they feel safe going balls-to-the-walls about, which leads me to think that the left-wing emotion driving this is actually coming from a Democratic sense of utter impotence on everything else. Of course, that impotence is self-imposed. They could have been, and should have been, applying the same sense of outrage to...well...you name it--the GOP has given us plenty to scream about over the years. But no, it all has to be about sex and trash.
I'm really starting to become sickened by how the left is dealing with this Foley scandal.
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Thursday, October 05, 2006
GOING AFTER FAHRENHEIT 451
From KTRK TV courtesy Crooks and Liars:
Parent files complaint about
book assigned as student reading
Two weeks ago at Caney Creek High School, a tenth grade English class was given "Fahrenheit 451" as a reading assignment. But Diana Verm stopped after a few pages. She said she was offended by "the cussing in it and the burning of the Bible."
Diana complained to her father. She was given an alternate reading assignment, but her dad is pushing the issue. It is ironic in the truest sense that a fictional book on book banning is now the target of a request to remove it from school curriculum.
"With God's name in vain being in there, that's the number one reason," said Diana's father Alton Verm. "There's no reason for it being read."
The school has appointed a committee to review Verm's objections. But students are now circulating a petition in support of the book. They plan to wear t-shirts on Friday voicing their opinions.
Click here for the rest.
Okay, I don't think there's any danger of this book actually being banned, but I think this story is important to note if only to observe how utterly stupid these fundamentalist types can be. It's also a pretty sad testament to how our public schools, far more concerned with instilling the great American values of obedience and authority, are apparently unable to instill the importance free speech within our democracy to their students. I mean, yeah, most people probably have some kind of notion in their heads that free speech is important, but when push comes to shove, the concept is meaningless to vast sectors of our population.
Come on: how could anyone want to ban a book about how horrible book banning is? I suppose it's easy to people who absolutely reject the Enlightenment principles upon which our country was founded. Sadly, there seem to be more and more of these idiots coming out of the woodwork every day. As usual, I'm afraid for America's future.
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Amish turn the other cheek in wake of slayings
From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:
In just about any other community, a deadly school shooting would have brought demands from civic leaders for tighter gun laws and better security, and the victims' loved ones would have lashed out at the gunman's family or threatened to sue.
But that's not the Amish way.
As they struggle with the slayings of five of their children in a one-room schoolhouse, the Amish in this Lancaster County village are turning the other cheek, urging forgiveness of the killer and quietly accepting what comes their way as God's will.
"They know their children are going to heaven. They know their children are innocent ... and they know that they will join them in death," said Gertrude Huntington, a Michigan researcher and expert on children in Amish society.
"The hurt is very great," Huntington said. "But they don't balance the hurt with hate."
Click here for the rest.
Of course, it's just horrible when this sort of thing happens anywhere, and I always wince a bit more these days, myself, since my six year stint in the public schools as a teacher, but this one's got me particularly down. While I think the Amish, with their technophobic and insular ways, and their cultural austerity, are a bit nutty, I also have great admiration for them. They are true pacifists, shunning violence as acceptable behavior under any circumstances. Their communities are very close knit, with mutual support, which gives each of them a sense of personal meaning, value, and purpose. Simply put, they're just good people, showing us all a thing or two about how human beings ought to treat each other. That is, the Amish, unlike so many other American Christians, take Christ's most central principles seriously--they really do seem to love their neighbors as themselves. My god, so many American Christians, so many Americans in general, would be filled with rage and hate and a strong desire for revenge of some sort at this point, but these people have already forgiven the killer and reached out to his family.
God forbid I'm ever put into their current circumstances. I can only hope that I have the inner moral strength to follow their example.
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Wednesday, October 04, 2006
Gingrich: Dems' sex scandals are worse
From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said Wednesday that Democratic sex scandals have been far worse than the suggestive Internet messages sent to teenage congressional pages by former Rep. Mark Foley.
Gingrich said Democrats have wanted to punish their offenders less than the GOP.
"What we don't have to do is allow our friends on the left to lecture us on morality," Gingrich said at a party fundraiser in Greenville. "There's a certain stench of hypocrisy.
Click here for the rest.
Obviously, this is pretty lame rhetoric, and doesn't even come close to qualifying as what I used to call when teaching public speaking back in Baytown an "argument." Especially when coming from a man who dumped his wife, while she was in the hospital being treated for cancer, for a another woman, whom he later divorced after she caught him having an affair. Regardless of the spin here, former GOP Representative Mark Foley sent suggestive emails and IMs to several boys under the age of eighteen, which were then covered up by the Republican House leadership.
However, the big blowhard tub-of-lard with helmet-hair who once served as Speaker of the House offers Democrats a valuble lesson if you kind of squint and read between the lines: moral indignation and judgment in the political sphere, especially about sex, is a dangerous game to play, which, I'm hoping, conservatives everywhere are beginning to figure out. Democrats, meanwhile, have their heads so far up their asses on this that they're talking through their necks.
As I wrote a couple of days ago, Foley's cyber-talk was pretty sleazy and creepy, and probably a firing offense if uttered by anyone in any sort of senior/subordinate relationship with these kids: you know, teacher/student, coach/athlete, manager/employee, that sort of thing. But Foley wasn't their boss or coach, and he had no direct control over their fates. Certainly his behavior is worth some sort of reprimand, but the Democrats and corporate media are calling the guy a "predator" without any evidence at all to support it. Instead of seizing on the real issue here, Republican hypocricy on issues of homosexuality and sex in general, and pretty much all pet conservative issues for that matter, the stinking donkey party is playing right into the hands of the sexual alarmists of the right wing. In other words, the Dems are going balls-to-the-wall for some short term political gain, but totally bolstering the conservative sex freak out position in the long run.
This is dumb, dumb, dumb, and I fear there'll be hell to pay sometime soon. Doesn't anybody remember what they did to Clinton? The Democrats need to calm down, take a long breath, and ask themselves if this is really worth it. They really are playing with fire.
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JET'S "PUT YOUR MONEY WHERE YOUR MOUTH IS"
SHOWS CLASSIC ROCK IS ALIVE, WELL, AND NEW
I've just gotta take a momentary break from the media frenzy over what's shaping up to be yet another depressing and wrong-headed political-sexual witch hunt, and focus on something uplifting.
I've been seeing their t-shirts on the kids here and there for a couple of years now, at one point even mistaking the band's logo for having something to do with Joan Jett--yeah, yeah, I'm getting old and out of touch. I even heard, and liked to some extent, their hit tune from a couple of years back, the one riffing on that Iggy Pop song used in the film Trainspotting. Of course, I've really had no idea who they are or what they're about until earlier this evening when I saw them play their new single on Leno. Needless to say, I really dug what I saw. Jet fucking rocks.
According to this Wikipedia article, these Australian lads are something of a classic rock revivalist band, heavily relying on the Beatles and the Stones, but also treating the entire classic rock genre as their own little tool box, successfully merging the signature sounds of artists as diverse as the Who and T. Rex--"to the sound of old T-Rex - who's next?" Along with that, says the article, has come a pounding from rock critics, who have blasted Jet for, I guess, daring to play in an old style--that is, they appear to be too derivative for serious music guys who know more about music than me. I swear to god, if critics today were writing about Beethoven when he was composing, they'd be blasting him for deciding to work in the Viennese classical style, which had been around for decades beforehand; "you're ripping off Mozart," they'd exclaim. Well, fuck 'em. The problem with classic rock is that so-called classic rock stations play the same 250 or so songs ad nauseam: the genre itself still has buttloads of unexplored territory.
And kids today know that. Jet is extraordinarily popular, I understand, with the teen and twenty-something set. It's too damned bad that the American music industry appears to share the critics' view on classic rock, which is probably why we have to import bands like Jet and the Vines from overseas, instead of looking to the countless good bands here in the States doing the same kind of material.
Anyway, here's a link to the video for Jet's "Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is." Check it out, 'cause it's great.
Classic rock gets a much needed shot in the arm.
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THE STAR TREK CALENDAR PICTURE OF THE MONTH IS...
Dr. McCoy, Mr. Scott, and Admiral Kirk!
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Monday, October 02, 2006
Congressional Report Finds Convicted Lobbyist
Had Contact With Karl Rove, Ken Mehlman
From ABC News courtesy of AlterNet:
The report from the Republican-led House Government Affairs Committee stated that Abramoff had as many as 485 contacts with the White House, and prime among his lobbying targets was former White House political director Ken Mehlman, and Bush's adviser Karl Rove.
Of those 485 contacts, 345 were described as meetings or other in-person contacts; 71 were described as phone conversations and 69 were e-mail exchanges.
The records detailed in the recent report span from Jan. 2001 to Mar. 2004.
And
After Abramoff pled guilty to illegal lobbying, officials at the White House said they barely new him and all they knew was what they read in the papers.
Click here for the rest.
What with the release of the NIE data showing that the Iraq war actually causes more terrorism, the release of the damning Woodward book about the Bush administration, and the Foley gay lust scandal, it's been a big week in terms of GOP wildfires, and I fear that the above linked story is going to end up being lost in all the smoke. But this is big. It definitively links the White House to the Abramoff lobbying scandal, which has already put several Republicans behind bars. Even bigger, we've now caught the White House red handed in a big fucking lie, nothing blurry about this, no way to blame it on "bad intelligence" or liberals or whatever the scapegoat of the day is.
I mean, I was already pretty sure that Abramoff's tentacles reached the Oval Office, given his clout among Republicans, but this proves it. How much more of this will it take to convince the die-hards that the Conservative Movement is kaput?
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THERE'S NOTHING LIKE A SEX SCANDAL FOR
INSPIRING OVERBLOWN MORAL OUTRAGE
I do my best here at Real Art to completely ignore internet political gossip guy Matt Drudge in the vain hope that it might make him go away. No such luck, of course; I think we're definitely stuck with him for a while, which sucks because he drives me completely batty. It's not that he's conservative, which I can deal with, and besides, relative to other right-wing bloggers and radio hosts, he's not even really off the spectrum in terms of extremism. What gets me about Drudge is that he's a whiney and arrogant little shit who brings out whatever dregs of jock remain within me from years ago. That is, I'd love to beat the shit out of him, and I'm sure I could, even though I haven't been in a fistfight since sixth grade. The smarmy little fuck has it coming.
Anyway, I have to admit that, even though I've only been to his site once or twice, I do occasionally listen to his radio show, and his reaction to what the left is calling "Predatorgate," the scandal over the coverup of former Florida GOP Congressman Mark Foley's creepy sexual emails sent to underage male Congressional pages, again made me want to give him a swirly. The long and short of it all is that he's doing a complete reversal of his well known moral outrage over Clinton's trysts with Monica Lewinsky, and essentially blaming the boy pages for...what?...entrapping Foley, I guess. I mean, he didn't come right out and say it, but he gave listeners everything they needed to come to the conclusion. And by "listeners," I mean what I assume to be his usual moronic radio fans--he actually doesn't give any reason to blame the kids, but that's how he was structuring his argument, if you want to call such pseudo-intellectual tripe an "argument."
Crooks and Liars has some audio clips of Drudge's bullshit here. It's pretty amazing, especially when factoring in how he was so much a part of the feeding frenzy over Bill and Monica. Like I said, complete reversal.
On the other hand, which is just so typical of both sides in this country, nobody on the left side of the blogosphere is even mentioning the fact that, among all his squirrely spewing, Drudge raised a couple of good points, which makes me want to beat his sniveling ass all the more. Anyway, Mr. Internet Pussy observed that Foley never actually did anything short of sending out some creepy emails. He never touched any of these guys. He never even seriously solicited them. Republican Speaker of the House Hastert was probably right when he described the correspondence as "inappropriate," but, as far as I can tell, there was nothing illegal about it. Drudge even went a step further and declared that the age of consent in the District of Columbia is 16, so, even if Foley did hook up with any of these boys, he broke no law as long as it took place in Washington.
Don't get me wrong; I'm not saying what Foley did was somehow right or good or that he shouldn't have resigned his seat. What I am saying is that this is very quickly turning into a political witch hunt. Both liberals and conservatives are calling for investigations and want Foley, and anybody who hushed up his sexual utterances, behind bars. That's seriously fucked up. I feel pretty certain that when all the dust settles, nobody's going to jail at all because nobody broke any laws.
The real story here is Republican hypocricy, which is quite a big deal in and of itself. Foley was a gay elected official in an anti-gay party, who has voted multiple times for anti-gay bills, and whose very gay emails to teenaged boys were covered up by anti-gay party leaders in order to keep his seat "safe." In other words, the Republican Party isn't really anti-gay in any philosophical sense: bashing the queers is only something they do in order to get all those fundamentalist and homophobic votes--when push comes to shove, they really don't give a shit who's screwing who; all they care about is power. Do I need to connect the dots? Conservatism is a lie. Conservative leaders just don't care about conservative principles. It's all a facade to get votes.
That's pretty big news, and for the life of me, I just can't figure out why liberals are being so fucking stupid by jumping on the anti-sex hysteria wagon long ago created and still largely controlled by the forces of American Puritanism. Ultimately, it's counterproductive, not to mention anti-liberal. Why isn't the real story good enough?
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Sunday, October 01, 2006
Bob Woodward: Bush Misleads On Iraq
Earlier this evening, investigative journalist Bob Woodward related the major details of his third Bush book State of Denial to 60 Minutes' Mike Wallace. Real Art readers might recall that I have nothing but loathing for the onetime Watergate good guy reporter because he ultimately came to represent everything that's gone wrong with the corporate news media, arrogance, deference to conservatives, insider thinking, and extreme closeness to the officials and stories they cover. Woodward's a real pig, and his first two books on our President were, according to all reasonable reports, nothing but mindless ejaculations of man-love and bullshit.
But now it appears that he's lost his taste for Presidential semen; the new book sounds like a hit job. 'Bout time, too. If the interview is indicative of the book's major themes, it doesn't really sound like I need to read it. Most of what he has to say has been said countless times in the foreign and left-wing press for several years now: Bush has no idea what's going on, and is fiercely resistant to anyone who tries to get him to face reality, including his own father. We already know that. What is important, however, is not the book itself, but the guy who wrote it. Woodward has so much respect and credibility in press and Washington circles that it is impossible to think that his switching sides isn't the equivalent of a nuke going off. I think we are in the middle of witnessing a vast change in the conventional wisdom. Like I said, 'bout time.
On the other hand, there was one little bit in the interview that interested me greatly.
From 60 Minutes:
Cheney stunned Woodward by revealing that a frequent advisor to the Bush White House is former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who served Presidents Nixon and Ford during the Vietnam War.
"He’s back," Woodward says. "In fact, Henry Kissinger is almost like a member of the family. If he’s in town, he can call up and if the president’s free, he’ll see him."
Woodward recorded his on-the-record interview with Cheney, and here’s what the vice president said about Henry Kissinger’s clout: "Of the outside people that I talk to in this job I probably talk to Henry Kissinger more than just about anybody else. He just comes by and I guess at least once a month," Cheney tells Woodward. "I sit down with him."
Asked whether the president also meets with Kissinger, Cheney told Woodward, "Yes. Absolutely."
The vice president also acknowledged that President Bush is a big fan of Kissinger.
"Now, what’s Kissinger’s advice? In Iraq, he declared very simply: 'Victory is the only meaningful exit strategy.' This is so fascinating. Kissinger’s fighting the Vietnam War again. Because in his view the problem in Vietnam was we lost our will. That we didn’t stick to it," Woodward says.
He says Kissinger is telling the president to stick to it, stay the course. "It’s right out of the Kissinger playbook," Woodward says.
Click here for the rest.
Kissinger is, of course, quite a brilliant and educated man. But any fool knows that brilliance and education in no way innoculate an individual against common stupidity. That is, Henry's ideas about global strategy and American use of military power were thoroughly discredited over thirty years ago--he never figured out that a third world nation, if it is determined enough, is fully capable of bringing a super power to its knees by creative use of guerilla warfare. But now this fool has the President's ear, and he's telling him that we can and must win an unwinnable war. And our damn-fool President believes him, which means that we're definitely not leaving as long as Bush occupies the Oval Office.
Of course, we already knew that, even before we knew about Kissinger bringing some pseudo-intellectuality to the "stay the course" plan. Nonetheless, it's depressing.
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FOX NEWS TV RATINGS TAKE A NOSEDIVE
From the AP via Yahoo courtesy of AlterNet:
Slumping Fox celebrates 10th anniversary
Fox News Channel will mark its 10th anniversary this week in an unusual position: knocked back on its heels. The network is in the midst of its first-ever ratings slump. Cable news' most stable lineup is being juggled. And the blow-up over President Clinton's interview with Chris Wallace suggests that Democrats are attacking Fox because they perceive the same vulnerability in the network as they do in the Bush administration.
And
But the years of explosive growth have ended at Fox. Viewership over the first eight months of the year was down 5 percent compared to 2005, with a steeper 13 percent decline in prime-time, according to Nielsen Media Research. For 12 straight months, Fox's prime-time audience has been smaller than the year before. Meanwhile, CNN viewership inched up 5 percent this year through August. On a typical day this year, Fox's audience is 845,000 while CNN's is 466,000.
"It's hard," Ailes said, "to win the Super Bowl every year."
Click here for the rest.
While I don't want to start celebrating Fox's demise too early, I can't help but get some satisfaction over this. As Fox chief Roger Ailes observes in the article, they're still in first place, all day long, by very comfortable margins, but this is the first time in propaganda network's history that they've lost ground in terms of audience numbers. The obvious conclusion to make is that because Americans are getting sick of Republicans, they're also getting sick of the GOP's biggest media cheerleader. I think it's safe to say that Fox is going to continue to be a news media player for years to come simply because some thirty percent of the US electorate really does believe that "fair and balanced" isn't a bald faced lie, and that the terrorists really do "hate our freedom." Other Americans, however, who were freaked out by 9/11 and then comforted by the artificial testosterone spewing forth from the orifices of Fox's colorful cast of demagogues, have slowly come, after witnessing countless bigtime Republican blunders that not even Fox could successfully spin positively, to their senses. That's a good thing.
You know, if the weak-kneed Democrats are unable to take Congress in November, it might not be such a bad thing: two more years of self-destructive Republican rule may be just what it takes to permanently discredit the Conservative Movement. That would be an even better thing.
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REPUBLICAN CONGRESSIONAL LEADERS COVER UP
COLLEAGUE'S HOT GAY LUST FOR UNDERAGE BOYS
From the New York Times courtesy of AlterNet:
G.O.P. Aides Knew in Late ’05 of E-Mail
Top House Republicans knew for months about e-mail traffic between Representative Mark Foley and a former teenage page, but kept the matter secret and allowed Mr. Foley to remain head of a Congressional caucus on children’s issues, Republican lawmakers said Saturday.
The exchanges began with what Republicans now describe as an “overfriendly” e-mail message from Mr. Foley to the unidentified teenager.
But news reports about the exchanges led to the disclosure of e-mail correspondence with other former pages in which the discussions became more and more sexually explicit. Shortly after he was confronted by ABC News on Friday about the subject, Mr. Foley, who represented a south Florida district, resigned from the House.
And
Among those who became aware earlier this year of the fall 2005 communications between Mr. Foley and the 16-year-old page, who worked for Representative Rodney Alexander, Republican of Louisiana, were Representative John A. Boehner, the majority leader, and Representative Thomas M. Reynolds of New York, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee. Mr. Reynolds said in a statement Saturday that he had also personally raised the issue with Speaker J. Dennis Hastert.
Click here for the rest.
I don't really know what the legal ramifications are for this, or even if it amounts to anything worse than a simple case of sexual harassment, but I do know that I'm really starting to wonder if elected Republicans honestly believe what they say they believe. Of course, I know that there are millions of American citizens who identify themselves as Republican and steadfastly support what we traditionally understand as conservative principles: small government, low taxes, less spending, Christian sexuality, that sort of thing. But the last five years of GOP rule have brought us much bigger government, higher taxes for average Americans relative to taxes for corporations and the wealthy, and much more federal spending. Add to that all the lobbying and pay-for-vote scandals that have been rocking Washington for months now. Mix in tales of fundamentalist Christian Tom DeLay's drunken hot tub parties, and GOP porn star Mary Carey's stories about how many Republicans have hit on her at Republican events. And now this business about covering up Foley's underage gay internet sex shenanigans.
It's hard enough being subjected for years to all this right-wing bullshit spewing out of D.C., but the possibility that they don't even believe their own rhetoric may be just too much for me to bear. These guys are the biggest liars in history.
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FROM THE REAL ART SPORTS DESK
BLOWOUT WEEKEND II: TEXAS, LSU AGAIN
DEFEAT VASTLY OVERMATCHED OPPONENTS
From the AP via ESPN:
Texas torments Sam Houston
with Sooner showdown looming
Sam Houston State was little more than a scrimmage for No. 7 Texas. Bring on Oklahoma.
Colt McCoy passed for two touchdowns, Henry Melton ran for two more and the Longhorns emptied their bench and still piled up the points on Division I-AA Sam Houston State in a 56-3 win Saturday night.
Next up, the rival Sooners who won five straight over Texas before the Longhorns ended the losing streak last season in their run to the national championship.
While thousands of fans left early, many who stayed to the end chanted "Beat OU!" as the Longhorns left the field.
"I've been waiting for this moment," McCoy said. "My whole life."
The Longhorns first had to dispatch an overmatched opponent in a game that was as one-sided as expected. Sam Houston State was Texas' first I-AA opponent since 1992 and the Longhorns (4-1) made quick work of the Bearkats (2-2).
Texas led 42-0 by halftime and scored more than 50 points for the third time this season.
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Jeez, when the article talks more about next week's opponent than this week's, you know there's something a bit off. Of course, I too am looking forward to UT/OU next weekend, which will obviously be a real game. Not that I have anything against Sam Houston State: they have a good theater department, an excellent criminal justice degree program, a funny mascot, and a decent football team. For I-AA football, that is. All of which brings me to this question: would somebody tell me why the hell Texas played these guys? It's just as well that it wasn't on TV; I watched what I'm sure was a much more interesting matchup instead, Florida versus Alabama.
Anyway, beat OU!
Again. from the AP via ESPN:
Russell's career day leads No. 9 LSU over Miss. State
Russell threw for a career-best 330 yards and matched a school record with 14 consecutive completions Saturday as No. 9 LSU beat the Bulldogs 48-17 in a game delayed when lightning sent spectators scurrying for cover.
After the storm passed, the junior quarterback returned and ended up completing 18 of 20 passes, including three for touchdowns.
The career day for Russell was by design. LSU coach Les Miles said he and his staff favored a pass-heavy attack after scouting Mississippi State's defense on film.
"We felt like we had advantages down the field throwing," Miles said. "If the defense gives us opportunities in the air, we're certainly going to take them. ... [Russell] is a pretty special quarterback."
LSU (4-1, 1-1 SEC) led 35-0 early in the second quarter, prompting thousands of fans to leave at halftime. A 52-minute delay while a thunderstorm rolled through further emptied the stands in the third quarter, when the score was 35-3.
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Well, obviously, this was much more interesting than the Texas game, if only because Mississippi State is a bona fide I-A team, and a conference opponent, to boot. But then, "to boot" is exactly what the Tigers did to the Bulldogs' collective butt. I only watched the second half of this one, which was on CBS here in Baton Rouge, because of the annoying 11:30 a.m. kickoff time. Thankfully, the in-stadium announcer, who was really only about six blocks away from where I slept the morning and early afternoon away, woke me up in time to catch me some LSU football. Which wasn't really all that exciting given the Tigers' 30 odd point lead when I finally switched on the tube. Ah well, as I said last week about UT beating Iowa State, at least it's a conference win.
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