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

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

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

From their site:

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

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


My favorite tenor sax player, Dexter Gordon

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Paz



Phil



Frankie



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Novak Freaks on the Set!

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

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

And

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

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

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

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

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

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

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

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

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

Click here for the rest.

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

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

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

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

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

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

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

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

Click here for the rest.

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

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Widespread Ignorance

From AlterNet:

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

Click here for the rest.

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

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Is My Child Becoming Homosexual?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Click here for the rest.

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

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GREAT CONVERSATION ON NEWS MEDIA

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

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

BRANCACCIO: You're telling me?

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

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

Click here for the rest.

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

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

From Newsweek via MSMBC courtesy of the Daily Kos:

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

Click here for the rest.

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

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

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AMERICANS LOVE AUTHORITY

From bmj.com courtesy of J. Orlin Grabbe:

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

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

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

Click here for the rest.

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

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

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

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"ADDICTED TO RUSH"

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

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



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Theories of humour

From the Economist courtesy of J. Orlin Grabbe:

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

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

Click here for the rest.

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

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Widespread environmental damage seen from shuttle

From Reuters courtesy of J. Orlin Grabbe:

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

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

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

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

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

Click here for the rest.

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



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

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

Another essay from linguistics professor George Lakoff via AlterNet:

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

And

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

Click here for the rest.

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

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

From CounterPunch courtesy of J. Orlin Grabbe:

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

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

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

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

Click here for the rest.

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


Hiroshima, 1945

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FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING

Phil



Paz



Frankie



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Documents Tell of Brutal Improvisation by GIs

From the Washington Post courtesy of the Daily Kos:

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

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

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

And

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

Click here for the rest.

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

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Moral Victory or Another Lost Opportunity?

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

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

Click here for the rest.

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

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MEANWHILE...
Explosion kills 14 Marines in Iraq

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

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

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

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

Click here for the rest.

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

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Big Brother Nixes Happy Hour

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

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

Click here for the rest.

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

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

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