FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING

Reine



Phil



Be sure to check out Modulator's Friday Ark for more cat blogging!

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DEMOCRACY NOW BROADCASTS FROM NEW ORLEANS

So Democracy Now was in the Big Easy Thursday morning, broadcasting their news show from here. As usual, they cover stuff that never gets covered in the corporate press.

For instance:

New Orleans Hit By Another "Hurricane of Racism,
Greed and Corruption" - Community Activist Malik Rahim

Most of the houses that wasn't destroyed during Katrina was demolished under our city’s Good Neighbors Program. So what you have is -- is just a series of empty lots. And it's a testimony of the lack of recovery. This is a testimony of a lack of, truly, support by our federal, state and local government for the upliftment of this community. You find other areas of the Lower Ninth Ward that have a large population of whites, the Holy Cross area, and it’s doing well. But over here you only have -- I know of only one house that has been totally rebuilt.

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

Rahim's the real deal, an old school, former Black Panther who brings real 60s political values to the struggle here in NOLA, and whose rhetoric is as fiery as my own, but he actually does stuff, instead of simply blogging like me.

But wait, there's more:

"The Red Cross Has Basically Stolen Money from Victims in New
Orleans" - People's Hurricane Relief Fund Blasts Katrina Aid Program

And so, we have just been challenging their veracity on this whole program, and witness to that is every time we've confronted them they’ve changed the figures. When we first started this campaign, they said they had $80 million left. A week later, they said they had $40 million left. And then the national president came down here, and he said they had $171 million left. So you don’t know what the story really is, so they haven't gotten their story together.

And, of course, they've been attacking the People's Hurricane Relief Fund, saying that we are spreading lies and stuff against them. But we confronted them directly, and we took our -- their application to the local news media. And they were forced to admit that the program existed, because when people first called about the program, the Red Cross would say, “What are you talking about? We’ve never heard of a Means to Recovery program.” So we want to know why such secrecy, and why did you decide that it was up to you, the Red Cross, to decide what to do?

The other important factor is they got $50 million from Kuwait, and instead of giving that money to people, they built new office buildings in New York City.

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

I said a couple of days ago that Democracy Now was probably going to be one of only a very few media outlets to cover the Tribunal on Hurricanes Katrina and Rita taking place here in NOLA this weekend. Turns out I was right, at least so far: the guy making this accusation is from the Tribunal.

And yeah, this Red Cross malfeasance is definitely flying below the mainstream press' radar. How the hell could they miss out on diverting millions of dollars in donations away from hurricane victims? Oh yeah, I know, they're too busy concentrating Senator Craig's bathroom dalliances. I guess that's more important.

Okay, those last two sentences were sarcasm.

Anyway, still more:

The Privatization of Education: How New Orleans Went
from a Public School System to a Charter-School City

While many in New Orleans have waited two years for recovery, the restructuring of its schools seemed to happen overnight.

Not long after Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans two years ago, the Louisiana legislature cleared the way for the state to assume control of 107 out of 128 schools in the Orleans district. Immediately, the state began converting many of its newly acquired schools to charter schools - publicly funded schools run by for-profit or nonprofit groups that operate by a "charter," or contract. One result is that the number of unionized teachers dropped from about 4700 to 500.

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

Not only is this whole charter school thing about getting rid of collective bargaining rights for teachers, it signals that Orleans Parish and the state of Louisiana have essentially given up on NOLA' commitment to public education. Charter schools have been the flavor of the month in national education circles for about a decade now, probably because they sometimes get results. Most of the time, however, they have nothing to show for their "efforts." Charter schools are essentially educational laboratories. They're freed from all regulation so they can "experiment" without hassle. But like I said, those experiments generally fail--I have no idea why they continue to be so popular. Anyway, the net result is that African-American kids in New Orleans - most white kids go to private schools, anyway - are being screwed. I mean, Orleans Parish public education was shitty before, but now it's the Wild West.

Anyway, check this stuff out. It's good.

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FROM THE REAL ART SPORTS DESK
LSU begins with 45-0 rout of Miss. St.

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle (which, out of the four online news sources I checked, including ESPN, the Baton Rouge Advocate, and the New Orleans Times-Picayune, seems to be the only one running the story right now, from all the way over in Houston; go figure):

Craig Steltz had three of LSU's six interceptions of Mississippi State quarterback Michael Henig and the second-ranked Tigers manhandled the Bulldogs again in a 45-0 victory Thursday night.

LSU's new starting quarterback Matt Flynn and new offensive coordinator Gary Crowton struggled to find a rhythm early, but they received plenty of help from Henig, who tied a school record by throwing six picks.

It was LSU's eighth straight win overall and eighth straight in the series with the Bulldogs. Since Mississippi State's last win in 1999, LSU has outscored the Bulldogs 340-81, including three shutouts by 42 or more points.

And

LSU had four sacks and a fumble recovery in addition to the interceptions.

Click here for the rest.

You know, the only way I'm able to enjoy watching a blowout like this is if one of my teams is in it. Otherwise, it's just boring. Who cares if, say, Ohio State wipes the floor with Bowling Green? No fun. Fortunately, tonight's romp featured the LSU Tigers, so I loved it. And they did exactly what they needed to do: beat the living shit out of their greatly over matched opponent, something they've got to do if they're actually serious about getting another national championship. Oh sure, the Tigers were offensively sloppy in the first half, but they pulled it together exceedingly well after halftime, making me much more confident that they've got a shot.

I mean, Flynn may not be able to outplay JaMarcus Russell when he's on and all that, but the Raider quarterback's replacement can easily kick his predecessor's ass when he's off. That is, Flynn is waaay more consistent than Russell, which is what the Tigers are going to need in order to win out.

And, man, six fucking interceptions. The defense is definitely playing better this season.


Louisiana State running back Jacob Hester (18) tries to break free from Mississippi State defenders for a four yard gain during the first quarter of a college football game in Starkville, Miss., Thursday, Aug. 30, 2007. (AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis)(via ESPN)

Geaux Tigers!

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ATHEIST HITCHENS ON TERESA'S CRISIS OF FAITH

From Newsweek courtesy of AlterNet:

Moreover, this was no mere temporary visitation of doubt. Here are some of the things that she told her various advisers. “For me, the silence and the emptiness is so great, that I look and do not see,—Listen and do not hear—the tongue moves but does not speak.” “Such deep longing for God—and … repulsed—empty—no faith—no love—no zeal.—[The saving of] Souls holds no attraction—Heaven means nothing.” “What do I labor for? If there be no God—there can be no soul—if there is no Soul then Jesus—You also are not true.” Like an old-fashioned Morse signal, the cryptic and dot-dash punctuation somehow serves to emphasize and amplify the distress.

And

Now, it might seem glib of me to say that this is all rather unsurprising, and that it is the inevitable result of a dogma that asks people to believe impossible things and then makes them feel abject and guilty when their innate reason rebels. The case of Mother Teresa, who could not force herself into accepting the facile cure-all of “faith,” is that of a fairly simple woman struggling to be honest with herself, while also—this is important—striving to be an example to others.

Click here for the rest.

Yeah, so this hits on where I'm at with the concept of faith right now. I'll follow suit with Hitchens' glibness: Teresa's crisis was likely caused by a realization that God probably does not exist. I lost faith long ago, myself, but I went through an extended intellectual buffer stage before I decided to call myself an agnostic. For years I saw myself as a deist, believing in God, who created the universe, but who also doesn't really do anything anymore, either. This buffer stage allowed me to continue believing in God, which was very important to my own sense of identity, while acknowledging the fact that there is absolutely no evidence, anywhere, of his existence.

Unlike Mother Teresa, however, this was never a crisis for me. I mean, it was difficult at times knowing that I was intentionally separating myself from a part of our culture that I loved, that I identified with the concept of morality, and of being a good American. But it wasn't a crisis. It was growth or evolution, life's journey, whatever you want to call it, but not a crisis. Unlike Mother Teresa, I never had devoted my life, my own personal "meaning of life," to Christianity. Of course, all Christians make some sort of public declaration of their devotion to God at some point in their lives, but most people don't ever really have to live up to that declaration, either--they just go about their existences, working, sleeping, all that, and never really have to actually do anything for their God outside of going to church, or making the occasional charitable donation, or tithing, that sort of thing. Teresa was the real deal, a fucking zealot. Losing faith when you've bet the farm on it is definitely a crisis.

When she was alive, I never really knew much about her, just that she was supposed to be some kind of selfless, super-charitable, perfect Christian woman, working her ass off with the poor in India. When she died, I was heavily swayed by Christopher Hitchens' opinions of her: her seemingly charitable actions served to glorify poverty as some sort of state of Jesus-like Zen, contributing, however inadvertently, to the wealthy establishment that perpetually keeps the poor in poverty; her anti-sex and anti-abortion rhetoric was also deplorable. Now, I just feel sorry for her. She did everything her culture told her was good and right, but it wasn't enough. She knew there was a very good chance that her entire life's motivation was a sham, but by the time she figured it out, it was too late; she was in too deep to go back.

At least she had a conscience. I wonder if all these recently fallen right-wing neo-puritan leaders here in the US have had the same struggle. Probably not. If there's one thing we Americans have become very good at doing, it's denial.

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NICE GUY RIGHT-WING PUNDIT CARLSON BOASTS OF BEATING UP GAY GUY

From Media Matters courtesy of AlterNet:

On the August 28 edition of MSBNC Live, hosted by MSNBC general manager Dan Abrams, Tucker Carlson, host of MSNBC's Tucker, asserted, "Having sex in a public men's room is outrageous. It's also really common. I've been bothered in men's rooms." Carlson continued, "I've been bothered in Georgetown Park," in Washington, D.C., "when I was in high school." When Abrams asked how Carlson responded to being "bothered," Carlson asserted, "I went back with someone I knew and grabbed the guy by the -- you know, and grabbed him, and ... hit him against the stall with his head, actually."

And Carlson's response, from an update of the same article:

Let me be clear about an incident I referred to on MSNBC last night: In the mid-1980s, while I was a high school student, a man physically grabbed me in a men's room in Washington, DC. I yelled, pulled away from him and ran out of the room. Twenty-five minutes later, a friend of mine and I returned to the men's room. The man was still there, presumably waiting to do to someone else what he had done to me. My friend and I seized the man and held him until a security guard arrived.

Several bloggers have characterized this is a sort of gay bashing. That's absurd, and an insult to anybody who has fought back against an unsolicited sexual attack. I wasn't angry with the man because he was gay. I was angry because he assaulted me.

Transcript and video here.

So "bothered" became "grabbed" less than twenty four hours after he told the story, and "hit him against the stall with his head" apparently actually meant "held him until a security guard arrived." Tucker's second story rings more true to me, but it is still disturbing that the smiling and dapper conservative mouthpiece felt compelled to characterize the incident as a gay bashing. Needless to say, he was also characterizing gay bashing itself rather favorably. I assume that this fancy flight of rhetoric was intended to firmly establish his own masculine sense of heterosexuality--perhaps Tucker was surprised when the other two men on screen with him claimed to have never been "bothered" in men's rooms; maybe he felt he needed to prove his attraction to women by signaling a casual willingness to beat the shit out of men who try to pick him up. Who knows? It is certain, however, that Carlson was presenting anti-gay hate violence to his television audience as something justifiable under certain circumstances. And, you know, that's extraordinarily irresponsible because anti-gay hate violence is a really big deal: stupid rhetoric definitely eggs on people who are inclined to act rather than speak. That is, whether he meant to or not, Carlson just contributed to an overall cultural climate that makes being gay dangerous.

But really, Carlson's just an idiot. I don't think he's evil.

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Peoples’ Justice: the International Tribunal on Hurricanes Katrina and Rita

From the International Tribunal on Hurricanes Katrina and Rita courtesy of the New Orleans Independent Media Center:

Why a Tribunal is necessary

On August 29th, 2005, Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans and the Gulf Coast leaving death and unparalleled devastation in its wake. The poor Black communities of New Orleans, Mississippi, and Alabama bore the full weight of the storms and floods. Local, state and federal governments had at least four days advance notice that the levees did not have the capacity to contain mass flooding expected from a category three hurricane. Yet, despite these warnings, the US government had neither prepared for evacuation, nor mobilized to evacuate thousands of people displaced from their homes and left to die on their roofs and in the rubble of the devastation.

In the face of this abandonment, the population of New Orleans took their survival into their own hands and neighbor-to-neighbor attempted to save lives and reach secure ground. In the chaos of their own incompetence and racist rumors, local, state and federal governments sent military and mercenary personnel to New Orleans. They launched a military invasion aimed at removing the Black population and containing a potential rebellion, rather than sending a relief effort. New Orleans became a battle zone between government and mercenary forces seeking to ‘protect’ the white neighborhoods of the city and the surrounding suburbs from the Black mass fleeing the floods and seeking refuge from the disaster and race induced neglect. Dozens were murdered and arrested by various government forces and mercenaries as the media fuelled and justified human rights abuses by their unfounded, and later to be found completely untrue, reports of mass looting and rape.

To this day, the government has produced no accurate count of the number of people killed. What is known is that some one million, mainly poor Black people, were forcibly dispersed to over 44 states across the US. They herded people onto buses and trains at gunpoint, separating mothers, children, grandmothers and cousins. They uprooted and separated families, friends, neighbors, support networks and violently ripped apart the social fabric of peoples lives in order to transform the ethnic and racial make up of New Orleans and the region forever.

Over the past two years the US government has fundamentally ignored the plight of the more than one million people directly impacted and displaced by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. When the government has been pressed to answer for its actions, it has ducked and dodged and basically washed its hands of any responsibility or liability. When the Army Corp of Engineers acknowledged its responsibility for the faulty and racially discriminatory design and maintenance of the New Orleans levee system, the government has not corrected its errors, nor provided restitution or recourse for its fatal policies. The net result of the systematic policies of intentional neglect and depraved indifference being executed in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast is ethnic cleansing of the historic and politically strategic Black communities in the region.

More here.

Okay, so this event starts Friday, here in New Orleans, and runs through the weekend. I won't be attending because I'm unemployed and have no money, but I expect that it will probably get some left wing press coverage, maybe at Democracy Now! or over on ZNet. I fully expect the mainstream press to ignore it entirely, which renders problematic the organization's goal of furthering the Gulf Coast reconstruction movement--if the media ignore them, the politicians will too. However, I think this event's real value will be contextualizing Katrina within the overall global human rights movement, right alongside Israel's brutalizing of Palestinians, genocide in Darfur, Indonesian oppression of East Timor, and Iraqi refugees.

Really, what's going on here, especially with the African-American community, is that big of a deal.

"Ethnic cleansing" is a pretty good term to use. It's not quite genocide, but it's been looking all along like a concerted effort to break up concentrated black populations in the hurricane zone. I don't think it's a conspiracy or anything along those lines--after all, this is such a big undertaking that such info would have leaked. However, just because there's no conspiracy doesn't mean it isn't happening. The ethnic cleansing is a result of a confluence of interests, from real estate developers to chamber of commerce members. In New Orleans, for instance, the massive poverty-stricken black community was perceived as a problem by many in the white power establishment. Crime levels associated with poverty hurt business and lowered property values. And many money-spending white tourists are just afraid of black people. When Katrina came along, an irresistible opportunity to rid the city of its "problem" revealed itself to various groups at the same time. Each group has acted independently, but together. And, unfortunately, it's currently looking like they're going to succeed. As far as I can tell, virtually nothing is being done by anyone in power to help NOLA's poor black displaced citizens.

Go check out the Tribunal's site, lots of cool links to articles and other info.

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Men's room arrest reopens questions about Sen. Larry Craig

From the Idaho Statesman courtesy of Eschaton:

Sen. Larry Craig, who in May told the Idaho Statesman he had never engaged in homosexual acts, was arrested less than a month later by an undercover police officer who said Craig made a sexual advance toward him in an airport men's room.

The arrest at a Minnesota airport prompted Craig to plead guilty to disorderly conduct earlier this month. His June 11 encounter with the officer was similar to an incident in a men's room in a Washington, D.C., rail station described by a Washington-area man to the Idaho Statesman. In that case, the man said he and Craig had sexual contact.

The Minnesota arrest was first reported Monday by Roll Call, a Capitol Hill newspaper.

In an interview on May 14, Craig told the Idaho Statesman he'd never engaged in sex with a man or solicited sex with a man. The Craig interview was the culmination of a Statesman investigation that began after a blogger accused Craig of homosexual sex in October. Over five months, the Statesman examined rumors about Craig dating to his college days and his 1982 pre-emptive denial that he had sex with underage congressional pages.

The most serious finding by the Statesman was the report by a professional man with close ties to Republican officials. The 40-year-old man reported having oral sex with Craig at Washington's Union Station, probably in 2004. The Statesman also spoke with a man who said Craig made a sexual advance toward him at the University of Idaho in 1967 and a man who said Craig "cruised" him for sex in 1994 at the REI store in Boise. The Statesman also explored dozens of allegations that proved untrue, unclear or unverifiable.

Click here for much more.

Jesus Christ! What the hell is it with these people? Just when I think I can take a breather from writing about all these self-righteous, neo-puritan, right-wing hypocrites, another one of them starts waving his penis around an airport in Minnesota. Like I keep saying, it's not really the sexual behavior of these people that troubles me, as long as all this hot sex is consensual and everything; rather, it's the fact that these down-low diggity dunkers have based much of their careers on an insistence that all Americans adhere to old-fashioned anti-sex fundamentalist Christian values--what's good for me, but not for thee.

It's now very clear that a sizable fraction of these moralists simply pay lip service to "family values." It reminds me of history professor Eugen Weber's assertion that early Christianity only functioned well before it became Rome's state religion. That is, austere and chaste Christian morality is really only attainable, socially speaking, when individuals choose such a path for themselves as an alternative to the mainstream. Once Christianity became mainstream in Rome, countless cultural, political, and economic incentives having nothing to do with spirituality or God came into play, bringing into the fold countless individuals who used the religion for their own personal agendas, twisting and warping the practice of Jesus worship into something only barely resembling what it had been while in the minority.

In short, the fundamentalist drive to Christianize America is ultimately self-defeating, and every instance of a "family values" leader publicly falling into the sin hole serves as evidence of this. Really, if the fundamentalists are serious about what they say they believe, they'd do much better to separate from society entirely, creating a sort of parallel culture, and try to attract converts who really want that way of life, rather than trying to forcibly reshape all of society into a sort of New Jerusalem.

Anyway, it's interesting to note, as did Atrios over at Eschaton, that the right wing was fairly forgiving of heterosexual, "family values," prostitute customer, David Vitter, but is already calling for Craig, homosexual men's room cruiser, to resign. For conservatives, gay infidelity always trumps straight infidelity. I guess that's really just a manifestation of the old "dead girl/live boy" political problem. Vitter's hookers were all alive so he survives; Craig's boy, however, was also alive, which means political death.

I guess some things will never change.

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GONZALES OUT!

From McClatchy courtesy of AlterNet:

Bush's herd of loyal Texas advisers continues to thin

They were fiercely loyal, unfailingly disciplined and, as a unit, offered the president a comforting touchstone from his home state.

Now, Team Texas is moving ever closer to extinction. The already thinning cadre of advisers who followed George W. Bush from Austin to Washington is unraveling even further, with Alberto Gonzales and Karl Rove heading toward the door.

Although Texans are still dotted throughout the administration, most of the influential Lone Star transplants who've worked at Bush's side since his days as Texas governor either have left town or removed themselves from day-to-day influence at the White House.

Gonzales, a steadfast loyalist who served as Bush's counsel in the governor's office, announced his resignation as attorney general Monday after enduring a months-long uproar over his stewardship of the Justice Department. Rove, the architect of Bush's victorious presidential campaigns, will leave at the end of the week.

More here.

The only thing surprising about Gonzales' resignation is that it was so long in coming. That is, anybody in his position with half a brain would have quit sometime last spring. That's the thing. Gonzales is an idiot, more like FEMA's "Heckuva Job Brownie" than, say, Karl Rove, whose intelligence I'm kind of beginning to doubt myself.* Gonzales has been credited with being the legal mastermind behind Bush's bullshit rationales justifying various kinds of torture; however, the Washington Post recently reported that all that came out of Cheney's office--Gonzales is totally unfamiliar with the law in that area. So if he didn't mastermind the torture presidency, what's he actually done? To the best of my knowledge, he harassed his predecessor, Ashcroft, while he was laid out in a hospital bed, and lied to Congress, in a fairly blatant way, about the politically motivated firings of several US prosecutors. That is, he's never been anything more than a political operative. Bottom line: Gonzales is a mediocre lawyer who hitched his fortunes to a piss-poor businessman turned mediocre politician and rode the gravy train all the way to Washington, where he spread his worm-slime down every hallway he walked.

I really hope Congress continues to investigate him. He, like so many other Bush loyalists, needs to be behind bars.

(*I'm beginning to wonder if the ability to lie and smear on a grand scale is really evidence of intelligence. I've known plenty of morons over the years who are able to slander and malign pretty effectively, even when their lies are obvious. Is Karl Rove really a smart guy? More like a second-tier high school debate nerd.)

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Joe Lieberman Betrays Hurricane Katrina Victims

From AlterNet:

And once Lieberman was re-elected with no small amount of help from the GOP?

Bush's Best Democratic Buddy Joe Lieberman
gives the president a pass on Katrina.

Jan. 11, 2007 - Sen. Joe Lieberman, the only Democrat to endorse President Bush's new plan for Iraq, has quietly backed away from his pre-election demands that the White House turn over potentially embarrassing documents relating to its handling of the Hurricane Katrina disaster in New Orleans.

Lieberman's reversal underscores the new role that he is seeking to play in the Senate as the leading apostle of bipartisanship, especially on national-security issues. On Wednesday night, Bush conspicuously cited Lieberman's advice as being the inspiration for creating a new "bipartisan working group" on Capitol Hill that he said will "help us come together across party lines to win the war on terror."

Click here for the rest.

So the info is a little old but well worth repeating as the anniversary of Katrina nears. It's also worth repeating because it cements the fact that Joseph Lieberman is a sanctimonious prick, as if we weren't pretty sure about that already. There are many reasons for the continuing federal failures in dealing with the aftermath of the hurricane that hit east of New Orleans on August 29, 2005; I've been trying to document some of them here: corruption, misguided conservative ideology, and incompetence. But this one, sacrificing White House accountability on Lieberman's imaginary altar of bend-over bipartisanship pisses me off perhaps the most.

I've really hated the guy since his self-righteous support for the Clinton impeachment movement back in the late 90s. By not understanding that the whole thing was a GOP hatchet job without any merit whatsoever, Lieberman made a total fool of himself. Then Gore asked him to be his running mate in 2000, trying to distance the ticket from all those naughty shenanigans with interns, which is one of the reasons I voted for Nader. Then Lieberman supported the war. He still supports the war. The guy has been dragging the Democrats in a psychotic and suicidal direction for nearly a decade. But he's still in office, narrowly avoiding defeat by leaving his party.

I'm really beginning to wonder if he actually believes all this bipartisan bullshit. When I consider what I've just written above, he strikes me as being much more of a cold and calculating operator than somebody who's really worried about all our strife and division. You know, one of those politicians who changes party and ideology when the political winds change direction.

That makes him even worse. The retreat on his vow to make Bush answer for his Katrina failures isn't about bipartisanship. It's about Lieberman's own political power. Fucking scumbag.

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THE CONTINUING IRAQ DEBACLE
Whistleblowers on Fraud Facing Penalties

From Forbes courtesy of Crooks and Liars:

Bunnatine "Bunny" Greenhouse knows this only too well. As the highest-ranking civilian contracting officer in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, she testified before a congressional committee in 2005 that she found widespread fraud in multibillion-dollar rebuilding contracts awarded to former Halliburton subsidiary KBR.

Soon after, Greenhouse was demoted. She now sits in a tiny cubicle in a different department with very little to do and no decision-making authority, at the end of an otherwise exemplary 20-year career.

People she has known for years no longer speak to her.

"It's just amazing how we say we want to remove fraud from our government, then we gag people who are just trying to stand up and do the right thing," she says.

In her demotion, her supervisors said she was performing poorly. "They just wanted to get rid of me," she says softly. The Army Corps of Engineers denies her claims.

And

Julie McBride testified last year that as a "morale, welfare and recreation coordinator" at Camp Fallujah, she saw KBR exaggerate costs by double- and triple-counting the number of soldiers who used recreational facilities.

She also said the company took supplies destined for a Super Bowl party for U.S. troops and instead used them to stage a celebration for themselves.

"After I voiced my concerns about what I believed to be accounting fraud, Halliburton placed me under guard and kept me in seclusion," she told the committee. "My property was searched, and I was specifically told that I was not allowed to speak to any member of the U.S. military. I remained under guard until I was flown out of the country."

Halliburton and KBR denied her testimony.

Click here for the rest.

Outrageous but totally unsurprising. And these two above excerpted tales are relatively easy going: the article relates the story of another whistleblower who was thrown into a military prison for 97 days and given the Guantanamo treatment. All of this comes down from the White House, for sure, which is why it's so unsurprising. This is not to say that everytime a whistleblower in Iraq gets fucked over that it was ordered by Bush or a senior staffer, but this has been their attitude about inconvenient truths for years. Such attitudes have clearly filtered down the chain of command; it's just how the feds do business now. We've all heard the stories about NASA scientists given gag orders on global warming, and the same thing with all kinds of information developed by federal sources that is perceived by the White House as running counter to their agenda.

And Bush is the guy who promised back in 2000 to restore integrity to the Oval Office. For some reason, that's not even funny anymore.

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Queen guitarist Brian May awarded astrophysics
doctorate he abandoned 3 decades ago

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

The rocker was awarded his qualification Thursday by London's Imperial College and said submitting his thesis, Radial Velocities in the Zodiacal Dust Cloud, to supervisors was as nerve-racking as any stadium gig.

"I'm feeling rather joyful. I cannot tell you how much of a weight off the mind it is," May said late Thursday.

May was an astrophysics student at Imperial College when he joined Freddie Mercury and Roger Taylor to form Queen in 1970, but dropped his doctorate as the glam rock band became successful. Queen became one of Britain's biggest music groups in the 1970s, with hits including Bohemian Rhapsody and We Will Rock You.

Click here for the rest.

Right, well, of course I approve of this. As many Real Art readers know, I went back to school three years ago to get the master's degree that I didn't get when I was in my early twenties, which was over fifteen years ago--even if I don't become some big superstar, which probably won't happen, it was worth it for its own sake; I'm sure May, who actually published an astronomy book recently, would agree with me. You know, this science-braininess is apparently something of a rock and roll tradition: guitarist and creative heart of the band Boston, Tom Scholz, has a master's degree in engineering from MIT. And isn't guitarist Jeff "Skunk" Baxter of Steely Dan and the Doobies something of an amateur expert on missiles?

Anyway, congrats to Brian May. Here's the song with my favorite May guitar solo; I'm sure you're familiar with it:



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NBC's "To Catch a Predator" Faces Lawsuits, Mounting Criticism

From AlterNet:

Dateline's "To Catch a Predator" series has become a target itself for criticism -- by 20/20, Esquire, and an online magazine, as well a former producer, a Georgia judge, a local news reporter, and the relatives of two of the show's targets.

In the news segments, online decoys lure men to a house to meet underaged sex partners -- where instead the men are videotaped and arrested. Last year the Washington Post reported that the decoying group received more than $100,000 from NBC after they "hired an agent to negotiate." The show's former producer now says Dateline violated "numerous journalistic ethical standards," and challenges Dateline's argument that the police are performing a separate, parallel investigation, calling it "a ruse".

According to a May lawsuit which appears on The Smoking Gun site, former producer Marsha Bartel objects to NBC also purchasing the surveillance systems used by the police, and notes that the network even pays or "indirectly reimburses" law enforcement officials for the stings. Saying this blurs lines between television and law enforcement, she also spills details about the show's other apparent lapses in journalism. (For example, Dateline's failing to report the police officers "waving rubber chickens in the faces of sting targets while forcing them to the ground and handcuffing them.")

More here.

I think I've written before about how much I hate this show. It is presented as news but is obviously of the "reality television" genre, staging almost everything, and is consciously titillating, making numerous references to online chat logs which go into often surprisingly lengthy detail about the anal and oral sex fantasies of the would-be child molesters who are entrapped in the "sting." Speaking of being entrapped, this whole thing reeks of entrapment. That is, even though these guys' sexual desires are definitely harmful if acted upon, one wonders if they ever would have even left their computer screens in the first place if they hadn't been egged on by NBC. The self-righteous tone taken by pretty much the entire program is also disturbing, kind of like with the show's close cousin, Cheaters.

I especially hate how it's so goddamned difficult to change the channel once it's on. It's like watching a fucking car crash, horrible but hypnotizing.

It's good to hear they're in trouble. The sooner this trash is off the air, the better.

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RIGHT WING DELUSIONS
Romney proposes letting free market fix health care

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

"A one-size-fits-all national health care system is bound to fail. It ignores the sharp difference between states and it relies on Washington bureaucracy to manage," Romney said. "I don't want the people who ran the Katrina cleanup to manage our health care system."

The government's role is to facilitate changes, not mandate them, Romney said during a speech before the Florida Medical Association.

Health insurance costs can be reduced by deregulating the insurance market, capping malpractice damages and making sure everyone is insured, Romney said.

"The problem of the uninsured is a problem for all Americans," he said, because those who can pay for health insurance help foot the bill for those who cannot.

Instead of using federal money to reimburse hospitals for treating people without insurance, that money should be used to help low-income people buy insurance at a lower cost, Romney said.

Click here for the rest.

One of the philosophical tipping points for my shift from conservative to liberal years ago was a realization at some point in the late 80s or early 90s that all this talk about "market solutions" to social problems is a bunch of bullshit. I'm quite dubious that a for-profit approach has any chance at all of dealing with complex problems like poverty or crime, but what really pushed me to the other side was the growing sense that these conservatives touting the magic wonders of the market don't really care about curing social ills. Over the years, I've seen weird Heritage Foundation ideas in this area come and go, usually with no effect on the problem they were supposed to solve, sometimes making the problem worse.

Romney's bullshit about health care is a textbook example. Note how he puts what is obviously a national problem, dealing with national insurance and health care providers, in terms of the states--it's been a while since we've heard the right wing going on about "state's rights," which is clearly because they've controlled the federal government these past seven years, and didn't really need to bother with the rhetoric, which they never really believed in the first place; I guess they're expecting Democratic rule to continue for some time, and are hauling out a dependable old warhorse. It's also interesting to note that he uses Republican government failure, Katrina, to indict the federal government's ability to deal with problems--nice try, Mitt, but I think FEMA fucked up because Republicans go to Washington to destroy government, not run it.

But I digress.

In short, capping malpractice suit awards was done in Texas a few years back. Insurance rates went up, not down. This is not a good idea. And as far as deregulation goes, well, the health insurance market doesn't behave like other markets. Not at all. All deregulation will do is backfire; it will allow these vampires in business suits to suck all the more blood, which they're quite good at doing right now with what few regulations already exist.

The bottom line here is that Romney and other Republicans are simply spouting conservative ideological slogans. They have no idea what they're talking about on this issue, but then, they don't really care: they've all got good coverage; they're just looking for ways to get more campaign money from the extraordinarily wealthy insurance industry.

Single payer, like the system they have in Canada, is our only hope.

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UTAH GOVERNOR: MINE OWNER'S BEHAVIOR "UNCONSCIONABLE"

From the Salt Lake Tribune courtesy of AlterNet:

Earlier Thursday at his monthly news conference on KUED-TV, Huntsman lashed out at Murray for what he called callous treatment of the mine victims' families leading up to his announcement that the men were likely dead and would have to be entombed in the mountain.

"There ought to be some modicum of respect for their human dignity and what [victims' families] are experiencing," Huntsman said.

Although he avoided using Murray's name, Huntsman made it clear his criticism was aimed at the outspoken chief executive of Murray Energy. "I'm not going to get into the mine owner other than to say I thought the way the families were treated was unconscionable and they deserved better."

Murray has said Huntsman's push for an independent state investigation of the tragedy was a political ploy.

"No one is playing politics with this situation," Huntsman responded. His appointment of Matheson, his Democratic opponent in the 2004 election, shows mine safety transcends politics, he said.

Click here for the rest.

From the moment I saw that motherfucker get in front of the television cameras the day after the cave-in and launch an unprovoked attack on the miners union, even though workers at Crandall Canyon aren't unionized, and then assert that the disaster was caused by an earthquake, despite the fact that every seismologist in the country was asserting the opposite, I knew that Robert Murray is one sleazy son of a bitch. "Playing politics," indeed. Murray's been playing politics from the beginning. The anti-union blast is in anticipation of the political fallout that's bound to come from this and other recent mining disasters, and all this "earthquake" nonsense is simply rhetorical cover from the inevitable lawsuits by grieving family members who will have a very good chance of winning. While the Crandall Canyon operation hasn't been cited with any safety violations recently, several of Murray's other operations have. One mine in Illinois had "at least 2,787 violations and more than $2.4 million in proposed fines from the Mine Safety and Health Administration over a two-year span." All the safety record at Crandall Canyon means is that Murray was getting away with it there.

Well now that it's looking like those six miners are dead, there are going to be investigations out the ass, and I'm quite sure that Murray knows he's in deep shit. I hope they fry the motherfucker.

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FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING

Sammy and Frankie



Be sure to check out Modulator's Friday Ark for more cat blogging!

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Two Years After Katrina, Billions in Relief Funds Are Missing

From AlterNet:

* Washington set aside $16.7 billion for Community Development Block Grants, one of the two biggest sources of rebuilding funds, especially for housing. But as of March 2007, only $1 billion -- just 6 percent -- had been spent, almost all of it in Mississippi. Following bad publicity, HUD spent another $3.8 billion on the program between March and July, leaving 70 percent of the funds still unused.

* The other major source of rebuilding help was supposed to be FEMA's Public Assistance Program. But of the $8.2 billion earmarked, only $3.4 billion was meant for nonemergency projects like fixing up schools and hospitals.

* Louisiana officials recently testified that FEMA has also "low-balled" project costs, underestimating the true expenses by a factor of four or five. For example, for 11 Louisiana rebuilding projects, the lowest bids came to $5.5 million -- but FEMA approved only $1.9 million.

* After the failure of federal levees flooded 80 percent of New Orleans, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers received $8.4 billion to restore storm defenses. But as of July 2007, less than 20 percent of the funds have been spent, even as the Corps admits that levee repair won't be completed until as late as 2011.

And

Many in Washington claim that state and local governments are to blame: The money's there, they say, but the locals just aren't using it. And it's true that there have been problems below the federal level. For example, Louisiana's "Road Home" program -- created by Congress but run by the state -- has been so poorly managed that 18 months after the storms only 630 homeowners had received checks. Closings have sped up since then, but administrators admit many won't see money until 2008, if at all -- the program is facing a projected $3 billion shortfall.

But the White House and Congress have done little to exercise oversight of these federally backed programs, much less step in to remove red tape and make sure taxpayer money gets to its intended destination.

More here.

This story, about how badly the feds are handling their reconstruction responsibilities, is in its own way just as devastating as the story about how FEMA royally screwed up rescue and relief operations back in 2005. Unfortunately, because its slowly unfolding nature this one's getting less coverage. I really wonder how much Americans know about this massive fuckover going on down here.

And make no mistake about it: this is a massive fuckover. I included that second excerpt because I'm so fucking sick of hearing people argue over whose fault it all is. Republicans want it to be Louisiana's fault because the state is still run by Democrats; Democrats want the reverse for obvious reasons, although we've got a Donkey Butt Congress now, so I don't see how they can escape blame entirely. Nonetheless, President Bush, as head of the executive branch, is most responsible for executing the laws Congress has passed, and he's doing his usual horrible job. Look, there is indeed mismanagement and corruption here Louisiana. It's traditional, which is what gives the right wing their "in" for muddying the overall debate--"well, you know those people down there probably just pocketed all those billions." But Louisiana corruption is usually chump change compared to the amount of money we're talking about here--I don't think power brokers down here are competent enough to steal such vast sums of cash. And it's Federal cash that's being mismanaged. It's their goddamned job to make sure that doesn't happen.

America just ain't what it used to be.

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FROM THE REAL ART SPORTS DESK
RANGERS SCORE THIRTY RUNS IN ONE GAME

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

BALTIMORE — Five runs in the fourth inning.

Nine runs in the sixth.

Ten in the eighth.

Six more in the ninth.

The Texas Rangers rounded the bases at a dizzying pace and became the first team in 110 years to score 30 runs in a game, setting an American League record Wednesday in a 30-3 rout of the Baltimore Orioles.

"This is something freaky. You won't see anything like this again for a long, long time. I am glad I was on this end of it," said Marlon Byrd, who hit one of two Texas grand slams.

Trailing 3-0 in the opener of a doubleheader, Texas couldn't be stopped. At last, the last-place Rangers did something right.

"We set a record for something on the good side of baseball," manager Ron Washington said.

Click here for the rest.

You know, in the grand scheme of things this isn't all that weird. They play so many freakin' games in pro baseball that thirty runs in one game is likely to happen at some point. It's just that it took 110 years since the last time it happened. Okay, I guess it's pretty weird. Still, the Rangers are in last place in their division and this one game isn't going to do much to change that.

Nonetheless, it's pretty impressive.

The article goes on to point out some associated statistical weirdness, which is entirely appropriate due to baseball's obsession with statistics. For instance, Jarrod Saltalamacchia raised his batting average, in this one game, from a shitty .179 to not so bad .262. The Rangers raised their batting team average five points, while the O's team ERA dropped from 4.39 to 4.60.

I wonder if hardcore baseball fans, you know, the guys who are as obsessed with statistics as the league is, will love this or hate it. Hard to say because I don't really give that much of a shit about stats myself and have no way of guessing. I've sworn off of sports talk radio because of the idiots in Baton Rouge trashing Les Miles, so I'm probably never going to know what the stat-boys think.

But who cares?

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Ammunition Shortage Squeezes Police

From the AP via the Huffington Post courtesy of AlterNet:

Troops training for and fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are firing more than 1 billion bullets a year, contributing to ammunition shortages hitting police departments nationwide and preventing some officers from training with the weapons they carry on patrol.

An Associated Press review of dozens of police and sheriff's departments found that many are struggling with delays of as long as a year for both handgun and rifle ammunition. And the shortages are resulting in prices as much as double what departments were paying just a year ago.

"There were warehouses full of it. Now, that isn't the case," said Al Aden, police chief in Pierre, S.D.

Click here for the rest.

See, it's okay because we're fighting them over there so that we don't have to fight them here, which means fewer bullets for cops isn't that big of a deal. Right?

But seriously, this is pretty disturbing. Crime has increased nationwide these last few years, most likely due to Draconian Republican economic policies which have fucked the poor hardest--sociologists have long known that there is a definite correlation between poverty and crime. All those people who voted for Bush in '04 naively believing that he made them "safer" were obviously dead wrong. Not only has the President single handedly created conditions which make crime much more likely, but he has also handicapped the police who protect us by fighting a pointless war in Iraq.

And I'm living in the Big Easy, where violent crime is very stylish these days. The really sad thing is that Bush is too fucking stupid to know how awful he is.

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Commerce, Treasury funds helped boost GOP campaigns

From McClatchy via the Arizona Republic courtesy of AlterNet:

Top Commerce and Treasury department officials appeared with Republican candidates and doled out millions in federal money in battleground congressional districts and states after receiving White House political briefings detailing GOP election strategy.

Political appointees in the Treasury Department received at least 10 political briefings from July 2001 to August 2006, officials familiar with the meetings said. Their counterparts at the Commerce Department received at least four briefings - all in the election years of 2002, 2004 and 2006.

The House Oversight Committee is investigating whether the White House's political briefings to at least 15 agencies, including to the Justice Department, the General Services Administration and the State Department, violated a ban on the use of government resources for campaign activities.

Under the Hatch Act, Cabinet members are permitted to attend political briefings and appear with members of Congress. But Cabinet members and other political appointees aren't permitted to spend taxpayer money with the aim of benefiting candidates.

And

The briefings are part of the legacy of White House political adviser Karl Rove, who announced this week that he is stepping down at the end of the month to spend more time with his family.

More here.

So maybe this is why Rove got the hell out of Dodge.

This just has to be illegal. I mean, come on. The motherfuckers were using tax dollars for Republican campaigns. That's fucking outrageous. It's all so true to form, too. This is the kind of bullshit that took down GOP Lizard King Tom DeLay: play as close to the edge of the legal line as possible, and then cross over when you think nobody's looking. I'm sure that the White House will soon issue some kind of bullshit statement of rationale, some stupid-ass "explanation" of why it's all okay. The FOX guys will go into hysterics supporting the statement, and the idiots on Capitol Hill and the rest of the corporate media, while not necessarily agreeing with the rationale, will take it seriously.

I'm really sick of this shit. Bush and his people break law after law and nothing happens, no accountability, zip, zilch, never. This is so goddamned pathetic. The Democrats in Congress just sit there doing nothing, allowing Cheney to have his "unitary executive" branch, handing over king-like powers to whoever succeeds him--that is, if they don't declare martial law, rendering succession moot.

I don't know who I hate more, Democrats or Republicans. They're both destroying the republic.

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FUCK BOBBY JINDAL

Bobby Jindal, three years younger than me, is currently the front runner for the governor's mansion here in Louisiana. Since I've moved to Metairie, he is also now my Congressional Representative. Even though his public persona suggests he's a really nice guy, he's also a typical hard-hearted Republican son of a bitch. Indeed, last time he was running for governor against the pro-life Democrat who beat him, he managed to distinguish his position on the issue by ruling out abortions when they are needed to save the life of the mother!!! The NRA loves him. He's a strong supporter of the illegal, immoral, and stupid Iraq occupation. I mean, this guy's a GOP kool-aid clone for christ's sake.

I hate Bobby Jindal. That's why I'm totally loving this alligator mouth he's stuck his head in.

From the Daily Kos courtesy of Eschaton:

LA-Gov: Jindal (R) accused of being anti-Protestant

"Most Americans believe we should respect one another's religion. But not Bobby Jindal," the ad says, according to a script from the Democratic Party. "He wrote articles that insulted thousands of Louisiana Protestants. He has referred to Protestant religions as scandalous, depraved, selfish and heretical."

The ad references articles Jindal wrote for New Oxford Review, a Roman Catholic magazine, during the 1990s before he was a congressman. Vezinot, the Democratic Party spokeswoman, said the religion ad is running in the Alexandria, Monroe and Shreveport TV markets — areas of the state that are more heavily Protestant than south Louisiana.

More here.

Jindal asserts that his writings are being mischaracterized, but as Kos observes, he might as well just take ownership of his statements because he actually wrote them. On the other hand, I have absolutely no problem with slamming Protestants, especially the fundamentalists who speak as though they've all had frontal lobotomies; I think Protestants are just about as misguided as Catholics. Or as Muslims or Jews for that matter. However, this shit could conceivably stop Jindal's campaign dead in the water: while Louisiana has a large Catholic population, it's concentrated mostly in the Southern part of the state; Protestants, especially Baptists, are strong in the North. Jindal desperately needs those Baptists to win--most of them are Republican.

I'm really loving this.

But in the grand scheme, this a primary example of why religion should just be kept out of politics. Of course Catholics look down on Protestants as practicing a sort of ghetto-Christianity. I mean, Catholicism is the one true religion, right? On the other hand, many Protestants, especially the Southern Baptists, think the same thing about Catholics. Well, okay, fine. People have the right to religious freedom and can believe whatever foolish bullshit they want; it's all very important culturally. But none of it has anything to do with what kind of official a person would be once elected to office. Ideally, anyway. That is, I think Jindal's right-wing scum, but not because he's a Catholic. There are countless Catholics who are pretty far to the left, plenty who tell the Pope to fuck himself on the issue of abortion. Jimmy Carter and Al Gore are Southern Baptists, although I heard recently that Carter had pulled out because of that denomination's ever rightward loony march.

Mitt Romney, a loony Mormon, is facing the same kind of crap as he tries to get the GOP nomination. Hate Romney for his lies, flip-flops, and politics, but not because he's a loony Mormon.

I suppose that overall I should be happy for this kind of right-wing division on religion. It makes the "traditional values" crowd less effective as a political force. But it pisses me off. People's personal views about the universe and man's place in it are their own goddamned business, even if they write about it in religious journals. It's meaningless, really, which is why these politicians who wear god on their t-shirts should just shut the fuck up. Same thing.

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THE STATE OF MINNESOTA WAS WELL
AWARE THEIR BRIDGE WAS UNSAFE

From the Daily Kos:

Internal MnDOT documents reviewed by the Star Tribune reveal that last year bridge officials talked openly about the possibility of the bridge collapsing -- and worried that it might have to be condemned.

The documents provide the first look inside MnDOT's decision-making process as engineers weighed benefits and risks, wrestling with options to prevent what they believed was a remote but real possibility of the eight-lane freeway bridge failing.

More here.

Back at the beginning of the month I jumped on the bandwagon, took a leap of faith, whatever, and strongly asserted that the disaster was ultimately the result of twelve years of conservative rule. That is, the right-wing maxim "government is the problem" almost always manifests itself in terms of dismantling important government agencies and programs. You know, like the ones that rebuild interstate bridges and stuff. As Kos observes, lack of money is the most likely reason that Minnesota officials sat on this damning info.

But isn't there federal money granted to the states specifically for maintaining the interstate system? Well, yeah, but there's a whole lot less since the Republicans have been running the country. Know what I'm saying?

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Income Fell For Most Americans In First Five Years Under Bush

From the New York Times courtesy of AlterNet:

Americans earned a smaller average income in 2005 than in 2000, the fifth consecutive year that they had to make ends meet with less money than at the peak of the last economic expansion, new government data shows.

And

The growth in total incomes was concentrated among those making more than $1 million. The number of such taxpayers grew by more than 26 percent, to 303,817 in 2005, from 239,685 in 2000.

These individuals, who constitute less than a quarter of 1 percent of all taxpayers, reaped almost 47 percent of the total income gains in 2005, compared with 2000.

People with incomes of more than a million dollars also received 62 percent of the savings from the reduced tax rates on long-term capital gains and dividends that President Bush signed into law in 2003, according to a separate analysis by Citizens for Tax Justice, a group that points out policies that it says favor the rich.

And

Nearly half of Americans reported incomes of less than $30,000, and two-thirds make less than $50,000.

Click here for the rest.

A fairly obvious conclusion to make here is that Republican policies hurt most Americans. Indeed, the GOP has been successfully bullshitting voters for a long time. The notion that tax cuts are always good is bullshit. The notion that growing the economy is all we need to do to help most people's pocketbooks is also bullshit.

To be sure, some tax cuts are indeed good, and growing the economy, in and of itself, is also good. However, Republican tax cuts are usually about paying off wealthy campaign donors; they're not really for you and me, and don't forget that when we cut spending to pay for those tax cuts (hey, that's a novel idea!), it almost always hurts that two thirds of the country making under $50k, and usually never hurts that million-dollar salary club. And even though economic growth is generally something we need, the aforementioned million-dollar club has apparently perfected the art of pocketing the bounty of such growth; that is, growth, by itself, can no longer be used to gauge the economic health of the nation.

We've really got to develop a new vocabulary for talking about all this stuff--"tax cuts" and "growth" just don't do it anymore.

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POLL: TRADERS WILL COMMIT FELONY FOR PROFIT

From the New York Post courtesy of AlterNet:

Wall Street traders don't mind committing the crime - it's doing the time that gives them the willies.

More than half of traders questioned in a recent survey said they would trade on illegal insider information if the deal allowed them to pocket a $10 million profit - provided there was zero chance they would be caught.

And

Ty Wenger, the editor of the magazine, attributed the high number of traders willing to commit a felony to the huge premium placed on their hav ing an edge. "That edge is the difference between being highly successful or going belly up; there is no guaranteed money," Wenger said. "Morality can't be a big part of the job."

More here.

And there you have a textbook example of why business must be regulated. In short, business cannot be trusted to do the right thing. Indeed, business is pretty much guaranteed to do the wrong thing, if it can get away with it. Of course, there is such thing as too much regulation or bad regulation, but you can count on business to almost always complain that all regulation falls into the "too much" or "bad" categories because, you know, business can't be trusted. That's why regulatory agencies need to be staffed by people from outside business, an idea that runs utterly counter to the Bush point of view, which essentially adheres to a "fox guarding the hen house" philosophy.

Really, this is all pretty obvious. Why on earth isn't it considered to be common sense?

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The War as We Saw It

A New York Times op-ed, courtesy of AlterNet, written by seven soldiers currently serving in Iraq as part of the 82nd Airborne:

VIEWED from Iraq at the tail end of a 15-month deployment, the political debate in Washington is indeed surreal. Counterinsurgency is, by definition, a competition between insurgents and counterinsurgents for the control and support of a population. To believe that Americans, with an occupying force that long ago outlived its reluctant welcome, can win over a recalcitrant local population and win this counterinsurgency is far-fetched. As responsible infantrymen and noncommissioned officers with the 82nd Airborne Division soon heading back home, we are skeptical of recent press coverage portraying the conflict as increasingly manageable and feel it has neglected the mounting civil, political and social unrest we see every day. (Obviously, these are our personal views and should not be seen as official within our chain of command.)

And

Reports that a majority of Iraqi Army commanders are now reliable partners can be considered only misleading rhetoric. The truth is that battalion commanders, even if well meaning, have little to no influence over the thousands of obstinate men under them, in an incoherent chain of command, who are really loyal only to their militias.

And

In short, we operate in a bewildering context of determined enemies and questionable allies, one where the balance of forces on the ground remains entirely unclear. (In the course of writing this article, this fact became all too clear: one of us, Staff Sergeant Murphy, an Army Ranger and reconnaissance team leader, was shot in the head during a “time-sensitive target acquisition mission” on Aug. 12; he is expected to survive and is being flown to a military hospital in the United States.) While we have the will and the resources to fight in this context, we are effectively hamstrung because realities on the ground require measures we will always refuse — namely, the widespread use of lethal and brutal force.

And

Political reconciliation in Iraq will occur, but not at our insistence or in ways that meet our benchmarks. It will happen on Iraqi terms when the reality on the battlefield is congruent with that in the political sphere. There will be no magnanimous solutions that please every party the way we expect, and there will be winners and losers. The choice we have left is to decide which side we will take. Trying to please every party in the conflict — as we do now — will only ensure we are hated by all in the long run.

At the same time, the most important front in the counterinsurgency, improving basic social and economic conditions, is the one on which we have failed most miserably.

Click here for more.

So the reason I think this essay is so great is not because it's written by soldiers on the ground over there, although such a fact lends their analysis a strong level of emotional credibility, but because it so well articulates my own take on the situation. That is, the occupation isn't really facing a military problem: it's facing a supremely fucked up political problem, so fucked up in fact, that it has manifested itself in terms of mass violence. There is no military solution in Iraq, at least, none short of genocide that can be implemented by the United States. While we waste time, money, and American life pretending that we can somehow make it work against all odds, we're artificially preventing the political scenario from playing itself out. Yeah, the violence will most likely intensify in the short run after we pull out, but it's really doing that anyway. Soon there will be very little difference, in terms of violence, between US forces being there and not being there.

There's a good argument out there that says something along the lines of "whether the invasion was right or wrong, we owe it to Iraq now to make things better." Well that's persuasive to an extent, but you can't pay what you don't have. That is, the only way we can make things better over there is to get the hell out.

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FROM THE REAL ART SPORTS DESK
MY TWO OLD SCHOOLS TO START SEASON RANKED IN AP TOP FIVE

It's that time again!

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

Chase is on: USC starts season No. 1 in AP Top 25

Southern California received 62 of 65 first-place votes and 1,622 points from a panel of media members. USC easily outdistanced No. 2 LSU in the poll released Saturday. The Tigers received two first-place votes and 1,511 points. They haven't started a season ranked this high since 1959, when they were preseason No. 1.

No. 3 West Virginia received the other first-place vote. The Mountaineers have never been ranked higher in the preseason. No. 4 Texas and Michigan round out the top five, and defending champion Florida is sixth.

And

The Southeastern Conference has six ranked teams, most of any league. The Big Ten and Big 12 are next with four and the Pac-10 and Big East have three each.

Click here for the rest.

Well, after three years at LSU, the whole "SEC is toughest" meme has kind of made me a believer. That is, if you can make it out of the SEC undefeated, there's a very good chance that the BCS title game will simply be a formality. Consequently, it's been easier for USC to stay in the title hunt over these last few years than it has been for the Tigers.

Hey, don't yell at me; I'm simply echoing Les Miles' wisdom from last week.

But really, as usual, my real money's on the Longhorns. Their quarterback, "The Doctor," a.k.a. Colt McCoy, is the real deal, and only freshman inexperience, as well as a cheap shot from a Kansas State Wildcat late last year, kept them from finishing better than they did. Damn! This is soooooo nice to have my two schools, Texas and LSU, start the season in the top five!

So fuck off OU! Go to hell Auburn! Eat me, Aggies! Fuck your sisters, Arkansas! It's football season again, and glory is right around the corner!




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A rush to pull out cash

From the Los Angeles Times courtesy of Eschaton:

The rush to withdraw money -- by depositors that included a former Los Angeles Kings star hockey player and an executive of a rival home-loan company -- came a day after fears arose that Countrywide Financial could file for bankruptcy protection because of a worsening credit crunch stemming from the sub-prime mortgage meltdown.

The parent firm borrowed $11.5 billion Thursday by using up an existing line of credit from 40 banks, saying the money would help the lender meet its funding needs and continue to grow. But stock investors, apparently alarmed that the company felt compelled to use the credit line, sent Countrywide's already battered stock down an additional 11%.

At Countrywide Bank offices, in a scene rare since the U.S. savings-and-loan crisis ended in the early '90s, so many people showed up to take out some or all of their money that in some cases they had to leave their names. And In recent months, sales of high-end houses have been stronger than those for cheaper homes. Now, with a pullback in larger loans by Countrywide and other major lenders, the weakness at the low end is likely to spread upward, said Esmael Adibi, director of Chapman University's Anderson Center for Economic Research.

"The implication will be declining home prices, higher foreclosures, a significant slowdown in spending by consumers," he said. As home sales fall further, "ultimately job growth will slowly deteriorate."

Click here for the rest.

One of capitalism's fatal flaws is that money often flows in incredibly stupid directions. The standard thinking about this is that it's all okay in the long run; the market will discipline the stupid and recalibrate itself eventually. Of course, the same could be said of nuclear holocaust: everything will be destroyed, but life will return. Eventually. In the form of cockroaches and radioactive resistant fungus. Eventually.

It's really frustrating to be watching the "discipline" of "the market" in action. Once upon a time, in the wake of the Great Depression and for decades after, American leaders understood just how stupid investors and financial institutions can be, and enacted laws to prevent their economic suicide competition from getting out of hand. Then they forgot their lessons; the hateful, self-destructive philosophy of "market discipline" took over; deregulation ensued, and the savings and loan crisis of the 80s came as an inevitable consequence. You'd think that more recent multi-billion dollar brush with economic disaster would have served as a handy re-education tool. But no. Here we are again, and this time both the nation's and its citizens' credit cards are maxed out.

That's why this mad dash to withdraw funds, which is frighteningly reminiscent of depositor behavior in the early 1930s, is so disturbing. Right now, this is happening, as far as I know, with just this one bank, and people are putting their money into other banks, instead of, say, their mattresses, but it remains to be seen if Federal and EU economic actions, in stark philosophical defiance of "the market's wisdom," will go far enough to thaw the credit freeze.

This all could have been easily avoided.

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Feds Train Clergy To "Quell Dissent" During Martial Law

From AlterNet:

The first directive was for Pastors to preach to their congregations Romans 13, the often taken out of context bible passage that was used by Hitler to hoodwink Christians into supporting him, in order to teach them to "obey the government" when martial law is declared.

Pastors were told that they would be backed up by law enforcement in controlling uncooperative individuals and that they would even lead SWAT teams in attempting to quell resistance.

Though some doubted the accuracy of this report at the time due to its fundamentally disturbing implications, the story has now been confirmed by a KSLA 12 news report, in which participating clergy and officials admit to the existence of the program.

Click here for the rest.

Ahem.

The only possible reason for such a program's existence is that there are plans to declare martial law. Needless to say, if martial law were declared at the national level, without any real emergency or disaster so devastating that it would incapacitate all local and state governments, America effectively ends. I've been wondering for some time how Cheney was going to maintain power after the 2008 elections: he'll simply call them off until the "emergency" ends.

Any minister, priest, or rabbi who participates in this program will be a fair target for resistance fighters.

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KPFT Targeted: Bullet Pierces Studio Window of Pacifica's Houston Station

From Democracy Now!:

A drive-by shooting targeted Pacifica Radio station KPFT in Houston early Monday morning. A single bullet blasted through a Plexiglas window into the station's studio at 1:00 a.m. No one was injured in the shooting, but the bullet came within eighteen inches of Mary Thomas. She was hosting a Zydeco music program at the time.

KPFT’s station manager Duane Bradley said the shooting might have been political. If so, it would not be the first politically motivated attack on KPFT. More than thirty-five years ago, the Ku Klux Klan blew up the station's transmitters twice within the Houston station’s first year of operation. In October of 1970, five months after the first bombing, KPFT's transmitter was bombed for a second time, just as the station was broadcasting folk legend Arlo Guthrie's song “Alice's Restaurant.”

Click here to watch, listen to, or read the rest--if you watch or listen, you'll get to hear the cool Cajun accent spoken by Mary Thomas.

This could be a case of mistaken identity, or simple street crime, but I seriously doubt it. The house from which KPFT broadcasts is on one of the swankier streets in Montrose. There aren't usually drive-by shootings there. Further, the interview later shows that the shooter spent some time casing out the area: this was deliberate; they were gunning for KPFT. And how could it not be politically motivated? Again, I suppose it's possible that it was a disgruntled worker, or a jealous lover, or some weird loony or something, but KPFT, probably the least inflammatory of Pacifica's five or six stations, definitely broadcasts content that would make a conservative's blood boil. And Houston has waaay more conservatives than any other Pacifica cities.

This was a deliberate, politically motivated act of violence designed to intimidate both the station, and the left in general. And the shooter didn't give a rat's ass whether he killed anyone.

Every now and then I get this creepy sense that there are people out there, who don't even know me, that want me dead because of my political beliefs. I usually dismiss the feeling as paranoia, which I suppose it is, but there is some truth to it. Conservatives, who generally support violence as a legitimate means for furthering political ends, are becoming desperate given the political and cultural shift to the left that appears to be happening in the US. After years and years of violence-filled, hateful, anti-liberal rhetoric from the likes of radio dunderhead Michael Savage and television transsexual Ann Coulter, it is no surprise that the extremists among their fans would seek to turn the rhetoric into reality.

Fucking bastards.

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FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING

Reine



Phil



Be sure to check out Modulator's Friday Ark for more cat blogging!

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CIA, FBI computers used for Wikipedia edits

From the AP via Yahoo courtesy of AlterNet:

WikiScanner revealed that CIA computers were used to edit an entry on the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. A graphic on casualties was edited to add that many figures were estimated and were not broken down by class.

Another entry on former CIA chief William Colby was edited by CIA computers to expand his career history and discuss the merits of a Vietnam War rural pacification program that he headed.

Aerial and satellite images of the U.S. prison for terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, were removed using a computer traced to the FBI, WikiScanner showed.

CIA spokesman George Little said he could not confirm whether CIA computers were used in the changes, adding that "the agency always expects its computer systems to be used responsibly."

The FBI did not have an immediate response.

More here.

So, yeah, this definitely violates Wikipedia's conflict-of-interest policy. I know that because I studied the policy pretty heavily when I was violating it myself at my university job in Baton Rouge. That's not what really troubles me. As the article observes, Wikipedia is, in the long run, self-correcting; their tens of thousands of volunteer editors will eventually catch any mistakes and correct them. What troubles me is that these moves by the two major US spook agencies essentially amount to psychological warfare waged on their own people. I mean, okay, every institution has to engage in some kind of public relations, especially given the media saturated environment in which we live, but this is very disturbing. Both the CIA and FBI have long histories of fucking with, even murdering, law abiding American citizens. This stealth-propaganda just comes too close to that shit.

I shouldn't be surprised. Sleaze is standard procedure for these two agencies. It's also worth noting that FOX News is pulling the same shit.

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FAREWELL MAX ROACH

From the San Francisco Chronicle:

Jazz Master Max Roach Dies at 83

By his 30th birthday, Max Roach was already considered the greatest jazz drummer ever by his peers. By the time he died this week, the 83-year-old master percussionist was known worldwide as much more: innovator, activist, teacher, genius.

Roach, whose rhythmic innovations and improvisations defined bebop jazz during a career marked by expectations defied and musical boundaries ignored, died late Wednesday in a Manhattan hospital after a long illness.

No additional details were available, said Cem Kurosman, spokesman for Blue Note Records, where Roach played on seminal recordings with Thelonius Monk, Duke Ellington and Miles Davis. Roach was elected to the Downbeat magazine Hall of Fame in 1980, and the Grammy Hall of Fame 15 years later.

"Max was one of the founders and original members of the A-Team of bebop," said fellow music legend Quincy Jones. "Outside of losing a giant and an innovator, I've lost a great, great friend. Thank God he left a piece of his soul on his recordings so that we'll always have a part of him with us."

And

Roach re-emerged in the free jazz era with a new political consciousness, becoming one of jazz's loudest voices for civil rights. Albums like "We Insist! Max Roach's Freedom Now Suite," released in 1960 to celebrate the upcoming centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, reflected his support of black activism.

Click here for the rest.

Years ago I got into an argument with a big sweaty fat guy on coke about who the greatest drummer of all time is. He was a Rush fan and was heavily pushing Neil Peart. I was like, "Surely there are some jazz drummers who are better than Peart." But big fat sweaty coke-head wouldn't hear any of it. After going back and forth for a couple of minutes, he became menacing, so I backed off.

Lesson: never argue with drunk, crazy, or drug addicted people; also, never argue with Rush fans.

Of course, big fat sweaty coke-guy was wrong. Peart's really good, which goes without saying, but drummers like Roach, or Elvin Jones, or Art Blakey were doing things with a five piece kit years before he was born that Peart couldn't do with his scores of drums and gongs and bangles and beads. Indeed, according to Wikipedia, Peart eventually studied jazz drumming himself in his own pursuit of excellence. He would do well to scrutinize everything Max Roach ever recorded.

I came to love Roach's work by way of Miles Davis. Roach was the drummer on Lisa Simpson's favorite album Birth of the Cool, which is definitely in my own top five. I later discovered his playing on some other Davis albums, and on the great Money Jungle record, where he was joined by Duke Ellington on piano, and Charles Mingus on bass. I've also got a couple of his own projects, M'Boom and Percussion Bitter Sweet.

That last album, which features the Roach composition "Garvey's Ghost" introduced me to Roach's political persona. The title is a reference to the Afrocentric pre-civil rights era philosopher and leader Marcus Garvey, who was an enormous influence on Malcolm X's father, and consequently, Malcom X himself. There are no words to the song, but the title invokes quite enough, especially when you consider the fact that the song was originally recorded at the height of the Civil Rights Movement.

In short, in addition to being in contention for that aforementioned "greatest drummer of all time" title, Roach was a practitioner of Real Art, that is, art which consciously seeks political change.

He was a great man.

Here is a bit of documentary on Roach via YouTube.

Here is one of his drum solos, also via YouTube.



Farewell Max Roach.

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NEW ORLEANS FEDERAL FUCKOVER CONTINUES

From the New Orleans Times-Picayune:

GO Zone bond money flowing, but not in N.O.

Projects in New Orleans are getting only a tiny fraction of the low-interest bond money aimed at jump-starting Louisiana's post-Katrina economy, and officials plan to ask for a larger share, commensurate with the city's massive flood damage, recovery director Ed Blakely recently told a City Council panel.

Blakely's beef relies on the numbers: Just one New Orleans GO Zone project has gotten off the ground. That project, listed on State Bond Commission records as "Carrollton Revitalization," has a price tag of $4.5 million. That amounts to 0.1 percent of the $4.5 billion in projects that have received final approval from the commission.

The Gulf Opportunity (GO) Zone Act aims to spur private projects that provide housing or jobs by offering developers low interest rates, courtesy of the government. Though the money benefits primarily private developers, the bonds must be issued by a "conduit issuer," a public agency such as the city's Industrial Development Board.

And

The biggest roadblock, he said, has been the acquisition of property insurance at reasonable rates, the lack of which can call into question credit for the project, Kling said.

More here.

This insurance obstacle is just red tape, which the Feds could clear up with a few finger snaps. But they're not. And that really pisses me off. I mean, of course, there continue to be problems at the state and local level, as well, but Bush's agencies have treated NOLA like, well, black people under Jim Crow.

I think that's a rather appropriate comparison.

Especially because of who's actually getting GO Zone money.

From the AP via the Huffington Post courtesy of AlterNet:

Katrina Aid Goes Toward Football Condos

With large swaths of the Gulf Coast still in ruins from Hurricane Katrina, rich federal tax breaks designed to spur rebuilding are flowing hundreds of miles inland to investors who are buying up luxury condos near the University of Alabama's football stadium.

About 10 condominium projects are going up in and around Tuscaloosa, and builders are asking up to $1 million for units with granite countertops, king-size bathtubs and 'Bama decor, including crimson couches and Bear Bryant wall art.

And

The GO Zone was drawn to include the Tuscaloosa area even though it is about 200 miles from the coast and got only heavy rain and scattered wind damage from Katrina.

Click here for the rest.

What the fuck?!? Why the fuck is 'Bama getting this break while the Big Easy continues to get the big fuckover? You know, Louisiana's got a longstanding reputation as a corrupt state, but it seems to me that the only reason that's the case is due to incompetent corruption. That is, corruption appears to be all over the place, but in Louisiana they don't have it together enough to write such grand larceny into law, legalizing the criminals.

When NOLA was so fucked up during the week after Katrina, when FEMA sat on its ass doing nothing, I never imagined the nausea I was feeling then would still be biting me two years later.

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Iraqi officials: Truck bombings killed at least 500

From CNN:

The death toll in the suicide bombings Tuesday in northern Iraq has risen to at least 500, local officials in Nineveh province said Wednesday.

Iraqi Army and Mosul police sources earlier put the number at 260, but said it was likely to rise. 320 were reported wounded.

The Tuesday truck bombs that targeted the villages of Qahtaniya, al-Jazeera and Tal Uzair, in northern Iraq near the border with Syria, were a "trademark al Qaeda event" designed to sway U.S. public opinion against the war, a U.S. general said Wednesday.

The attacks, targeting Kurdish villages of the Yazidi religious minority, were attempts to "break the will" of the American people and show that the U.S. troop escalation -- the "surge" -- is failing, Maj. Gen. Benjamin Mixon said.

The bombings highlight the kind of sectarian tensions the troop surge was designed to stop.

Click here for the rest.

I'm not at all surprised that the US is trying to pin this on al Qaeda, which bolsters the crazed notion that the Iraq occupation is all about ending terrorism, but as of late Wednesday evening, CNN was reporting that nobody really knew who was behind the attacks. Well, whether it's "foreign fighters" working for "al Qaeda in Iraq" or simply homegrown extremists makes no difference in this one respect: the "surge" failed to prevent it. Indeed, the "surge" is a total failure, which anybody with half a brain knew months ago when Bush first announced it. The sectarian violence in Iraq is obviously beyond our military's abilities. I mean, okay, we could firebomb the whole damned country, get into some severe genocide, and that would probably work. Eventually. If that's what you really want, the old "destroy the village in order to save it" Vietnam philosophy. But I assume most Americans have some sense of morality which would rule out genocide as US policy for Iraq. So we're screwed. If we pull out, the violence will get worse. While we stay, the violence is getting worse, and Americans are dying, too.

Time to go. Like now. There's nothing the US can do on the ground over there.

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Baptist pastor under scrutiny

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

The Rev. Jerry Sutton, a prominent Southern Baptist pastor who lost a bid to become president of the denomination, is now facing an upheaval in the megachurch he leads, including complaints that he spent church money on his daughter's wedding.

For nearly 21 years, Sutton has served as leader of Nashville's Two Rivers Baptist Church, which sits just across the highway from the Grand Ole Opry. The church hosted the "Justice Sunday II" rally in 2005, where then-House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and others criticized judicial activism via satellite to a national audience of evangelical Christians.

But now, some Two Rivers members are accusing Sutton of failing to abide by church rules and punishing those who question his authority.

"We have a fractured fellowship. Somehow, with the Lord's help, we need to put this church back together," Harry Jester, who's been in the congregation for 32 years, said at a church meeting July 28.

One of Sutton's former administrative assistants has also said Sutton looked at pornography on his church computer and had an affair with a church staff member — charges that the church denies. The church's executive pastor, Scott Hutchings, said human resource officials at the church investigated those charges and found no evidence that Sutton had looked at porn or had an affair.

Click here for more.

This may turn out to be nothing more than hardball internal Southern Baptist church politics. That is, the article later observes that church staffers are spinning these allegations as coming from some sort of disgruntled faction within the congregation.

Whatever.

One way or the other, this is yet another example coming out of what now appears to be a veritable avalanche of gross right-wing moral hypocrisy. If the allegations are true, then Brother Sutton is a porn-consuming, embezzling, dictatorial tyrant, totally unlike their LORD Jesus Christ. If the allegations are false, then a sizable percentage of the Two Rivers congregation is willing to lie and smear in order to get their way. No matter how you look at it, traditional Christian values are being stomped on here.

Goddamned conservative church fuckers.

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QUIS CUSTODIET IPSOS CUSTODES
Means "Who Polices the Police?"

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

Sheriff's deputy pulls over his wife on DUI charge

Charlotte Moore, 36, a jail deputy and 11-year veteran, was driving her 2004 Pontiac Grand Am when she was pulled over by her husband, Elko County Sheriff's Deputy Mike Moore, a police report said.

She allegedly left before being administered a portable breathalyzer test, the Elko Daily Free Press reported.

Mike Moore pulled her over again and called the Elko Police Department for backup. He left shortly after officer Shane Daz arrived. Elko Police Department Sgt. Mark Butterfield also was on scene.

More here.

So usually I use these Quis Custodiet posts to rail away on police misconduct and how cops protect each other from the law they're supposed to enforce, but I've got to give credit where it's due. How many times have you seen a cop turn on his rolling flashers in order to run a red light, only to turn them off once he's through the intersection, obviously not headed to bust some crime in progress? Well, here's one moving violation that the cop didn't get away with. Good work. Although something tells me it all probably has more to do with this couple's domestic situation than it does with doing the right thing.

But what the hell, I'll take it.

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ROVE'S RESIGNATION CAUSES BLOGGER AND JOURNALIST FRENZY!

And it's got me pretty excited, too. Rove, with his brutal, scorched-earth, take-no-prisoners style of politics has probably done more than any one individual in American history to destroy the public discourse on which democracy desperately depends. He's total scum. I'm glad he's out. But why's he going? He says he's leaving to spend more time with his family, but then that's what Jeff Skilling said, too, just a few weeks before Enron went belly-up.

What's the real reason?

Most people's first reaction, myself included, is spelled out in this Washington Post article, courtesy of AlterNet:

Democrats Continue to Seek Testimony From Rove

Rove's retirement announcement came 11 days after he refused to testify before the Judiciary Committee. While his actions figure in two other investigations on Capitol Hill, the Senate panel is the only committee that has subpoenaed Rove.

Aides to Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) said he is considering whether to assert that a White House claim of immunity is not valid, which could lead to a committee vote next month holding Rove in contempt of Congress.

More here.

Like Skilling and Enron, Rove may very well be getting out before the heat gets turned up, either to protect himself somehow, or to keep from further embarrassing the White House. And it may not even be about any looming disaster of which we are aware. Maybe some shit we've never even heard about is about to hit the fan.

Or maybe not.

Monday morning's Democracy Now! offers a much more sober and rational understanding of Rove's skedaddle than any I've heard so far:

"The Media Dissector" Danny Schechter on Karl Rove's Resignation

I mean, this is rats deserting a ship. You know, the ship is sinking, clearly. His comment -- President Bush's comment the other day -- he doesn't speak English -- is indicative of an administration that doesn't know what it's doing or where it’s going. Bush's top adviser leaving is certainly not going to make it any easier for him. We're going to see more and more crises.

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

In other words, despite his undeniably effective campaign work, Rove's tenure in the White House, in terms of advancing successful policy, has been a spectacular failure. The best guess here is that he's expecting things to get even worse, and is getting the hell out before that happens, maybe salvaging his reputation, maybe ducking some hardcore mud.

Still, this abrupt departure fuels the conspiracy theorist in many, I'm sure. Like with this guy over at AlterNet:

Rove's off White House Payroll -- Will
That Free Him to Play Even Dirtier Tricks?

The smart money says Rove is quitting ahead of one or more indictments, and here's hoping. There is, however, precedent for speculating that he's not really "leaving" at all.

The precedent, as is so often in this administration, is Nixonian. In the Nixon Library's newly released tape of the President's phone conversations shortly before, on, and after Election Day 1972, the longest is Nixon and Chuck Colson riffing out their second term plans -- most especially for a new "information and counterattack capacity in the White House" that would be more durable, and better deniable, than the one that got them in trouble with Watergate.

The idea is for Charles Colson to leave the White House with great fanfare, as if riding off into the sunset after a job well done. He will establish a law firm that will actually be a political front working for Nixon: "I wouldn't call it 'Colson,' something like that," Nixon says; "I would just say, "Washington Associates," or something..a good, high-sounding name." It would serve as a base the usual Nixonian work of manipulating and intimidating the media; and, intriguingly, a new idea, establishing a new polling firm, scrubbed of its origins in the White House: "I mean, the point is, let's just get the polling done our way."

Click here for more.

As far as conspiracy theories go, this one isn't all that bad. I mean, the Nixon/Bush parallels have been just inescapable for years now, and Rove is probably the most Nixonian of the whole gang of thugs occupying the White House--okay, Cheney comes pretty close himself to being "most Nixonian," but Rove is supreme in terms of "dirty tricks," which is why I give the nod to him.

At any rate, even though Rove is going to be out of the spotlight for a while, his influence will most definitely be felt for years to come, as this New York Times hatchet piece, courtesy of AlterNet, observes:

Legacy Laden With Protégés

Whatever history makes of Karl Rove’s role in the White House, his legacy as a political strategist can be measured in a presidential campaign that has already begun without him. A look at the roster of every Republican presidential candidate finds people who have worked with him, and they have brought some of his methods to this race.

Click here for the rest.

I'm sure we'll know more about what's really going on here soon.

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SO I TOOK MONDAY OFF...

...or, rather, I took Sunday off, but because I usually post late at night, I assume anybody who comes in here regularly sees it the next day. Anyway, I had to take the day off because I needlessly decided to reinstall my operating system to get rid of what I thought was a virus. Turns out it was an electrical issue, which I fixed, but I ended up being caught in crazy software hell--I really am out of my element when it comes to major stuff like this. Topping things off, I lost internet access for about fifteen hours or so, making it impossible to post. Anyway, I've got it all figured out now, and my computer is running waaaay faster than usual. We'll see how long that lasts once I'm loaded down with junk and spyware after a few weeks.

In the meantime, Karl Rove, son of Satan, and Bush's brain, suddenly resigned.

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TO FUNDAMENTALIST CHRISTIANS, LOVE EQUALS HATE

From the AP via the Huffington Post courtesy of AlterNet:

Church Cancels Memorial for Gay Navy Vet

The church's pastor, the Rev. Gary Simons, said no one knew Sinclair, who was not a church member, was gay until the day before the Thursday service, when staff members putting together his video tribute saw pictures of men "engaging in clear affection, kissing and embracing."

Simons said the church believes homosexuality is a sin, and it would have appeared to endorse that lifestyle if the service had been held there.

"We did decline to host the service _ not based on hatred, not based on discrimination, but based on principle," Simons told The Associated Press. "Had we known it on the day they first spoke about it _ yes, we would have declined then. It's not that we didn't love the family."

And

Wright called the church's claim about the pictures "a bold-faced lie." She said she provided numerous family pictures of Sinclair, including some with his partner, but said none showed men kissing or hugging.

More here.

Full disclosure: I met Simmons' wife, April, who is Joel Osteen's younger sister, years ago when I was a Southern Baptist youth; some church friends brought her to visit a Bible study group I attended. The Osteen family lived in Kingwood, but she didn't go to school with me because her devout parents had her in a private Christian academy. And that's about it. I noted that she was very sweet and utterly beautiful, and never saw her again.

Now I know she's married to a total asshole.

What ever happened to loving the sinner? This really blows my mind. Jesus, supposedly these people's LORD, consistently associated with the dregs of society, tax collectors, prostitutes, thieves, lepers, Democrats, you name it. Shunning this guy because he was gay is decidedly not what "Jesus would do." The hugging and kissing pictures just don't cut it as an excuse: they could have easily cut the offending images and continued with the service as planned. Clearly, they freaked because he was gay.

So they're liars, too. Fucking bastards.

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

2 arrested in alleged dragging of girl behind van at boot camp

The director of a Christian boot camp and an employee were arrested Friday for allegedly dragging a 15-year-old girl behind a van after she fell behind the group during a morning run, authorities said.

And

A call to Love Demonstrated Ministries was not immediately returned Friday. No listing was found for Bassitt. An answering machine at a listing for Flowers cut off during an attempt to leave a message Friday.

Flowers, the camp's director, allegedly ordered Bassitt to run alongside the girl after she fell behind, the affidavit said. When the girl stopped running, Bassitt allegedly yelled at her and pinned her to the ground while Flowers tied the rope to her, according to the affidavit.

Click here for the rest.

I love how the organization running this outfit is called "Love Demonstrated Ministries." Yet another off the scale right-wing irony in this age of countless right-wing ironies. Obviously, love is not demonstrated by dragging a fifteen year old girl down the road from a van. For that matter, teen boot camps in general, which are brutal, fucked-up institutions of humiliation, violence, and mind-control, aren't a good way of demonstrating love, either. What the fuck kind of people show their love in this way?

Bottom line: fundamentalist Christians are psychotic, violence-loving monsters. Just like the genocidal god-the-father they prefer over the peace-loving god-the-son to whom they only pay lip service. If one of these sociopaths ever tells you that he loves you, run for the fucking hills.

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EVERYONE HATES MCCAIN!

From Crooks and Liars, some news on how Republican presidential candidates are doing in Iowa:

UI political scientists note that McCain has been passed in popularity not only by former Sen. Fred Thompson, R-Tenn., who earned 5.2 percent support, but also by a Democratic challenger, Obama, who is supported by 6.7 percent of Republicans.

More here.

You know, I always used to like McCain. I mean, don't get me wrong, he's conservative as all get-out, but I liked the guy. I liked his "straight talk." I liked how he told the fundamentalists to go to hell back during the 2000 campaign. I even liked how he broke ranks with other Capitol Hill Republicans during the US Yugoslavia intervention to support Clinton. Clearly, McCain's maverick image was well deserved; a conservative, yes, but not one of those lock-step right-wing pigs that have been all over the place for the last fifteen years or so, a guy a liberal could negotiate with.

I even felt sorry for him when his election hopes against Bush finally faltered due to a Karl Rove engineered "black love-child" whispering campaign during the Southern primaries--if he'd remembered that the reason he lost is because Rove successfully smeared him, he might actually be a front runner right now. Instead, he decided that "straight talk" wasn't what voters wanted, and turned himself into a GOP clone, supporting a war he knows is bullshit, reaching out to the right-wing Christian lunatics he hates.

Apparently, absolutely nobody buys it. He's now polling below a Democrat. Among Republicans. He should just quit now. I bet the only reason he hasn't is that he hopes to continue fund raising in order to pay off campaign debt.

This is all just sad.

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FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING

Sammy and Frankie



Be sure to check out Modulator's Friday Ark for more cat blogging!

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Democratic Party is growing more liberal

From McClatchy courtesy of AlterNet:

The Democratic Party is growing more liberal for the first time in a generation.

It's more antiwar than at any time since 1972. Support is growing for such traditionally liberal values as using the federal government to help the poor. And 40 percent of Democrats now call themselves liberal, the highest in more than three decades and twice the low-water mark recorded as the conservative Reagan revolution swept the country in the early 1980s.

While politicians such as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama shun the liberal label, they're rushing to court new power brokers who wear it proudly and constituencies that could barely win a nod from party leaders just a few years ago. For example, the top Democratic presidential candidates all planned to attend the YearlyKos convention of liberal bloggers in Chicago this weekend and a Human Rights Campaign debate this week in Los Angeles on gay, lesbian and transgender issues.

They all skipped an annual gathering of the Democratic Leadership Council last week in Nashville, Tenn. The DLC is the centrist group that pushed for welfare overhaul and a pro-business agenda in the 1990s, helped launch Bill Clinton to the presidency and stood by centrist Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., when liberals attacked him for supporting the Iraq war and he effectively was drummed out of the party in a primary last year.

Click here for the rest.

It may very well be that the so-called pendulum of American politics is starting to swing in the other direction--this Democratic shift is an extraordinarily good sign. Of course, I really have come to hate the pendulum metaphor because it strongly suggests that political change is something that just happens. The truth couldn't be further away from that.

Going back to the early 90s, well after "liberalism" had been discredited during the Reagan years, the right wing went into hyperdrive in its attacks on the left, all of which culminated in the impeachment of a popular Democratic President for a crime which any reasonable person wouldn't define as being "high." Compounding matters is the fact that Clinton wasn't even all that liberal. I think the US public started getting heartburn from all this conservative agitation. Meanwhile, elected Democrats, scared shitless of the conservative liberal hate-machine, started moving to the right themselves. This, too, put a bad taste in Americans' mouths. Then, both at around the same time, Nader decided to start agitating from the left, running for President in 2000, and the liberal blogs hit the ground running, doing essentially the same thing as Nader.

Throw in the obviously stolen election, and Americans were starting to realize something was fishy about conservatism. Then Bush took the Oval Office, 9/11 happened, and the rest is history.

This is all just armchair historical analysis, but I think that conservatives overplaying their hand combined with liberal agitation now has the country at a point such that it's ready to move to the left again. That is, if the country ever actually moved to the right in the first place. Certainly, the word "liberal" was successfully demonized long ago, but, as Chomsky has observed repeatedly, issue polling has consistently showed the US population to be well to the left of the ruling class for years and years. Conservative America may very well have always been something of a propaganda induced illusion.

Maybe the re-liberalization of the Democratic Party signals not a change in pendulum direction, but rather an unmasking of where the country's actually been for decades.

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Authorities not amused by Texas Redneck Games

From the San Antonio Express-News via the Houston Chronicle:

Don't make plans quite yet to visit Athens for the next edition of the rowdy outdoor party known as the Texas Redneck Games.

Describing the four-day event that ended Sunday as a bloated bacchanal of disorder, drunkenness and debauchery, Henderson County officials say they might charge the promoter under a state crowd control law.

"There was a lot of nudity, rowdiness, intoxication, people running wild on their four-wheelers and underage drinking," said Lt. Pat McWilliams of the county Sheriff's Department. "There was also fights and assaults, and some serious injuries."

Over the weekend, nearly 100 people were either arrested or cited for offenses that included speeding, underage possession of alcohol, driving while intoxicated and possession of marijuana.

That aside, McWilliams said the county's biggest gripe with promoter Oscar Still is that he promised that no more than 2,500 would attend.

Authorities said upwards of 8,000 people — some who traveled hundreds of miles — jammed the 300-acre Pool Ranch to run all-terrain vehicles on muddy trails and watch contests featuring everything from Spam-eating to wet T-shirts.

More here.

Take away the references to ATVs and wet t-shirts and this could be a description of Woodstock. I mean, all the partying, the anti-authority attitudes, the naked people. Are these hicks or hippies?

I was watching Easy Rider a few days ago on Bravo or AMC and I noted a couple of times how appearance seemed to count for everything in those days. Captain America and Billy pick up a hitch-hiker on the road and they know he's okay because he's dressed like a freak, just like them. Later, asshole cajun rednecks mock their appearance in a hick diner in Louisiana. Today, however, appearance means nothing. Long hair, short hair, it's all meaningless. Right-wing rocker and xenophobic racist Ted Nugent has hippie-long hair; punker and former Black Flag front man Henry Rollins sports a conservative looking short haircut.

I could get into how I believe that much of this is about how the mass media co-opt all styles and movements, filters them through a white-bread machine, and then sells it all back to the people as consumer products, but there's no need to go down that road.

I'll just leave it with this observation: the counter-culture ain't what it used to be.

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China threatens 'nuclear option' of dollar sales

From the UK Telegraph courtesy of AlterNet:

Two officials at leading Communist Party bodies have given interviews in recent days warning - for the first time - that Beijing may use its $1.33 trillion (£658bn) of foreign reserves as a political weapon to counter pressure from the US Congress.

Shifts in Chinese policy are often announced through key think tanks and academies.

Described as China's "nuclear option" in the state media, such action could trigger a dollar crash at a time when the US currency is already breaking down through historic support levels.

It would also cause a spike in US bond yields, hammering the US housing market and perhaps tipping the economy into recession. It is estimated that China holds over $900bn in a mix of US bonds.

Xia Bin, finance chief at the Development Research Centre (which has cabinet rank), kicked off what now appears to be government policy with a comment last week that Beijing's foreign reserves should be used as a "bargaining chip" in talks with the US.

"Of course, China doesn't want any undesirable phenomenon in the global financial order," he added.

Click here for the rest.

So, the two or three people with whom I've had arguments about this issue, and who know enough about economics to even know what I'm talking about here, have utterly poo-poo'ed my fears about how much of our debt China owns. "They'll never sell 'em off," they've said. "It's totally against their interests to do so. It would wreak havoc with the global, and therefore their own, economy."

Well, there's probably something to all that, but it's not really Chinese irrationality that's got me scared: it's American irrationality. Remember, nobody really believes in all that free market crap, except for maybe the ideologues on TV and their devoted viewers. Politicians and businesses, however, are totally happy to use government to further their economic ends, and China is increasingly becoming economically influential in ways that our wealthy elites don't like. Throw in a little American nationalist arrogance, and we have a recipe for some dangerous trade policy that could conceivably force the Chinese's hand.

Then we're fucked. I mean, the Chinese would be fucked, too, but much less so than us. The only way out of this situation is to get off the dammed deficit teat and start paying down our massive national debt. Until then, they've got our balls in their tight Mandarin grip.

And that's just something we're going to have to get used to for now.

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Young Republican National Federation Chair
Accused of Sexually Assaulting Sleeping Man

From AlterNet:

Glenn Murphy, Jr., the recently elected chairman of the Young Republican National Federation (also the RNC Chair for Clark County, Indiana and formerly the YRNF Secretary) has been accused of sexually assaulting a sleeping man. Immediately following the accusation, he came up with an unrelated reason to resign, and the YRNF cleansed their website of his name.

Allegedly, Murphy and another YR were drunk and crashing at Murphy's sister's house. The other man apparently awoke in the morning to find Murphy giving him a non-consensual blow job. The Clark County (Indiana) Sheriff's Department is charging Murphy with "criminal deviate conduct", a Class B felony.

More here.

Because I'm not really sure what Murphy's stated views on sexuality are, this story isn't technically along the lines of the high profile right-wing hypocrites I've been posting on lately, but it is worth a mention, if only because the right wing seems to be producing so many sex weirdos these days. I mean, okay, the boob-grabbing Governer Schwarzenegger and porn star Mary Carey are Republicans, too, but they're out in California, which blows the curve, or something to that effect. Generally, Republicans stand for so-called "family values," that is, neo-puritanism, and Murphy has sought and won a leadership role under these circumstances.

So what the hell does he think he's doing? I mean, sure, if gay blowjobs are your thing, no problem from me, but this sounds like date rape, totally non-consensual, and anyway...aren't Republicans supposed to be against that sort of thing, consensual or not?

You know, I wonder if it's always been like this, lots of GOP perverts on the down-low, with only the age of hyper mass media making it all visible, or if there's something in the water that's making them turn weird. Who am I kidding? It's always been like this: anti-sex attitudes breed perversion; the denial of human nature can only result in bizarro behavior. Okay, this is something we can definitely thank the hyper mass media for.

One of the few things, actually.

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"MARKET DISCIPLINE IS GOOD FOR YOU BUT NOT FOR ME"

That is, as Noam Chomsky says, "you" is the consumer or worker, and "me" is big business.

From Money via CNN courtesy of This Modern World:

"The chance of government intervention in the marketplace in response to current events has increased significantly," said Andy Chow, portfolio manager at SCM Advisors LLC, a $14 billion San Francisco-based investment firm specializing in fixed-income and structured-finance markets.

Mike Perry, chief executive of mortgage lender IndyMac Bancorp (IMB) said on Thursday that he got a phone call this week from U.S. Sen. Christopher Dodd, D- Conn., who asked whether Congress can help the U.S. mortgage industry in any way.

At a hearing in Washington D.C. on Thursday, Dodd said that he'd spoken this week with several mortgage bankers "to solicit their opinions as to what they thought was happening and what solutions may lay out there to try to deal with this seizing up of credit that is really getting rather dramatic."

Indymac's Perry said he'd also talked to the chairman of Fannie Mae on Thursday and had traded calls with the chairman of Freddie Mac.

"Fannie Mae's Chairman (is) telling me that they are 'prepared to step up and help the industry'," Perry wrote on the company's blog.

Click here for the rest.

Well at least I'm able to get a laugh out of this. The "free market" got the mortgage industry into this subprime mess, but it's starting to look like the nanny state may very well swoop in to save the day, just as it did with the savings and loan crisis in the 80s.

Here's the lesson.

The right-wing notion that government interference in the market always leads to bad consequences is bullshit. Certainly, some regulations are stupid, but just as certainly, some regulations are the only thing keeping the entire market from collapse. Further, it is impossible to remove the government from the market; indeed, the government is that which allows the market to exist by creating the circumstances under which it can flourish. Capitalists, real capitalists, the people with the money, not the ideological cheerleaders on TV and in the papers, know this, which is why they're always going to the government with lobbyists and gifts in order to work this system to their advantage.

Most everybody's heard about the laws of supply and demand. Here's a new economic law: government and business are so intertwined that there is no way of separating them. We might as well get used to that fact and adjust our political conversation accordingly. Hopefully, this will end up with nanny state help for regular people like you and me not being demonized all the time.

You know, just like the way it is with nanny state help for big business.

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State GOP forms loyalty committee

What is the matter with Kansas?

From the AP via the Wichita Eagle courtesy of Alternet:

"The motive behind this is, 'Let's make sure Republicans are supporting Republicans,' " said Christian Morgan, the state GOP's executive director. "If you want to hold a party post, you should at least be supporting Republican candidates."

The state committee's actions struck a sour note for some Republicans, particularly moderates on issues such as abortion. Bob Beatty, a Washburn University political scientist, suggested the loyalty committee could prove a "public relations disaster."

"Ironically, it smacks most of the Communist Party," Beatty said Monday. "That's the kind of public irony that most parties try to avoid -- the party of freedom telling people they have no freedom."

Kobach and his allies contend they're attempting to strengthen the party's state organization and the loyalty committee is a way to promote unity.

While the GOP enjoys a significant advantage in the number of registered voters in Kansas, dissension has allowed Democrats to peel away disaffected moderates. Sebelius and Morrison are perhaps the best examples.

Click here for the rest.

"The party of freedom."

Oh, that's fucking hysterical! Only in the twisted, fun house mirror of GOP logic is the Republican Party "the party of freedom." Really, this Kansas Republican loyalty committee is probably one of the most honest moves the party's made in years and years. That is, since the Republicans took Congress back in '94, dissension in the ranks has not been tolerated. After 9/11, they made some serious attempts to bring Democrats and liberals under the boot, as well, achieving short term success, which resonates a bit even today, diluted only by conservative incompetence and adherence to ideology and philosophy that do not work in the real world.

Sure, words and phrases like "loyalty committee" ring with a Stalinist melody, but no sane person should be worried. This is simply a sign of desperate right wingers showing their true colors. Nothing has actually changed.

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FUCK BARRY BONDS

From the Houston Chronicle sports section:

Entire game is diminished

Congratulations, Barry. You did it. You joined the 755-homer club Saturday night.

You and Hank Aaron. How does that feel, Barry?

You now share baseball's most coveted milestone with one of its most respected players. Thanks to you, the record feels different this morning. It feels a bit less magical. In fact, the entire game feels diminished.

On the other hand, you certainly did it your way. You did it without regard to what teammates, managers, coaches or fans thought of you. You apparently were unbothered by the rules, either. You believed the means justified the end.

And

According to exhaustive reporting by two San Francisco Chronicle reporters, you did it by using an array of illegal performance-enhancing drugs.

At a time when many players are starting to decline, you got better and better. Beginning in the summer you turned 36, you averaged 52 home runs a season. You averaged 37 in the five years before you added those slabs of muscle. You showed the world that steroids and human growth hormone do work.

More here.

Cheating is something that you do when you're a little kid and don't yet understand that doing so renders the entire point of game-playing moot. Or maybe it's something that you do when the stakes are literally life and death, although god knows why someone might get themselves into such a situation. Maybe cheating is okay if your opponent is also cheating.

It's certainly not okay for Bonds.

Ultimately, the real problem here is with Major League Baseball, the very old, very American organization which is so wired into the national culture that it enjoys anti-trust exemption on Capitol Hill. When the San Francisco Chronicle made utterly apparent what The Cheater was doing, MLB should have kicked him out immediately. And when MLB didn't do that, Congress, which allows pro baseball its privileged economic status, should have revoked the exemption.

For me, and for any baseball fan with any sense of ethics at all, Bonds is a non-entity. He has not tied Aaron's record, and when Bonds finally blasts that steroid-powered 756th homer, he will not have broken Aaron's record.

I guess this is just a sign of our decaying culture: we live in an era when politicians steal elections and when star athletes steal records. That's what decades of pro-capitalism "greed is good" propaganda gets us.

Totally sickening.

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THE STAR TREK CALENDAR PICTURE OF THE MONTH IS...



...Mr. Spock and Dr. McCoy!

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Minister Charged With Indecent Exposure

From the AP via WTOP-FM courtesy of This Modern World:

The minister of a Baptist church has been charged with indecent exposure and driving under the influence, and police officers say he propositioned them.

Tommy Tester, 58, of Bristol, Va., was wearing a skirt when he was arrested last week after allegedly urinating in front of children at a car wash, police said.

Police also said Tester offered to perform oral sex on officers who were sent to the scene.

Click here for the rest.

Well, this guy is no Ted Haggard or David Vitter, but nonetheless a Christian leader in his own right. What is it with these people? And why are all these isolated incidents starting to coalesce into an ominous pattern? As usual, it's not really the sexual perversion that bothers me so much, although drunkenly peeing in front of kids is not something of which I approve, but rather the hypocrisy. It is becoming increasingly apparent that many of these neo-puritan types simply don't believe their own anti-sex rhetoric.

Why, then, must they devote their lives and careers to furthering a clearly dangerous and hateful agenda with which they do not agree? Maybe that's a question for a psychologist to answer, but I bet that power, money, and prestige play a role somehow. And that's far more sick and twisted than offering blowjobs to the cops who want to arrest you.


Baptist minister and
pervert Tommy Tester

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Weapons Given to Iraq Are Missing

From the Washington Post courtesy of AlterNet:

The Pentagon has lost track of about 190,000 AK-47 assault rifles and pistols given to Iraqi security forces in 2004 and 2005, according to a new government report, raising fears that some of those weapons have fallen into the hands of insurgents fighting U.S. forces in Iraq.

The author of the report from the Government Accountability Office says U.S. military officials do not know what happened to 30 percent of the weapons the United States distributed to Iraqi forces from 2004 through early this year as part of an effort to train and equip the troops. The highest previous estimate of unaccounted-for weapons was 14,000, in a report issued last year by the inspector general for Iraq reconstruction.

The United States has spent $19.2 billion trying to develop Iraqi security forces since 2003, the GAO said, including at least $2.8 billion to buy and deliver equipment. But the GAO said weapons distribution was haphazard and rushed and failed to follow established procedures, particularly from 2004 to 2005, when security training was led by Gen. David H. Petraeus, who now commands all U.S. forces in Iraq.

Click here for the rest.

The article goes on to observe that anti-occupation insurgents are, in all probability, in possession of these missing weapons, even while the Bush administration continues to assert that Iran and Syria are doing the lion's share of arms supplying. Typical, very typical. Indeed, this kind of utter incompetence - fucking up horribly and blaming somebody else for it - is by now the modus operandi of the Bush administration, from New York to Baghdad to New Orleans, and will probably be the most memorable aspect for Americans of this century's first decade when it's all over and done with.

It is very interesting to note that most of these weapons were lost while under the command of General Petraeus, which kind of sounds like "betray-us" if you forget to aspirate the initial consonant sound, who is now busy failing to end the violence and insurgency over there. Is his rise to supreme command in Iraq the military version of "Heckuva Job" Brownie's reign over FEMA? Probably not: Petraeus is more likely most adept at licking his superiors' buttholes, which is no doubt why he is now the big cheese instead of other generals who prefer truth-telling over anilingus.

You know, we've lost track of billions of dollars over there, too. Wads and wads of actual cash just fucking gone, literally gone.

Fucking idiots.

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PAT TILLMAN WAS MURDERED

From AlterNet:

Friendly fire is commonly understood to mean the accidental death of a U. S. soldier through weapons fired by U.S. or allied troops. (See this definition.) The facts in the Tillman case make friendly fire highly unlikely. He died from three bullet holes grouped together in his forehead, fired from a M-16 that was no more than ten yards away.

Three bullet holes. In the forehead. From a M-16. That was ten yards away.

That's not "friendly fire." That's murder.

Click here for the rest.

So I've been alternately fascinated and outraged by the Pat Tillman story from the beginning. At first, I was simply saddened that this extraordinarily patriotic former NFL star turned Army Ranger was heroically killed in a war that has done nothing to capture or kill Osama bin Laden and everything to enrage Islamic populations and create more terrorists. Then when I found out it was "friendly fire," I was saddened further still. Then the outrage began. The news broke that the heroic aspect was completely fabricated by the Pentagon, and that the "friendly fire" angle was suppressed. Psy-ops, I suppose, directed at the homeland, rather than the enemy. Then it became really fascinating: it turned out that Tillman was a Noam Chomsky fan, and had grown bitter with the Bush administration's handling of the war on terrorism. The invasion of Iraq was "so fucking illegal," Tillman is reported to have said.

Now it turns out that it wasn't "friendly fire." Tillman was murdered, and the Pentagon has lied about it for years now. Indeed, when I first heard about this on Coast to Coast last Sunday night, the weekend guy speculated that Tillman was murdered for his atheist views. But just a few nights later, the regular host interviewed a guy who asserted that Tillman was executed because top brass feared he would come back to the US and become a very persuasive anti-war activist. Indeed, this execution speculation originally comes from former General Wesley Clark on Olbermann's MSNBC show.

Even after all the outrageous bullshit we've endured these last six years or so, it's hard to believe that the Pentagon would execute an Army Ranger because they feared his ability to mold US public opinion after he was out of the service. But they've covered up his murder.

Why?

Right now, this is the only theory that fits.

UPDATE: So I've watched the Clark interview a couple of times and I think the guy interviewed on Coast to Coast got it wrong. Clark was only saying that the top brass ordered the cover-up, not the murder. Nonetheless, Tillman was murdered, and it appears that the entire military command structure, from battlefield to Washington, was in on keeping it hushed up. Why the hell was it so important to keep his murder a secret? Execution remains an intriguing theory.

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Are the Dead From the Minneapolis Bridge
Collapse Victims of Conservative Ideology?

Why, yes, of course they are.

From AlterNet:

It was the second U.S. bridge collapse this week -- a span in California fell the day before, with far fewer injuries and no loss of life. The tragedy occurred just weeks after an 80-year-old steam pipe in Manhattan blew up, killing one and injuring dozens more. A year earlier, a section of tunnel in Boston collapsed, killing a woman as she drove home. A year before that, hundreds of thousands of Americans became refugees after New Orleans' pitiable levees collapsed -- a graphic illustration of shortsighted public policy if ever there was one. The AFL-CIO estimates that more than one in four roads are in "less than good condition." Minnesota ranks low on their list, with about one in eight failing to make the grade.

It's all part of a larger picture. We have a crumbling power grid and are falling behind the rest of the world in broadband infrastructure. The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) talks of "congested highways, overflowing sewers and corroding bridges" that are "constant reminders of the looming crisis that jeopardizes our nation's prosperity and our quality of life." Every year the engineering society issues a report card grading 15 categories of America's once-premier infrastructure. In 2005, that "core" infrastructure collectively got a "D-," slightly worse than the "D" it received in 2000. Ironically, the nation's bridges received the highest score -- a "C" -- in 2005.

And

A thousand grifters have gained office promising to cut taxes as if they existed in a vacuum, without mentioning the cost; no politician has ever won office promising to keep highways from collapsing on their constituents. For 30 years, we've been told by a series of right-wing snake-oil salesmen that they could deliver more and better public services while constantly cutting the taxes that pay for them, but it was always a fraud. The result is that the United States enjoys the third-lowest tax burden among the 30 most advanced economies as its public spaces gradually come apart at the seams.

Click here for the rest.

This is really a no-brainer. Conservatives have been boasting for years about how "government is the problem," about how they want to make government small enough "to drown it in a bathtub." Their rhetoric has been so fiery and insistent, so omnipresent by virtue of the fact that conservatives own all mainstream news media, that the ostensibly liberal Democrats have been infected. This isn't about political parties: this is about dead end conservative philosophy capturing the imaginations of elected officials.

It doesn't take an idiot to understand that if the prevailing political winds say that government must be destroyed that government will eventually be destroyed. And as government crumbles to ruins, everything it has built will go with it.

That's what's happening right now.

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REAL ART IN THE BIG EASY!
Cox Communications Imposed
Extended Hiatus Finally Ends

Well, that took much longer than expected. Somehow, I missed my cable guy on Friday a week ago and the soonest they could reschedule was seven days later. So I've had no internet, cable television, or even a telephone for over a week. Well okay, I did have my bottom of the line Tracfone, but the minutes are expensive so I kept phone conversations to a minimum. And I did have good old reliable free broadcast TV all week, and some of the signals were pretty strong, so it's not like I've been in limbo or anything. I suppose I could have picked up a newspaper, especially because the local daily, the New Orleans Times-Picayune, is a pretty good paper, especially when compared to that awful Baton Rouge paper I've been dealing with for the last three years.

Instead, I concentrated on getting settled here in my new apartment which is literally ten minutes from downtown New Orleans when the traffic is good. And I've been continuing to unpack even today, which is why I'm cutting this post short--I'm tired, and it's hard to concentrate. At any rate, Real Art is back, and I'm in a city I love, standing ready to jump into the local arts and performance scene as soon as I've got a day job to pay the bills. I'm excited.

One last thing. The cable guy accidentally hooked me up with the standard basic cable package instead of the limited action I've been getting in BR for three years. Cable TV is extraordinarily seductive. I mean, it sucks; there's rarely anything actually worth watching. But flipping channels is like playing the slots: you never know when you might hit the jackpot. Earlier tonight, I lost a few hours because Goodfellas was on Spike TV. I didn't really watch the whole thing, but the movie served as a kind of base while I surfed all the shitty shows on other channels.

God, I'm no better than anybody. I know how awful television is, but there I sat lapping it up. For fuck's sake, I even took in some FOX News! It's sick, just sick. I hope they hurry up and correct this, get me back to the twenty or so channels I had before. It's like being a recovering addict and having a bunch of heroin in the house.

How can I resist?

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FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING

Phil and Reine



Be sure to check out Modulator's Friday Ark for more cat blogging!

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