School Bible courses sectarian, study finds

From the Houston Chronicle:

Among the findings:

•The vast majority of Texas Bible courses, despite their titles, do not teach about the Bible in a historical or literary context, as required under state law. Instead, the electives tend to be explicitly devotional in nature and reflect an almost exclusively Christian (usually Protestant) perspective.

•The Bible is often presented as being divinely inspired and biblical stories treated as literal history.

•Most Bible courses in Texas are taught by teachers who have no academic training in biblical, religious or theological studies and, it appears, little familiarity with separation of church-state issues. Some districts bring in local clergy to teach their Bible courses and fund them with private money.

The report cited three exceptions: San Antonio's North East Independent School District and the Leander and Whiteface independent school districts. It said all presented material in a more neutral manner.

Click here for the rest.

Given that Western Civilization, our civilization, is based on a weird combination of Greco-Roman philosophy and Christianity, it stands to reason that if one doesn't understand the Bible, one doesn't understand what it means to be a Westerner. I'm pretty much of the opinion that all Americans should study the Bible. But not like this. This kind of Bible study isn't about the dynamic interplay between Biblical ideas and society at large, isn't about how Christian philosophers elegantly found ways to combine the wisdom of the ancients with their own religious beliefs, isn't about how countless secular ideas today have a basis in Christian thought. No, this is religious indoctrination, plain and simple, paid for by taxpayer dollars, with a curriculum mandated by government entities. Totally unconstitutional. Totally unAmerican.

Totally wrong.

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Cheney's criticism of war critics is wearing a bit thin

The Washington Post's liberal guy, E. J. Dionne, via the Houston Chronicle:

Cheney seemed terribly impatient with democracy Sunday on Meet the Press when he suggested that those who oppose President Bush's Iraq policies are helping — excuse me, validating — the terrorists.

Our allies in the war on terror, Cheney said, "want to know whether or not if they stick their heads up, the United States, in fact, is going to be there to complete the mission."

Then the punch: "And those doubts are encouraged, obviously, when they see the kind of debate that we've had in the United States. Suggestions, for example, that we should withdraw U.S. forces from Iraq, simply feed into that whole notion, validate the strategy of the terrorists."

Meaning what, exactly? If Cheney doesn't like "the kind of debate that we've had in the United States," is there any other "kind," short of a lockstep endorsement of all of Bush's choices, he'd endorse?

Click here for the rest.

If only Dionne had been writing like this back in 2002 when it really mattered.

I, for one, have never fully understood the whole criticism-equals-endangering-troops line of thought. I mean, I understand the assertion: our enemies hear about domestic opposition, which somehow makes them feel like they're winning, which emboldens them to fight all the more aggressively. Putting aside free speech issues for a moment, I think it's fair to ask if that's what actually happens. That is, how does Cheney know that's the case? I'm pretty certain that there have been no studies on this issue done among the Iraqi insurgency, so, to the best of my knowledge, Cheney's assertion about war criticism is simply an interesting, but totally unproven, idea. My own thought is that the insurgency simply wants the US the hell out of Iraq, and they're going to fight until they're dead or we leave, which is exactly the kind of enemy the US was facing in Vietnam over three decades ago. Indeed, the Vietnamese had been fighting against imperial occupiers for decades before we even showed up; they didn't care who we are or what we wanted--they just wanted us out. So it seems entirely fitting that Cheney's and other right-wingers' point of view is so utterly Nixonian. Really, as with Nixon, attacking war critics is far more about domestic power than about winning in the colonies.

And, of course, in a democracy, if that's still what we are, public debate about important national issues like war is vital. Without it, it's not democracy. But then, I'm sure my definition of democracy differs greatly from that of the Vice President.

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EPA proposes easing refinery pollution rules

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

The Bush administration proposed easing environmental rules today to allow oil refineries and other industries to change how they calculate whether they need pollution control equipment.

The oil refinery industry says the eased regulation would open the way for production of more oil and other products. But environmental groups say the proposed rules are gimmicks and loopholes allowing industry to emit more pollution, evade pollution controls and save money.

"This is a big gift to the refinery industry," said Frank O'Donnell, president of Clean Air Watch, an environmental watchdog group. "They are saying let's close our eyes and pretend pollution is not happening."

Click here for the rest.

This is actually from last week; I almost missed it, but I'm glad I didn't because this soooo obviously more of the same old dangerous cow shit coming out of Bush's ass. The three industries affected, oil, pharmaceuticals, and chemicals, are already doing quite well. The oil industry in particular, which continues to post record profits quarter after quarter, clearly needs no help--the real problem with gas prices isn't environmental rules; rather, it's that the industry has purposely reduced refining capacity over the years in order to create artificial shortages which raise prices. Meanwhile, over the last five years or so, Bush, with budget cuts and non-enforcement edicts, has degraded the EPA's ability to monitor emissions, which must now rely on industry self-reporting, which means that pollution is actually much worse than is reported. We need more stringency when dealing with pollution, not less. Like the environmentalist guy above says, this is nothing but another giveaway to GOP friends, but in this case, however, it's not simply the old reverse Robin Hood opertation that rips off average Americans like you and me: this time it's fucking dangerous, toxifying the air we breathe, causing cancers and weird asthmas, and accelerating even more our mad dash toward global warming induced apocalypse.

I know I'm not the only one out there who's sick of this shit.

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THE "WAR" ON TERROR

From AlterNet, another essay from Berkeley linguist George Lakoff:

How Bush's War on Terror Became Real

The war metaphor is still intimidating progressives. To come out against "staying the course" is to be called unpatriotic, weak, and defeatist. To say, "no, we're just as strong, but we're smarter" is to keep and reinforce the war metaphor, which the conservatives have a patent on.

It is time for progressives to jettison the war metaphor itself. It is time to tell some truths that progressives have been holding back on. What has worked in stopping terrorism is just what has worked in stopping international crime -- like the recent police work in England. What has failed is the war approach, which just recruits more terrorists. In Iraq, the war was over when we defeated Saddam's army. Then the occupation began. Our troops are dying because they are not trained be occupiers in hostile territory on the cusp of a civil war.

Bush is an occupation president, not a war president, and his war powers should be immediately rescinded. Rep. Lynn Woolsey's resolution to do just that (H.R. 5875) should be taken seriously and made the subject of national debate.

I am suggesting a conscious discussion of the war metaphor as a metaphor. The very discussion would require the nation to think of it as a metaphor, and allow the nation to take seriously the truth of our presence in Iraq as an occupation that must be ended. You don't win or lose an occupation; you just exit as gracefully as possible.

Click here for the rest.

Fighting a war against terrorism is like fighting a war against karate or fisticuffs. That is, terrorism is a tactic, a crime, not an opposing army or the nation state that sponsors it. We've never really been in a "war" against terrorism. I mean, okay, as Lakoff observes, the Iraq invasion was war, but that was against Iraq, not terrorism, despite what Bush has repeatedly asserted. The whole "war on terror" has been a con job from the get-go.

I would add to Lakoff's point about treating terrorism as a crime, the notion that we must also seek to dry up Islamic extremism's well of support: if we don't change the way we do business with the rest of the world, treating human beings as resources to be harshly exploited, we'll always have to deal with terrorism. That's the only way. Beyond that, however, Lakoff is, as usual, right on. Any discussion of the "war on terrorism" must have the concept of metaphor inserted. This'll definitely be helpful even at kitchen table conversations, but if somehow politicians and pundits start talking this way, it stands to abolish forever the spell the right wing has cast over America.

Lakoff makes it sound so easy.

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MORE ON THE UPCOMING GOP MUD SLING

Updating yesterday's post. From Talking Points Memo courtesy of Eschaton:

And who have they chosen to head up the effort?

According to the Post, that man is none other Terry Nelson.

And who is Terry Nelson?

Nelson has the unique distinction of being tied to two of the biggest cases of Republican campaign corruption in the Bush era. Nelson was implicated in the infamous New Hampshire phone-jamming scandal and he was an unindicted coconspirator in the political money-laundering case which ended Tom DeLay's career.

Click here for the rest.

So the GOP, having absolutely no positive record on which to run in the upcoming Congressional elections, has launched a negative "get the dirt on the Dems" campaign, which seeks to drown out common knowledge of near total loyalty to Bush by Republicans with a downpour rumor, innuendo, and lies. In other words, old-school Nixon style dirty tricks. I'm sure that Karl Rove, a master at this sort of thing, is providing spiritual guidance for the effort, but this guy Nelson, whose corporate-friendly bio says nothing about his fangs, sounds like nearly as big of a bastard. The fact that he was in on this phone-jamming thing says it all: the Republicans aren't just going to play dirty; they're going to cheat, just as they did in the 2000 Presidential election, just as they did in the '04 election.

I think I'm starting to figure out how to read right-wing code. "Taking the high road" means "mud-slinging," and "mud-slinging" means "election theft." These fuckers never tell the truth.

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THE BEST, QUICKEST ARTISTIC REACTION TO 9/11

From September 12, 2001:



Click here to see a bigger version.

Of course, Tom Tomorrow is a cartoonist, and cartoons are mostly funny, even when dealing with very serious subjects, as Tomorrow usually does. But not on 9/11. Like pretty much every other American, he was utterly devastated. Probably more so because he was living in New York at the time.

When I first saw the strip above, I marvelled at how perfect it was, how out of context it was for him, how with just a few words and a single oversaturated image he managed to capture and express my own feelings. Well, that's not entirely true. Words didn't completely fail me that day, although they mostly did: my first and pretty much only thought was something along the lines of "I fear the reaction of the American people far more than I fear any terrorist." And, of course, I was right to be afraid--a dark shadow of repression and hatred fell across our nation in the wake of 9/11, and many Americans wholeheartedly embraced it. Fortunately, most of my fellow countrymen eventually came to their senses.

But not everybody. My guess is that about 30% of the population continues to understand the "War on Terror" in terms of President Bush's comic book archetypes. They're the trigger-happy nuts who still support the Iraq occupation as a good thing, who support torture and ethnic profiling, who have no problem with a dramatic loss of civil liberties, who support Bush no matter what he does. In other words, the Republican base.

How the hell are we going to move forward as a nation when nearly a third of our citizens simply don't live in the same reality that the other two thirds do?

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GET READY FOR MUD AND SLIME

From the Washington Post courtesy of the Huffington Post:

In a Pivotal Year, GOP Plans to Get Personal

Republicans are planning to spend the vast majority of their sizable financial war chest over the final 60 days of the campaign attacking Democratic House and Senate candidates over personal issues and local controversies, GOP officials said.

The National Republican Congressional Committee, which this year dispatched a half-dozen operatives to comb through tax, court and other records looking for damaging information on Democratic candidates, plans to spend more than 90 percent of its $50 million-plus advertising budget on what officials described as negative ads.

The hope is that a vigorous effort to "define" opponents, in the parlance of GOP operatives, can help Republicans shift the midterm debate away from Iraq and limit losses this fall. The first round of attacks includes an ad that labeled a Democratic candidate in Wisconsin "Dr. Millionaire" and noted that he has sued 80 patients.

"Opposition research is power," said Rep. Thomas M. Reynolds (N.Y.), the NRCC chairman. "Opposition research is the key to defining untested opponents."

Click here for the rest.

This is definitely something to worry about. I mean, it's no surprise, but the fact that they've seemingly become so balls-to-the-walls committed to the idea is kind of scary because Republicans are so damned good at slime warfare. Memories of the 2004 campaign season are still fresh in my mind. Remember how the "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" successfully converted John Kerry in the public discourse from war hero, a status that he had for decades, to near traitor? Or how two years before that the right wing smeared and beat war hero and Georgia Senator Max Cleland by running ads that morphed his face into bin Laden's? Those guys were golden, with perfect records, straight as an arrow, bona fide American heroes. With uber-slimer Karl Rove overseeing the whole shebang, I think we might be in for a repeat of recent election history. That is, I don't think the GOP will manage to avoid losing some seats on the Hill, but I think they've got a shot at keeping control of both houses.

I think that probably the best thing targeted Democrats can do is dismiss all slime as dirty tricks and evidence of desperation, while at the same time pounding hard on Iraq, and relating their opponents as much as they can to Bush. It's do-able if they have perseverance. And that's what scares me most: Democrats these days are losers by nature; "persevere" just isn't in their dictionary.

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Nude photo scandal costs officials their jobs

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

The police chief, the mayor and a councilman in this small town resigned amid an uproar over nude photos of the chief's 300-pound, tattooed wife that she posted on a Web site.

Dozens of residents of the town of 1,500 had demanded Police Chief Tod Ozmun resign, and the district attorney recommended an obscenity investigation, but the City Council decided last week that the pictures were protected by the First Amendment.

On Friday, Ozmun, Mayor Dale Moore and Councilman Clifford Barnard said they were stepping down because they were fed up with the public attention and criticism of the chief. Another council member resigned earlier over the council's support of Ozmun.

And

"They have no morals as far as I'm concerned," said Shirley Anderson, who served as mayor in the 1990s and whose husband was mayor before that. "You should have respectable people in office. They need to go somewhere else where this is accepted."

Cristen Edgar, a 16-year-old high school student, said: "I don't think it's right for him to be the chief of police and for his wife to be doing what she's doing."

Click here for the rest.

You know, I'm tempted to simply dismiss this as the rantings of a bunch of stupid fucking Okies, but given that this kind of thing seems to be occurring more frequently these days, I wonder if I ought to be worrying about it. Of course, the bottom line here is that we live in the 21st century, the human body is beautiful, sex is natural and wonderful, you know, all that good modern stuff that essentially means these Puritans are big fucktards. But put all that into the context of the Conservative Movement, which puts their warped reading of the Bible over science and good sense, pushes a dangerous anti-condom agenda, impeached a President over his own personal business, and on and on, and it becomes increasingly clear that we may be in for trouble over the next few years.

I know what I'm going to do the next time somebody in my presence negatively criticizes sexuality or nudity: I'm going to call him a big dumb cunt-face.

Unless, you know, it's my parents. In that case, I'll just tell them I think they're wrong.

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FROM THE REAL ART SPORTS DESK
LONGHORNS LOSE, TIGERS WIN

From ESPN:

With poise and precision, Smith
leads No. 1 Buckeyes past No. 2 Texas

In the first regular season matchup of No. 1 vs. No 2 in a decade, Smith riddled the Longhorns for 269 yards passing and two touchdowns, leading the Buckeyes to a 24-7 win Saturday night.

And

As for No. 2 Texas (1-1), which saw its 21-game winning streak snapped, the Longhorns will need some help if they hope to defend their 2005 championship at the end of the season.

Colt McCoy was no Vince Young in the rematch of last season's 25-22 Texas win in Columbus. The Longhorns' new starting QB threw for 154 yards with an interception and a touchdown.

Click here for the rest.

You know, sports are much more enjoyable if you don't care who wins. I mean, okay, it's also more enjoyable when you care who wins and your team is the winner, but you get my general drift. I know I said recently that I was purposely going to have low expectations this year, what with Vince Young now playing for the former Oilers over in Tennessee, but I guess I wasn't very successful, especially because the 'Horns actually looked pretty good in the first half, kicking ass with the option and moving it all over the field. In the end, however, it was the absent Young who made all the difference. That is, McCoy's pretty good and stayed focused in the face of what is, admittedly, a really great OSU team, but we really needed a true superhero in the quarterback position, and the young guy simply doesn't have the X gene that makes Young and other mutant heroes and villains so powerful.

Maybe this loss will make the season easier to deal with; maybe it'll truly lower my expectations. As long as we beat OU and A&M, I'll be happy.

Meanwhile, just about six blocks down the street from where I now sit...

Again, from ESPN:

Behind suffocating defensive display, LSU crushes 'Zona

Jonathan Zenon returned an interception for a touchdown for the second consecutive week, highlighting a smothering defensive performance by No. 8 LSU in a 45-3 victory over Arizona on Saturday night.

"I knew the formation the Arizona receivers were going to run ... and I broke on it," Zenon said of his 41-yard interception return. "Our coaches are giving us a great scheme defensively and we already know what is about to happen."

Arizona had only 54 total yards through the first three quarters. The rest of the Wildcats' yardage came after replacements had begun to take over and a boisterous crowd of 92,218 was half gone.

"Obviously, playing a team like LSU they can expose some weaknesses," Arizona coach Mike Stoops said, dejectedly resting his chin on his hand. "There's no weaknesses when you play LSU. ... We just weren't ready for this."

Although the Tigers (2-0) put up 45 points for a second-straight week, they could have scored more. They settled for a field goal on their opening drive after having a first-and-goal on the 3. Three other drives ended with turnovers in Arizona territory on two fumbles and an interception.

Click here for the rest.

I didn't even get to watch this one--I did kind of hear it, though; the whole damned neighborhood hears it every Saturday the Tigers play at home. Sounded like rip roaring fun, actually. Nothing like sitting on a massive lead to get the testosterone pumping. But then, I was watching Texas lose, which made my testosterone levels drop dramatically. You know, this football blogging was easier last year. I like the Tigers, and they are my current school's team and all, but it doesn't really bother me that much when they lose, which they did two or three times last season: Texas didn't lose at all last year, and blogging about it was always a grand experience.

Aw, hell.

Geaux Tigers!

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FROM THE REAL ART SPORTS DESK
AT THE HALF, OHIO STATE 14 TEXAS 7

I don't know why I do this to myself. This game's driving me nuts! I'll post again after the game. If I don't die of a heart attack first.

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HAPPY 40TH BIRTHDAY STAR TREK

From the Huffington Post:

Star Trek Haters, Take Your Snotty Attitudes And Stuff It

Yes, Star Trek is a vital part of our culture. But it is that standing that frustrates more than a few science-fiction fans as well as large contingents of general fiction adherents.

Many of them are quick to embrace Heinlein, Bradbury and even the fantasies of Tolkien as literature- while consigning the original "Star Trek" and even its several successor series as little more than cartoonish escapades.

While I cannot say the authors I've cited have a lack of merit, I find much of their work intolerably quirky or overly ponderous. Sometimes both.

Yes, the original "Star Trek" had its hokey moments, but its memorable high drama as well. Some involved the complexities of moralistic dilemmas. Successor series, such as "Star Trek: The Next Generation" and "Deep Space Nine," were graced with plots that richly explored human tableus and taboos- the preservation of dying races and creatures, the inner struggle many of us face between our good and potentially evil sides, the balance between emotion and logic, the question of whether or not it is ever justifiable to expend some lives to save many more, the appropriateness of whether or not to interfere in another culture's civil war.

Hear today's headlines in the examples I've just cited?

Click here for the rest.

Anybody who knows me, or reads my blog, knows what a big Star Trek fan I am. Always have been. It's actually one of my earliest television watching experiences. Consequently, it's always been a big influence on me, even today, in numerous areas like science, philosophy, morality, ethics, the greatness and evil of humanity, the notion of exploration and research, comedy, tragedy, music, dramatic action, and, yes, even acting. Shatner's Kirk often tended toward melodrama, but he was usually effective, and he definitely had his moments, like in the episode City on the Edge of Forever. Kirk is the epic hero in my own aesthetic. And Leonard Nimoy has never been matched by any other actor trying to do a Vulcan: Spock's internal struggle between extreme logic and extreme passion, such as in the episode The Naked Time, is, in my humble but well educated opinion, one of the great performances of the 20th century. I also appreciate the camp value--me and my buddy Shane once giggled ourselves silly through a viewing of the episode Where No Man Has Gone Before: "... and if successful, ma-roon-him-there." But just because I get the joke doesn't mean I don't take Star Trek seriously. Like I said, it has profoundly influenced me, maybe more than any other single cultural artifact.

So, anyway, happy birthday Star Trek. We've had a good life together, and I have no doubt that we'll be together for many years to come.

Here's an amusing interview with Nimoy and Shatner courtesy of my buddy Matt.

Here's the Wikipedia article on the original series.

Here are the opening credits in German.

A couple of cool pics:





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FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING

Phil



Frankie



Sammy



Paz



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

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ABC alters 9/11 show under pressure

From the LA Times courtesy of the Huffington Post:

After much discussion, ABC executives and the producers toned down, but did not eliminate entirely, a scene that involved Clinton's national security advisor, Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger, declining to give the order to kill Bin Laden, according to a person involved with the film who declined to be identified because of the sensitivities involved.

"That sequence has been the focus of attention," the source said, adding: "These are very slight alterations."

In addition, the network decided that the credits would say the film is based "in part" on the 9/11 commission report, rather than simply "based on" the bestselling report, as the producers originally intended.

ABC, meanwhile, is tip-toeing away from the film's version of events. In a statement, the network said the miniseries "is a dramatization, not a documentary, drawn from a variety of sources, including the 9/11 commission report, other published materials and from personal interviews."

The statement adds: "The events that lead to 9/11 originally sparked great debate, so it's not surprising that a movie surrounding those events has revived the debate. The attacks were a pivotal moment in our history that should never be forgotten and it's fitting that the discussion continues."

Click here for the rest.

Well, I bet these changes don't amount to too terribly much--after all, ABC has apparently been heavily marketing this thing to conservatives, and I'm sure they don't want to lose too much of their audience. However, this last minute editing is a good sign. They had already sent out review copies to numerous media outlets, and such a thing isn't usually done when there's still more work to do on a project. That is, the public pressure has made them back down to some extent. In other words, this incident shows once and for all that big media companies are just as vulnerable to extreme liberal flak as they are to the usual conservative version. Only now, however, are liberals willing to use their dormant strength.

Actually, this vulnerability to flak has been known for some years. Here's a bit I wrote a while back about Chomsky and Hermann's book Manufacturing Consent:

FLAK AND THE ENFORCERS refers to organized negative responses to news products. The way this works is such that any reporting that is perceived as unflattering to the views or aims of these "flak machines" is attacked so endlessly that the news business loses money. A worst-case scenario, in these terms, is a boycott of news advertisers--advertising is the entire reason for the news business's existence. Of course, both liberal and conservative groups create flak (but I would say that the most powerful "flak machines" are conservative; they've got the money), but the point is that the news business is highly vulnerable to this kind of pressure and they certainly never admit it to their consumers.

Click here for more.

You can just scratch out the word "news" and pencil in the word "TV network" and it works just the same--at this point news and entertainment are all the same, anyway. The lesson here is that the left now has tangible evidence that they have the ability to successfully pressure the corporate media into fairer coverage. If I had a few million bucks, I'm pretty sure of where I would direct my activist dollars...

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Bush Fears War Crimes Prosecution, Impeachment

From ZNet:

With great fanfare, George W. Bush announced to a group of carefully selected 9/11 families yesterday that he had finally decided to send Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and 13 other alleged terrorists to Guantánamo Bay, where they will be tried in military commissions. After nearly 5 years of interrogating these men, why did Bush choose this moment to bring them to "justice"?

And

The President is undoubtedly familiar with the doctrine of command responsibility, where commanders, all the way up the chain of command to the commander in chief, can be held liable for war crimes their inferiors commit if the commander knew or should have known they might be committed and did nothing to stop or prevent them.

Bush defensively denied that the United States engages in torture and foreswore authorizing it. But it has been well-documented that policies set at the highest levels of our government have resulted in the torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of U.S. prisoners in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo.

Click here for the rest.

Oh yeah. The President is definitely a war criminal, and that notion ought to be uncontroversial to pretty much anybody who's actually read even a smattering about what a war crime is.

For instance, there's this bit from the Wikipedia article on war crimes:

Under the Nuremberg Principles, the supreme international crime is that of commencing a war of aggression, because it is the crime from which all war crimes follow. The definition of such a crime is planning, preparing, initiating, or waging a war of aggression, or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements, or assurances. Also, participating in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any such act constitutes such a crime.

Click here for more.

I suppose it all depends on whether you think the Bush administration simply made the grandest fuck-up of all time in their belief that Saddam Hussein had WMDs, or if the whole WMD thing was a big lie. Personally, I think it was a lie, and there appears to be, at this point, a mountain of evidence that strongly suggests that's the case. But even if you set that aside, it is undeniable that Bush invaded Iraq without the approval of the UN Security Council, which is definitely a violation of treaty obligations--come to think of it, Clinton did the same thing with Yugoslavia, Bush I with Panama, Reagan with Grenada, and JFK, LBJ, and Nixon with Vietnam. Really, when you get down to it, war crimes are a very annoying habit of US Presidents.

But really, I don't think that's the biggest problem, the fact that he's actually guilty, with holding Bush accountable for his horrible crimes: in America, war crimes are something other people do, something Germans or Russians or Rwandans do. But not us. We're the good guys. I fear that most Americans simply cannot accept that their President is up there with Hitler and Stalin in terms of guilt--remember how many Republicans were freaking out a few months back about Democrats' use of the word "Nazi" to describe the administration's behavior? How easily they were shot down by squirrelly "arguments" about specifics?

Sad, but true. However, if this country is ever going to have any sense of moral credibility, Bush not only has to be thrown out of office, but also put behind bars. For life. Anything less is making ourselves accessories to his crimes.

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The Undeclared War on America's Middle Class

An excerpt from Thom Hartmann's new book Screwed: The Undeclared War Against the Middle Class via AlterNet:

You can't be middle class if you earn the minimum wage in America today.

The American dream and the American reality have collided. In America we have always said that if you work hard and play by the rules, you can take care of yourself and your family. But the minimum wage is just $5.15 per hour. With a 40-hour workweek, that comes to a gross income of $9,888 per year. Nobody can support a family, own a home, buy health insurance, or retire decently on $9,888 per year!

What's more, 30 million Americans -- one in four U.S. workers -- make less than $9 per hour, or just $17,280 a year. That's not a living wage either.

The U.S. Census Bureau's statistics for 2004 show the official poverty rate at 12.7 percent of the population, which put the number of people officially living in poverty in the United States at 37 million. For a family of four, the poverty threshold was listed as $19,307. If the head of that family of four were a single mother working full-time for the government-mandated minimum wage, she couldn't even rise above the government's own definition of poverty.

Becoming middle class in America today is like scaling a cliff. Most middle-class Americans are clinging to the edge with their fingernails, trying not to fall. In the 1950s middle-class families could live comfortably if just one parent worked. Today more than 60 percent of mothers with children under six are in the work force. Not only do both parents work but often at least one of those parents works two or more jobs.

Click here for the rest.

You know, I hit on this subject just last Saturday, and this essay made me realize that I missed one more enormous sign that the middle class has effectively ended: the forty hour work week is almost completely gone; the fact that wages are so low not only means that most families no longer can make ends meet on one paycheck, but also that both mom and dad must work ever increasing hours. Some families are pulling it off, but just barely, and they are exhausted and always crunched for time--one financial disaster, like a car crash or a hurricane, means total ruin.

It's nice to see that the issue is being picked up by so many writers lately, but then, it's pretty obvious when you think about it all: this country is simply awash in cash and capital, so why the hell are we having to work so hard and so much? Answer: all the profit gains are going to the wealthy elite, despite increasing worker productivity. Trickle-down simply doesn't work. An expanding economy is only good for those who control it.

It's going to take some massive government intervention to set things straight again in this country, just as it set things straight in the first place. The Hartmann excerpt has some very good suggestions; go check it out.

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Iran's leader wants liberal teachers out

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

Iran's hard-line president Tuesday urged students to push for a purge of liberal and secular university teachers, another sign of his determination to strengthen Islamic fundamentalism in the country.

With his call echoing the rhetoric of the nation's 1979 Islamic revolution, Ahmadinejad appears determined to remake Iran by reviving the fundamentalist goals pursued under the republic's late founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

And

Dozens of liberal university professors and teachers were sent into retirement this year after Ahmadinejad's administration, sparking strong protests from students, named the first cleric to head Tehran University. The country's oldest institution of higher education remains home to dozens more educators who outspokenly oppose policies restricting freedom of expression.

"Today, students should shout at the president and ask why liberal and secular university lecturers are present in the universities," the official Islamic Republic News Agency quoted Ahmadinejad as saying.

Click here for the rest.

This is no surprise at all for Iran, which we ought not to invade, but is clearly in the control of a repressive, backward-ass, theocratic, totalitarian regime. Makes me glad I live in the United States. But there's something bugging me about this story, something I just can't put my finger on about it...

...oh, yes, it reminds me of this:

More recently, he has turned his attention to rooting out liberal bias in the academy. Students for Academic Freedom, a group he founded, promotes the cause of ''intellectual diversity" in teaching, faculty appointments, and even research. Horowitz is also the author of an ''Academic Bill of Rights" asserting that students are entitled to an education free of ''political, ideological or religious orthodoxy" imposed upon them by professors. This right, he says, is routinely infringed by liberal academics who voice their politics in the classroom. Legislatures in 17 states are considering making the ''Academic Bill of Rights" law.

In Horowitz's recently published book, The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America, he profiles left-leaning scholars who ''appear to believe that an institution of higher learning is an extension of the political arena." His targets range from the obvious, such as MIT linguist and public intellectual Noam Chomsky, to more obscure figures like Oneida Meranto, an associate professor of political science at Metropolitan State College in Denver. Horowitz insists that the professors profiled in the book are ''representative" of the American university as a whole, that liberal bias is ''increasingly widespread throughout the academic profession," and that it's time conservatives did something about it.

Click here for more, including David Horowitz's dumbass response.

Yeah, that's right, Iran's evil theocratic leaders are just like the American right wing in their hatred of liberal professors. Horowitz and others of his ilk, like gambling man and "virtues" expert former Secretary of Education William Bennett, and the wife of our evil VP, former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities and professional bitch Lynn Cheney, have made it their special project to intimidate and harass left-leaning professors in a post 9/11 wave of neo-McCarthyism.

So what does it mean that our right wing is very much like their right wing? Well, I just report. You decide. Anything less wouldn't be fair or balanced.

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WORST GREEN HOUSE GAS LEVELS IN 800,000 YEARS

From the London Independent courtesy of AlterNet:

The rapid rise in greenhouse gases over the past century is unprecedented in at least 800,000 years, according to a study of the oldest Antarctic ice core which highlights the reality of climate change.

Air bubbles trapped in ice for hundreds of thousands of years have revealed that humans are changing the composition of the atmosphere in a manner that has no known natural parallel.

Click here for the rest.

So, the way I manage to keep from falling into a deep depression over global warming is by intellectualizing it all. With that in mind, it will be very interesting to see if the human race is actually able to get its act together in time to do anything about it. I saw a NASA climatologist on Sixty Minutes a while back asserting that we have about ten years before it's too late. What makes it interesting to me is that in order to do what needs to be done we're going to have to totally alter the way pretty much everything in our society, the world really, works. That is, we can't have the highly consumptive, fossil-fuel based, ever expanding economy that is utterly ingrained in the minds and attitudes of the wealthy elite; with such a change must necessarily come a radical alteration of infrastructure, as well as the way that individuals live their moment-to-moment lives. Everybody's going to lose something in some way or another. But the rich, who are the true rulers of the planet, stand to lose the most, which is why they are the most resistant.

If I were betting, there's no fucking way I'd ever put my money on pulling it off, but if we do successfully reverse this awful downward spiral, it will be one of the most amazing accomplishments in the history of humanity. See? It's interesting.

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Humans 'hardwired for religion'

From the London Guardian courtesy of AlterNet:

The battle by scientists against "irrational" beliefs such as creationism is ultimately futile, a leading experimental psychologist said today.

The work of Bruce Hood, a professor at Bristol University, suggests that magical and supernatural beliefs are hardwired into our brains from birth, and that religions are therefore tapping into a powerful psychological force.

"I think it is pointless to think that we can get people to abandon their belief systems because they are operating at such a fundamental level," said Prof Hood. "No amount of rational evidence is going to be taken on board to get people to abandon those ideas."

But get a load of how he figured it out:

Another experiment involves asking subjects to cut up a photograph. When his team then measures their galvanic skin response - ie sweat production, which is what lie-detector tests monitors - there is a jump in the reading. This does not occur when a person destroys an object of less sentimental significance.

Click here for the rest.

Sometimes psychology, with its assumptions and wild logic, drives me as batty as economics. I think it's probably fair to take at face value the notion that human beings tend toward the irrational. After all, we are primates, animals, with a thinking organ in our heads called a brain, rather than a computer. So this psychologist manages to establish our innate irrationality through scientific experimentation, but then concludes something that his experiments didn't tell him, that we are "hard-wired" for religion. No, we're hard-wired for irrationality; we're also hard-wired for the opposite, rationality. That's how humans discovered, you know, fire and the wheel, while at the same time believing that the gods actually did it.

And this guy's also completely wrong when he asserts that we're wasting our time trying to have a more rational society. Martin Luther's protest against the Church in the sixteenth century sparked a direct line of thought and cultural change that led to the Enlightenment. The secular society we enjoy today stands in stark contrast to Professor Hood's belief that it is impossible to battle irrationality. What a cynic!

Look, it may appear these days that we're headed toward some kind of fundamentalist hell, but it is not our destiny. And it's irresponsible to say it is.

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The Great Housing Crash of '07

From CounterPunch courtesy of J. Orlin Grabbe:

The housing bubble is a $10 trillion equity balloon that will explode sometime in 2007 when more than $1 trillion in no-interest, no down payment, adjustable-rate mortgages (ARMs) reset; setting the stage for massive home devaluation, foreclosures and unemployment. ("By some estimates housing activity has accounted for 40% of all the jobs created since 2001". Times Online) July's plunging sales are just the first sign of a major slowdown. The worst is yet to come.

And

There is no real growth in the American economy. Figure it out. Last year Americans saved less than 0% of their net earnings while they borrowed a whopping $600 billion from their home equity to piss-away on a consumer spending-spree. Once home prices begin to retreat, that $600 billion will evaporate, real GDP will shrivel, and the economy will begin flat-lining. (Consumer spending is 70% of GDP)

Click here for the rest.

I keep saying that we're living in a house-of-cards economy, and this housing bubble is one of the many reasons why. Because wages have been stagnating for decades now, the economic elite have been forced to be clever in order to keep the economy moving. One of those strategies has been to make access to credit cards much more open and easy. In the wake of 9/11, something similar was done with the mortgage market.

Imagine your slacker kid brother taking an extended break from college and working at, say, Starbucks in order to support himself. Obviously, this guy is not a good credit risk, but, for some reason, the credit card companies pound him with dazzling offers. Pretty soon he's accumulated $50k in debt, screwed for the next couple of decades or so. Well, that's not a new concept; it's been happening to twenty-somethings for years and years now. But change the example to a yuppie couple that's doing well money-wise, but can't quite afford to break into the tight housing market in order to fulfill their Ward and June fantasy: suddenly adjustable rate mortgages, no interest loans, and all that stupid dangerous crap is dangled in their faces; pretty soon they're up to their ears in debt, but they naively believe it's good debt, the kind that ultimately equals an investment. They're dead wrong. The market's inevitably going to tank, and they'll be left with expensive loans on a low-value house. Poof: all that good debt becomes bad debt.

And nobody's going to be building any new houses, so the construction market tanks, and all those jobs are gone, and all their dependent industries also tank, and...you get the idea. I may be wrong, and hopefully my buddy Matt will come along any moment now to point out something I've missed, but I am afraid here. The US has a negative savings rate, which is what has essentially kept the domestic economy in the black for years, but it just can't last. We really are spending our children's inheritance.

But I have a feeling that's going to bite our asses well before it bites our childrens'.

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THE YES MEN

From Wikipedia:

The Yes Men are a group of culture jamming activists who practice what they call "identity correction". They pretend to be powerful people and spokespersons for prominent organizations, accepting invitations received on their websites to appear at symposiums and TV shows. They use their newfound authority to express the idea that corporations and governmental organizations often act in dehumanizing ways toward the public. Elaborate props are sometimes part of the ruse.

Their method is often satire: posing as corporate or government spokespeople, they might make shocking denigrating comments about workers and consumers, only to discover that instead of shock or anger, their prank is received enthusiastically, with no one realizing the reactionary rhetoric was only a joke. Sometimes, the Yes Men's phony spokesperson makes annoucements that represent dream scenarios for the anti-globalization movement or opponents of corporate crime. The result is false news reports of the demise of the WTO, or Dow paying for a Union Carbide cleanup.

The Yes Men have posed as spokespeople for The World Trade Organization, McDonald's, Dow Chemical, and the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development. The two leading members of The Yes Men are known by a number of aliases, most recently, and in film, Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno.

Their experiences were documented in the film The Yes Men, distributed by United Artists, as well as the book The Yes Men: The True Story of the End of the World Trade Organization.

Click here for the rest.

I mentioned the Yes Men yesterday as being potential harbingers of a new wave of relevant theater. In a weird fit of synchronicity, I today bumped into a full documentary about their work. I think I may very well be right about them and theater. The documentary shows them pulling off some amazing stunts by convincing several different groups, including CNBC, that they are representatives of the World Trade Organization. And once they've done the convincing, their real work begins: bogus announcements for bogus events and bogus initiatives, such as a plan to recycle human feces into edible food for the third world, that make utterly clear how contemptible and inhuman the WTO really is. That is, everytime the Yes Men make the news, corporations and the WTO, pretty much anybody they've targeted, have to issue a denial, which forces the corporate media to actually address issues they usually ignore.

It's brilliant stuff. Go watch the video.

Here's a link to their site.

Here and here are links to Democracy Now coverage of Yes Men performances not covered in the documentary.

One of their members, their video animator, lives here in Baton Rouge. Maybe I can hook up with them somehow. It strikes me that they could use a well trained actor...


A Yes Man posing as a WTO rep shows off to textile industry wonks a fake management suit, complete with a phallus that allows a manager to moniter his workers on a small video screen

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THIS MONTH'S STAR TREK CALENDAR PICTURE IS...



The Big Three: McCoy, Spock, and Kirk!

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ECONOMIC LAWS ARE BULLSHIT
GDP Grows But Most Lose Ground

From the New York Times courtesy of the Progressive American, Princeton economist Paul Krugman on how a "good economy" is meaningless to most Americans:

The Great Disconnect

The stagnation of real wages — wages adjusted for inflation — actually goes back more than 30 years. The real wage of nonsupervisory workers reached a peak in the early 1970's, at the end of the postwar boom. Since then workers have sometimes gained ground, sometimes lost it, but they have never earned as much per hour as they did in 1973.

Meanwhile, the decline of employer benefits began in the Reagan years, although there was a temporary improvement during the Clinton-era boom. The most crucial benefit, employment-based health insurance, has been in rapid decline since 2000.

And

Why have workers done so badly in a rich nation that keeps getting richer? That's a matter of dispute, although I believe there's a large political component: what we see today is the result of a quarter-century of policies that have systematically reduced workers' bargaining power.

Click here for the rest.

Somewhere along the line, in the late 80s or early 90s, when I wasn't as liberal as I am now, but had already left conservatism behind, it occurred to me that all the talk I was hearing then about traditional stay-at-home mothers versus working mothers was kind of a pointless debate. The conversation was in terms of how feminism was or wasn't hurting America, but for some reason it suddenly became obvious to me that so many women entered the work force starting in the 70s not because of a newfound freedom to do so, but because of necessity. It just so happens that the womens' rights movement happened at the same time that wages started falling. The long and the short of all this is that, in my lifetime, the middle class has effectively ended.

When I was a kid, a family could easily get by with only one breadwinner. Furthermore, this successful breadwinner status was easily accomplished by guys working in factories, driving cabs, clerking in grocery stores, and in many other blue collar jobs. Not today. Now most families absolutely have to have two adults working full time in order to make ends meet, and often these families are one financial disaster, such as an injury that requires surgery, away from ruin. If we have a middle class in the US today, it is cultural only. The economic middle class of my childhood is simply a thing of the past.

Krugman nails it when he suggests that the cause is the erosion of collective bargaining rights. That is, the middle class was essentially created after WWII by conscious policy decisions that established full legitimacy for labor unions, which affected all workers' situations, even those who weren't in unions. Since the Reagan era, and even earlier, even during the administration of liberal icon Jimmy Carter, the Federal government has made it absolutely clear that they would not only be repealing many of those labor-friendly laws passed decades before, but they would also refuse to enforce the laws remaining on the books. In other words, the government created the middle class, and the government destroyed the middle class.

In short, it doesn't have to be like this. Things can be much better.

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'Guerrilla artist' replaces heiress's
CDs in shops with doctored versions

From the London Independent:

Inside the accompanying booklet, a picture of the heiress emerging from a luxury car has been retouched to include a group of homeless people.

In another shot, Ms Hilton's head has been superimposed on a shop window mannequin beneath a banner reading: "Thou Shalt Not Worship False Icons."

Instead of Ms Hilton's own compositions, the replacement CD features 40 minutes of a basic rhythm track over which Banksy has dubbed Ms Hilton's catchphrase "That's hot!" and other extracts from her reality TV programme The Simple Life.

Click here for the rest.

Ironically, or perhaps appropriately, these little subversive works of art, I'm sure, are far more aesthetically pleasing than the album they lampoon. Actually, I'd go so far as to say that pretty much anything or anyone satirizing Paris Hilton is going to be better than the real deal, even when it's some stupid 15 year old jock doing the bashing. But then, when one is trying to be better than the famous and meaningless hotel fortune heiress one really only has to exceed what is, admittedly, an extraordinarily low standard. Not that hard to do.

Anyway, this CD prank is the work of Banksy, who apparently is becoming evermore sophisticated and political in his work. And inspiring to boot. Banksy's example, as well as the work of Ron English and his immitators, and various other culture jammers have all got me wondering what this means in terms of theater and performance. I mean, I've devoted my life as an artist to a medium, the theater, which is institutionally dead as far as I'm concerned. Dead and mostly irrelevant, but these other guys are out there making shit happen.

I think the Yes Men, another culture jamming group who struck again in New Orleans less than a week ago, are probably onto something in terms of making theater worth a damn.

I've gotta work this out. I just can't see myself being happy if I'm lucky enough to get cast in lots of commercials. Or even a Broadway play. Or a shitty blockbuster with Tom Cruise or Vin Diesel. There's got to be more to acting than all that.

UPDATE

From the BBC courtesy of the Huffington Post, a punchline of sorts:

No customers had complained or returned a doctored version, he said.

Click here for the rest.

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ARMITAGE CHANGES NOTHING AND EVERYTHING
Karl Rove and Lewis Libby are definitely traitors

The Nation's Washington editor David Corn, the first to realize that right-wing essayist Robert Novak's outing of undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame might constitute a Federal crime, fills us in on what it means that the leak originated with former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, a man who, ostensibly, wasn't trying to do anything but gossip:

Shortly after Novak spoke with Armitage, he told Rove that he had heard that Valerie Wilson had been behind her husband's trip to Niger, and Rove said that he knew that, too. So a leak from Armitage (a war skeptic not bent on revenge against Wilson) was confirmed by Rove (a Bush defender trying to take down Wilson). And days later--before the Novak column came out--Rove told Time magazine's Matt Cooper that Wilson's wife was a CIA employee and involved in his trip.

And

But because of Libby's request, a memo did circulate among State Department officials, including Armitage, that briefly mentioned Wilson's wife.

Armitage's role aside, the public record is without question: senior White House aides wanted to use Valerie Wilson's CIA employment against her husband. Rove leaked the information to Cooper, and Libby confirmed Rove's leak to Cooper. Libby also disclosed information on Wilson's wife to New York Times reporter Judith Miller.

Click here for the rest.

So, just to spell this out, Valerie Plame's undercover status didn't officially change once Armitage told Novak about it. That is, leaking her name was still highly illegal. And that's exactly what Karl Rove and Lewis Libby did: they blew her cover to journalists who hadn't been in contact with Novak about the issue, and they did it before Novak's essay was published. In other words, at the point that Rove and Libby squealed, Plame's undercover status was, in reality, still a secret--only Novak, and not his readers, knew. Consequently, Rove and Libby are guilty of revealing state secrets. They're traitors.

What's worse is that they're not traitors for any nation or ideology: what they did was clearly a hatchet job; they did it for short term political gain, a ham-handed attempt to discredit and punish Plame's husband, Bush critic Joseph Wilson. Furthermore, the fact that Libby sent around the entire administration a memo revealing Plame's identity strongly suggests that they weren't simply hardcore opportunists; rather, it is almost as if they were fishing for a leak, dangling some bait and hoping that some administration half-wit would bite, which is exactly what ended up happening.

The bottom line here is that this Armitage revelation confirms everything the left has been saying for months about the case. The fact that the former Deputy Secretary of State was apparently an unwitting pawn in Rove and Libby's high stakes Machiavellian games in no way changes their guilt. In fact, it makes it all the more obvious.

Hang these motherfuckers out to dry.

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FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING

Paz



Frankie and Sammy



Phil



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

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FAREWELL GLENN FORD

From KCAL TV:

Actor Glenn Ford, who played strong, thoughtful protagonists in films such as "The Blackboard Jungle," "Gilda" and "The Big Heat," has died. He was 90.

A statement from Beverly Hills police says paramedics called to Ford's home just before 4 pm found the actor deceased.

Ford, born Gwyllyn Samuel Newton Ford, suffered a series of strokes in the 1990s.

This generation probably knew Ford best as Clark Kent's adopted father in 1978's "Superman".

Click here for the rest.

While I've enjoyed his work in other films, particularly in The Blackboard Jungle, Glen Ford, to me, was, and will always be, Jonathan "Pa" Kent. Better than Ward Cleaver or Mike Brady, Pa Kent is the perfect father, intelligent, willful but not domineering, compassionate, strong, and with good salt-of-the-earth values. I mean, he was Superman's dad, for god's sake. Glen Ford totally nailed it when he played the role. Really, I think it was his best work, too, very honest and natural, which is especially noteworthy because he comes out the old school film style of acting--think Ronald Reagan's acting work and you get the idea.

At any rate, Ford's work in Superman was extraordinarily influential to me as a boy when I was figuring out what it meant to be an American man.

Farewell, Glenn Ford.



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Texas must improve its shameful poverty statistics

From the Houston Chronicle editorial board:

According to the new data, one in six Texans lived in poverty last year. And Texas was home to three of the nation's 10 poorest counties, including the top two — Cameron County, with 42 percent below the poverty level, and Hidalgo County, with 41 percent. With 29 percent of its population poor, El Paso County was listed as the country's fourth least-prosperous.

A full quarter of all Texas children are poor, the Bureau's American Community Survey found. Almost 20 percent of Texans are economically deprived, which the government defined for a family of four as earning $19,971 or less. Only 13 percent of Americans overall were found to be poor.

The news was no more heartening in Houston. A full 29 percent of black families here were impoverished, a jump from 25 percent in 2000. Among Hispanics, the number living in poverty climbed to 30 percent from 26 percent. Fewer white Houstonians, 9 percent, were found to be poor.

Click here for the rest.

Even though their hearts are obviously in the right place, the Chronicle's editors end their essay with a plea to Texas political leaders to not engage in blame games and to figure out why so many Texans are rotting in poverty. Fools. This is exactly how the Texas political establishment likes it. This is how it's been since the founding of the Republic of Texas. In my home state, it doesn't really matter which party is in charge. Everyone's conservative. Everyone always places business interests above the interests of average citizens. Hell, Texas was founded by business interests for business interests. This is deeply ingrained in both the political and civic cultures.

Here in Louisiana, people joke about how corrupt the politicians are: my response is always something to the effect of it being the same back home, but because businessmen have more money and influence, the laws are written such that what's corrupt in Louisiana is legal in Texas, thus, no corruption. The Lone Star State has made rule-by-business an art form.

And there's no profit in helping out the poor.

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