Bringing Good Things to Life

...When he died in an airplane crash in 1968, Mohammed bin Laden left behind a business empire and more than 50 sons and daughters, the products of a number of marriages. One of 20 sons was Osama bin Laden.

The successors: Control of the family business passed first to Salem bin Laden, his eldest son, and when he died in 1988, to Bakr bin Laden.

The board: Bakr bin Laden and 11 relatives now make up the board of the business, which is called the Saudi Binladin Group. Its headquarters are in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

Its reach: Now an international conglomerate, the family business has 50,000 employees worldwide and annual revenues estimated at $5-billion. Its enterprises include construction, engineering, telecommunications, book publishing and manufacturing that ranges from motor vehicle parts to crystal chandeliers. Its business partners include General Electric, Nortel, Snapple beverages, Motorola and CitiBank.

Ahh, General Electric

Military contracts 2003: $2.8 billion
Campaign contributions in 2004: $221,200 (defense related)
$1.9 million (total)

The world’s largest company by market share, General Electric’s revenues in 2003 totaled $134.2 billion. GE was run until 2001 by “Neutron” Jack Welch, who made it a matter of principle to lay off 10% of his workers per year.

General Electric makes household appliances, plastics, water treatment systems, lighting, medical equipment, and commercial financial services. It also makes aircraft engines and nuclear reactors, and keeps criticism at bay with its ownership of media giants NBC, CNBC, Telemundo, Bravo, and, in partnership with Microsoft, msnbc.com. GE’s recent partnership with Vivendi added Universal Studios, USA, Trio and Sci-fi cable channels to its $43 billion media empire.

General Electric is one of the world’s top three producers of jet engines, supplying Boeing, Lockheed Martin and other military aircraft makers for the powering of airplanes and helicopters.

The “war on terrorism” has seen GE’s military contracts rise substantially. But the company’s “defense” side has been doing well for a while. GE and other military contractors got a big boost under the Clinton administration from Presidential Directive 41 which stated that it was the job of US diplomats to promote arms sales abroad in order to safeguard American jobs; this directive tied the promotions of diplomats to how effectively they hocked US armaments.

GE has designed 91 nuclear power plants in 11 countries, yet its nuclear reactors around the world have a fatal flaw. In the event of a nuclear meltdown, there is a 90 percent chance that radiation from GE-designed reactors would be discharged directly into the atmosphere. While the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission is aware of the problem, it continues to license GE nuclear reactors.

Yes, the War on Terra's been good to GE- and their major shareholders and owners in the binLaden family- as well.

...For instance, it was reported in April 2003 that GE Energy Rentals Inc., a division of GE Power Systems, was supplying temporary electrical generators to the U.S. military in Iraq... The company refused to divulge the value of the contract.

In Afghanistan, GE was awarded a contract worth $5,927,870 from the U.S. Army Engineer District, Philadelphia, for "gas services." ...The fifth and most recent amendment to this contract ...reached a value of $6,801,493...

GE backed out nuclear reactor deals with North Korea- not because of any civic mindedness, but because it didn't care for the liability.

That doesn't stop them from trying to sell them to anyone else.

The GE take in the War on Terra is small potatoes, compared to Halliburton's take- but pretty good nonetheless for the family of the criminal we're all supposed to think is running from cave to cave in Afghanistan.

If you believe that.  ¶ 10:28 PM 0 comments links to this post

  "It all matters what you stand for," said the Senator from CitiBank

Molly Ivins says it well:

...Those of us in the beer-drinking, pick-up-truck-driving, country-music-listening school of liberals in the hinterlands particularly appreciate his keen dissection of how the Republicans use class resentment against "elitist liberals," while waging class warfare on people who work for a living.

The unholy combination of theocracy and plutocracy that now rules this country is, in fact, enabled by dumb liberals. Many a weary liberal on the Internet and elsewhere has been involved in the tedious study of the entrails from the last election, trying to figure out where Democrats went wrong. I don't have a dog in that fight, but I can guarantee you where they're going wrong for the next election: 73 Democratic House members and 18 Democratic senators voted for that hideous bankruptcy "reform" bill that absolutely screws regular people.

And it's not just consumers who were screwed by the lobbyist-written bill. The Wall Street Journal shows small businesses are also getting the shaft, as the finance industry charges them higher and higher transaction fees. If Democrats aren't going to stand up for regular people, to hell with them...

Robert Parry also has something to say about how we use- or don't use the media to communicate:

...the Right has relied heavily on media to gain political dominance, especially in the nation's heartland and increasingly with working-class Americans, even though their financial interests tend to suffer under conservative policies.

One of the seldom-acknowledged explanations for that political trend is the fact that the Right's media clout in Middle America is even more pronounced than in urban centers on the East and West coasts. For years, all these Middle Americans heard on their car radios was how evil liberals were and how Democrats weren't "real Americans."

Not surprisingly, this nearly unchallenged bombardment influenced how Americans thought and voted. To survive, Democratic politicians distanced themselves from liberal positions although that often was not enough to spare them from defeat.

Now, the media tide is showing signs of shifting. Progressives on talk radio are defending liberal values and criticizing conservative hypocrisy. Emboldened, Democratic politicians are starting to find their voice, too, and the Republicans have begun to stumble.

Progressives, who have long puzzled over how to get the Democrats to fight back, are discovering that relatively minor investments in media can bring major returns in convincing Democrats that there is a future in standing up to Republicans.

Ironically, however, the "progressive establishment" may ultimately save the conservatives' hide by balking at plans for more media expansion and by refusing to learn lessons from the Mystery of the Democrats' New Spine.

Our leadership, rolling over when it came time to count every vote and make a stand.

We thought it would get better when Howard Dean took over the DNC- but lately, one wonders...

Tom Hayden writes Dean an open letter- go read it all, but this says how many of us feel:

The party's alliance with the progressive left, so carefully repaired after the catastrophic split of 2000, is again beginning to unravel over Iraq. Thousands of anti-war activists and millions of antiwar voters gave their time, their loyalty and their dollars to the 2004 presidential campaign despite profound misgivings about our candidate's position on the Iraq War. Of the millions spent by "527" committees on voter awareness, none was spent on criticizing the Bush policies in Iraq.

The Democratic candidate, and other party leaders, even endorsed the US invasion of Falluja, giving President Bush a green-light to destroy that city with immunity from domestic criticism. As a result, a majority of Falluja's residents were displaced violently, guaranteeing a Sunni abstention from the subsequent Iraqi elections.

Then in January, a brave minority of Democrats, led by Senator Ted Kennedy and Congresswoman Lynn Woolsey, advocated a timetable for withdrawal. Their concerns were quickly deflated by the party leadership.

Next came the Iraqi elections, in which a majority of Iraqis supported a platform calling for a timetable for US withdrawal. ("US Intelligence Says Iraqis Will Press for Withdrawal." New York Times, Jan. 18, 2005) AJanuary 2005 poll showed that 82 percent of Sunnis and 69 percent of Shiites favored a "near-term US withdrawal" (New York Times, Feb. 21, 2005. The Democrats failed to capitalize on this peace sentiment, as if it were a threat rather than an opportunity.

Three weeks ago, tens of thousands of Shiites demonstrated in Baghdad calling again for US withdrawal, chanting "No America, No Saddam." (New York Times, April 10, 2005) The Democrats ignored this massive nonviolent protest.

There is evidence that the Bush Administration, along with its clients in Baghdad, is ignoring or suppressing forces within the Iraqi coalition calling for peace talks with the resistance. The Democrats are silent towards this meddling.

On April 12, Donald Rumsfeld declared "we don't really have an exit strategy. We have a victory strategy." (New York Times, April 13, 2005). There was no Democratic response.

The new Iraqi regime, lacking any inclusion of Sunnis or critics of our occupation, is being pressured to invite the US troops to stay. The new government has been floundering for three months, hopelessly unable to provide security or services to the Iraqi people. Its security forces are under constant siege by the resistance. The Democrats do nothing.

A unanimous Senate, including all Democrats, supports another $80-plus billion for this interminable conflict. This is a retreat even from the 2004 presidential campaign when candidate John Kerry at least voted against the supplemental funding to attract Democratic voters.

The Democratic Party's present collaboration with the Bush Iraq policies is not only immoral but threatens to tear apart the alliance built with antiwar Democrats, Greens, and independents in 2004. The vast majority of these voters returned to the Democratic Party after their disastrous decision to vote for Ralph Nader four years before. But the Democrats' pro-war policies threaten to deeply splinter the party once again.

We all supported and celebrated your election as Party chairman, hoping that winds of change would blow away what former president Bill Clinton once called "brain-dead thinking."

But it seems to me that your recent comments about Iraq require further reflection and reconsideration if we are to keep the loyalty of progressives and promote a meaningful alternative that resonates with mainstream American voters.

Let me tell you where I stand personally. I do not believe the Iraq War is worth another drop of blood, another dollar of taxpayer subsidy, another stain on our honor. Our occupation is the chief cause of the nationalist resistance in that country. We should end the war and foreign economic occupation. Period.

To those Democrats in search of a muscular, manly foreign policy, let me say that real men (and real patriots) do not sacrifice young lives for their own mistakes, throw good money after bad, or protect the political reputations of high officials at the expense of their nation's moral reputation.

So maybe the Big Money whispers to Dean in the night, as it whispered to Kerry. Maybe it would be expedient to go with the Soros faction of the Carlyle Group. It would certainly make the job simpler wouldn't it? Big money is so much easier to raise, and so much better at a personal level for the progressive leaders.

The only problem, Howard, is that if you become a DINOcrat like all the other Representatives of General Dynamics and Senators from CitiBank, if you accept the funds and wisdom of an international philanthropist from the Carlyle Group, you will find yourself in the same place progressive leaders like Al Gore and John Kerry have found themselves.  ¶ 9:50 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Industrial World Warfare

Noah Shachtman picks up on the tendency of private contractors to feel they are the ones responsible for formulating and implementing national security policy.

Conflict of interest, or an interesting conflict?

...America's second largest ally in Iraq isn't the UK. Not even close. Corporations like Halliburton provide almost as many trigger pullers and engineers as the US Army. They are the battalions of foot soldiers in Thomas Barnett's sys-admin force -- connecting Iraq to the US and the world.

This role converts CEOs into generals/colonels in the US globalization machine... They are now legitimate and highly prized targets.

Halliburton, America's second-largest ally in Iraq. Now that's an interesting concept not highlighted by the mainstream media at all:

Corporations like Halliburton provide almost as many trigger pullers and engineers as the US Army.

It turns out that Thomas Barnett is a very big star in the intelligentsia of the Department of Defense. Harvard graduate. Professor at the War College. Author of a nice shiny new book where he promotes this bit of cleverness (warning: it's a "commercial" or .com site, but you get scanned by and cookies from knowledge.navsup.naval.mil when you visit it):

The UN rules, in retrospect, look odd. To pretend that a Sudan, for instance, which is doing what it's doing within its borders should have its sovereignty treated with the same respect as a France or Japan is ludicrous.

So while in the popular imagination, the UN is the forum for addressing international crises, the reality is that the UN is largely impotent, except for its internal technical rule-making, which functions quite nicely, frankly. The UN has become primarily a bitch-session, where the developing countries can complain about their lot and the direction of the advanced world. I think that's fine in many ways; it's good that the Gap has a venue and forum to complain in the direction of the Core. In fact, increasingly what you see is one position held by what I call the "old Core" -- the U.S., the E.U., Japan -- another position held by the Gap, and what I call the "new Core" -- the Brazil, India, China and South Africa -- acting as a sort of go-between. This is an arrangement which serves us well in terms of trade and economic and technical arguments.

But in terms of security, in the realm of violent situations, it's not realistic to pretend that 1) all countries are equal -- 'cause they're not: we have huge military capabilities and almost nobody else really does -- or 2) that every state has good intentions or treats its own people well. There are terrible things happening in certain parts of the world, and I think it's unrealistic to pretend that the U.N. is going to be able to stop these things.

So what I argue for in the book, and what I'm arguing for even more extensively in the next book, is that we need to come up with a transparent and fairly agreed-upon "A to Z" ruleset, as I call it, for dealing with politically bankrupt states. Again, as you said, we have a system for dealing with economically bankrupt states. Why? That's a fairly non-controversial subject compared to genocide or states trading in weapons of mass destruction. It's pretty basic to say, it would be nice if you paid back your creditors. But how do you deal with states that are either run by bad guys or in melt-down?

The traditional model has been imminent threat. You threaten me and I'll deal with you. But in a world of international norms and a stronger sense of community, haphazard responses just don't measure up.

Steffen: "He was reachin' for his gun" sounds pretty shabby in comparison to our economic and diplomatic decision-making processes?

Barnett: Well, what you want is not some sort of frontier justice, but a police force: something that represents the law, that points out when some guy transgresses the law, and takes him down when we catch him.

A more erudite John Bolton, indeed. He advocates policing the wogs to ensure they have the benefits of globalization. Not democracy, mind you.

And who should do this?

We need to rethink the connections between security and developmental economics. We need to stop having an antagonistic relationship between military people and the development community, because the fact is, we're not succeeding at all in these failed states. Insecure places are desperately poor places. Desperate poverty breeds insecurity. We need a new approach, a more comprehensive and integrated approach that sees these problems as two sides of the same coin and thinks differently about how to solve them.

Steffen: What would that approach look like on the ground, do you think, compared to what we're able to do now?

Barnett: Well, it would be what I call the System Administrator Force. It would be a people-intensive, UN-peacekeeping-plus approach that could defend itself -- could do counter-insurgency, could fight and not be some ineffective, pussy UN force where you shoot at them and half of them run away. It would be a tough force. You shoot at these guys, or start committing atrocities in their presence, and they would stop you, and if necessary, kill you. It could not only keep the peace, but enforce it.

It would also have a highly-trained civilian component. You'd have international, inter-agency teams. It'd look like the Casbah bar scene in Star Wars -- you'd want to see loads of uniforms from all sorts of countries, and you'd want to see civilians from all sorts of NGOs and aid agencies: you'd want the whole package, acting in a Great Depression, FDR sort of mode, where the first order of business (after enforcing the peace) would be to get everybody busy. The government that would be there would be some sort of transitional organization, an international reconstruction fund, with the goal of getting things stabilized, an economy working and laws written.

The United States military is going to continue to be critical to the whole process, though, for a long time, Other countries won't show up for peacekeeping unless the Americans will be there, and be there in numbers. And the NGO crowd can't really show up unless there's a stabilizing military presence there. So if you don't have the Americans, you don't have big enough coalitions to make it work, and if you don't have those coalitions, you don't have the NGOs who can turn things around, except for the bravest, most foolhardy ones who will go into the most dangerous situations, people like Doctors Without Borders.

But it's not going to be the United States alone, policing the whole world. It can't be. The only way that you can shrink the Gap and deal with these failed states and the humanitarian crises you're seeing is to bring together the assets and the energies and ideas from the Core as a whole: not just what the Americans can dream up, not even just what the Europeans can dream up, but the best innovations from an India, a China.

The military component would be predominant at first, then, over time, ramp down. These would be trained, experienced peacekeepers, and at first they would be everywhere, because our experience with peacekeeping is, the more peacekeepers you have, the fewer of them die.

We need to design an overwhelming presence, like that we've had on the warfighting side, for the peacekeeping side. Our warfighting force can actually be a small, elite, small footprint, highly maneuverable, lethal, mostly raining death-and-terror-from-the-skies crowd--

That's right, not a "pussy" U.N. force, but a highly trained professional civilian cadre. Peacekeepers. Like DynCorp. Or Blackwater. Or CACI. You know, private contractors.

Like Iraq. Halliburton's doing a great job of showing the benefits of globalization to the Iraqi people. Just ask Bu$hCo...  ¶ 8:49 AM 1 comments links to this post

  Bu$hCo Wants Your Retirement Fund

The New York Pravda once again proves itself a marvelous tool for the Carlyle Group to disinform the public. Looks like others noticed this as well.

Front page:

President Bush called Thursday night for cutting Social Security benefits for future retirees to put the system on sound financial footing, and he proposed doing so in a way that would demand the most sacrifice from higher-income people while insulating low-income workers.

Unless, of course those higher-income people have a high enough income not to rely on Social Security.

The only low-income workers that are insulated by the Bu$hCo plan are unemployed.

His plan would cut benefits and not guarantee returns.

Why, there might be a problem in 20 years or so with the current system.

And maybe in fact we should boost benefits while continuing to guarantee income.

How to do that?

Raise the taxes in a progressive fashion.

There's no reason why someone like me shouldn't pay more taxes than someone earning just above or below the poverty level.

Eliminate expeditionary wars like what we're doing in Iraq.

That would solve the problem nicely.  ¶ 7:57 AM 0 comments links to this post

  When the Moralists Embrace Deception, Their Morals Become Deception

Dear Leader takes his Bamboozlepalooza tour on the air tonight to promote the Arthur Andersen plan for Social inSecurity.

Instead of developing alternative energy sources Dear Leader advocates an energy policy involving drilling in the Artic and the Gulf and the United States of Canada whether they want it or not and whether or not it will effect the price of oil.

Dear Leader, having obtained 95% of the Federal judiciary he's appointed, wants to round out the bar with judges from the American Taliban.

As Dear Leader makes his case for a candidate for the United Nations who has advocated American Empire and personally disrupted the vote tallies in Miami in 2000, we should pause to consider where we are at and how we got here.

Let me point you to the historic background of the Neo TheoCon philosophy, so well described today by Billmon.

... the Straussians – and by extension, the neocons – ... pushed the traditional liberal/conservative dichotomy of American politics back about 150 years, and moved it roughly 4,000 miles to the east, to the far side of the Rhine River. Their grand existential struggle isn’t with the likes of Teddy Kennedy or even Franklin D. Roosevelt, it’s with the liberalism of Voltaire, John Locke and John Stuart Mill – not to mention the author of the Declaration of the Independence.

Strauss, in other words, wasn’t a neo anything. He was a conservative in the original European sense – fond of hierarchy, tradition and religious orthodoxy; deeply suspicious of newfangled ideas like egalitarianism, rationalism and a political theory based on enlightened self interest and the social contract. Nor was he impressed by Mill’s utilitarian adding machine – constantly calculating the greatest good for the greatest number.

To the Straussians, rationality does not provide an adequate basis for a stable social order. To the contrary, the Age of Enlightenment has ushered in the crisis of modernity, in which nihilism – the moral vacuum left behind by the death of God – inevitably leads to decadence, decline and, ultimately, genocide.

That logical leap from Jefferson to Hitler might seem like the intellectual equivalent of Evel Knieval’s outlandish attempt to jump the Snake River canyon on a rocket-powered motorcycle. But...

What gives Straussian thought its special flavor – a bitter blend of hypocrisy and cynicism – is the fact that Strauss himself didn’t believe in the eternal “truths” he championed. He was a nihilist, in other words – but one who believed only the philosophical elite could be trusted to indulge in such a dangerous vice. In exchange for this privilege, the elite has a special obligation to uphold the “noble lies” the ignorant masses must live by if society is to survive...

All this would be just another academic exercise – so to speak – if some of the Straussians hadn’t turned his philosophical fixations into a political crusade to “save” America from the horrors of modernity...

A most informative post, for those unfamiliar with Leo Strauss, and the chain of Wrepublican "intellectualism" and cynicism that leads from Strauss to the American Enterprise Institute and the Project for a New American Century.

And over at Corrente, Riggsveda points towards the new issue of Harpers which looks to do a breakdown of the TheoCon movement as it attempts to strong arm its way into absolute autocratic control of all three branches of government.

She says a few things from a post of her own blog worth repeating.

The first thing we must do is to join with religious progressives across the country, many of whom are the so-called mainstream churches of our childhoods, to stand up against this attempted coup, protect our nation, and protect our nation's churches. It is foolish and self-destructive to take the tack, as so many bloggers and commenters have, that if it says "religion", it's the enemy. If the protective barrier between church and state dissolves, we will all suffer, religious and non-religious alike. People of faith everywhere have been watching open-mouthed as these fascist maniacs have grabbed the mantle from them and declared themselves the only true "christians", and the Christians I know, both friends and family, are appalled.

These fascist maniacs have been stoked by politicians trained by the Straussian school.

Back to Billmon:

One of the Straussians’ most important innovations has been to reconcile their brand of elite conservatism with Southern fried demagogic populism ala Huey Long and George Wallace. That’s a pretty radical concession for a movement with its mind (or at least its heart) planted firmly in the fifth century BC. But it's solved the traditional dilemma of old-style conservatives in America: How to win power in a society that has no landed gentry, no nobility, no established church – none of Europe’s archaic feudal institutions and loyalties.

The rationale – or rationalization – for the populist ploy is that the common folk are a hell of a lot less liberal (again, using the Enlightenment definition of the word) than what the Straussians like to call America’s “parchment regime” – that is, the ideas and principles enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. The masses want their opium, in other words, and with the right guidance, will happily sweep away the liberal elites who have been denying it to them.

This, in turn, will set the stage for a golden (or at least silver) age of religious orthodoxy, patriarchal values and a hierarchical corporate capitalism stripped of its original libertarian feistiness – all of it supervised by a moral nanny state freed from the confines of all that “parchment.”...

There are so many problems with this political vision (insane, potentially catastrophic problems) that it’s hard to know where to begin. I can start, I suppose, by attacking the notion that liberalism or secularism – or even nihilism, for that matter – is the royal road to totalitarianism.

Leaving aside the fact that most totalitarian movements are simply imitation religions that feed off the same irrational emotions as the established name brands, there’s the rather obvious empirical example of modern Europe – about as secular and cosmopolitan a society as ever has existed. Europe has its social problems just as America has hers, but it’s not obvious they’re any worse – in fact, on many indicators (teen pregnancy, drug abuse, violent crime, election turnout, public civility) they’re clearly better. Likewise, back at the ranch, the Godless blue states rank, on average, ahead of the Bible-thumping red states on such hot-button morality indicators as divorce, unwed mothers and domestic violence.

So perhaps the masses don't need to be spoon fed their religious opium in order to have a reasonably decent society. The death of God may have left the neocon elites trembling with existential dread, but it’s possible that everyman and everywoman can go right on loving their children, obeying the laws and finding meaning in life even without the old bugger upstairs.

The nihilist threat, in other words, may be the Straussian version of an “inside the beltway” issue – one which paralyzes the philosophical elite but which the rest of the Western world is increasingly inclined to ignore as it tries to get on with daily life. The horrors of the 20th century were unquestionably real, and even more terrible ones may well await us in the 21st. But the horrors of the Thirty Years War, the Holy Inquisition and the Russian pogroms were also real – and it’s pretty hard to blame them on the death of God.

If there is a crisis of modernity, it appears to be more a function of the faithful – some whom are getting awfully violent for a bunch of opium addicts. When the 9/11 terrorists flew their planes into the World Trade Center, I can guarantee you they weren’t reciting passages from Mill’s On Liberty. The real crisis may be the lack of modernity, not a surplus of the stuff – an argument the neocons themselves are now making, at least about the religious fanatics in the Middle East.

The ones in Midwest, on the other hand, are another story. To the Straussians, it apparently doesn’t matter what kind of religious orthodoxy America has – as long as it has one. And so the highly educated followers of a Jewish refugee from demented old Europe have allied themselves with some of the most ignorant, racist and xenophobic people in modern crazy America.

Men of the Straussian school of thought like the Bu$hes, the Wolfowitzes, the Boltons, the Cheneys, men who view their status in the world as the Dominionists do, that they are the elite by virtue of breeding and belief, such men may find that the force they've unleashed is one that may just as easily feed on them as on the democratic modernists they so despise.

This is because the feudal social structure depends first and foremost on Forte Main. And breeding and family, and money and greed, may ingrain the avarice for power and riches, but this a very different thing from holding power and riches. As Al Gore says, gut the system of its laws, and those laws will no longer protect you.  ¶ 9:36 PM 0 comments links to this post

  An American Heresy

Presented here in its entirety, because, this is an academic educational website, see, Salon? No profit for me. No commercials for anyone here.

So here is a speech delivered by Al Gore at the Hyatt Regency Washington on Capitol Hill on Wednesday April 27, 2005. You can sit through the commercials at Salon to read it if you want by following the link. I happen to think it's important for all citizens to read what the elected 43rd President of the United States has to say.

An American Heresy

Four years and four months ago, the Supreme Court of the United States, in a bitterly divided 5 to 4 decision, issued an unsigned opinion that the majority cautioned should never be used as a precedent for any subsequent case anywhere in the federal court system.

Their ruling conferred the presidency on a candidate who had lost the popular vote, and it inflamed partisan passions that had already been aroused by the long and hard-fought election campaign. I couldn't have possibly disagreed more strongly with the opinion that I read shortly before midnight that evening, December 12, 2000. But I knew what course of action best served our republic.
Click Here

Even though many of my supporters said they were unwilling to accept a ruling which they suspected was brazenly partisan in its motivation and simply not entitled to their respect, less than 24 hours later, I went before the American people to reaffirm the bedrock principle that we are a nation of laws, not men. "There is a higher duty than the one we owe to a political party," I said. "This is America and we put country before party." The demonstrators and counter-demonstrators left the streets and the nation moved on -- as it should have -- to accept the inauguration of George W. Bush as our 43rd president.

Having gone through that experience, I can tell you -- without any doubt whatsoever -- that if the justices who formed the majority in Bush v. Gore had not only all been nominated to the Court by a Republican president, but had also been confirmed by only Republican Senators in party-line votes, America would not have accepted that court's decision.

Moreover, if the confirmation of those justices in the majority had been forced through by running roughshod over 200 years of Senate precedents and engineered by a crass partisan decision on a narrow party line vote to break the Senate's rules of procedure then no speech imaginable could have calmed the passions aroused in our country.

As Aristotle once said of virtue, respect for the rule of law is "one thing."

It is indivisible.

And so long as it remains indivisible, so will our country.

But if either major political party is ever so beguiled by a lust for power that it abandons this unifying principle, then the fabric of our democracy will be torn.

The survival of freedom depends upon the rule of law.

The rule of law depends, in turn, upon the respect each generation of Americans has for the integrity with which our laws are written, interpreted and enforced.

That necessary respect depends not only on the representative nature of our legislative branch, but also on the deliberative character of its proceedings. As James Madison envisioned, ours is a "deliberative democracy." Indeed, its deliberative nature is fundamental to the integrity of our social compact. Because the essential alchemy of democracy -- whereby just power is derived from the consent of the governed -- can only occur in a process that is genuinely deliberative.

Moreover, it is the unique role of the Senate, much more than the House, to provide a forum for deliberation, to give adequate and full consideration to the strongly held views of a minority. In this case, the minority is made up of 44 Democratic Senators and 1 Independent.

And it is no accident that our founders gave the Senate the power to pass judgment on the fitness of nominees to the Judicial branch. Because they knew that respect for the law also depends upon the perceived independence and integrity of our judges. And they wanted those qualities to be reviewed by the more reflective body of Congress.

Our founders gave no role to the House of Representatives in confirming federal judges. If they had believed that a simple majority was all that was needed to safeguard the nation against unwise choices by a partisan president, they might well have given the House as well as the Senate the power to vote on judges.

But they gave the power instead to the Senate, a body of equals, each of whom was given a term of office -- 3 times longer than that of a representative -- in order to encourage a reflective frame of mind, a distance from the passions of the voters and a capacity for deliberation. They knew that the judges would serve for life and that, therefore, their confirmation should follow a period of advice and consent in which the Senate was an equal partner with the executive.

Alexander Hamilton, in Federalist # 78, wrote that the "independence of the judges is equally requisite to guard the Constitution and the rights of individuals from the effects of those ill-humors which the arts of designing men... have a tendency, in the meantime, to occasion dangerous innovations in the government, and serious oppressions of the minor party in the community."

When James Madison introduced the Bill of Rights, he explained that "independent tribunals of justice will consider themselves... the guardians of [these] rights, ... an impenetrable bulwark against every assumption of power in the legislature or executive."

So, it is not as a Democrat but as an American, that I appeal today to the leadership of the majority in the Senate to halt their efforts to break the Senate's rules and instead protect a meaningful role in the confirmation of judges and justices for Senators of both parties. Remember that you will not always be in the majority, but much more importantly, remember what is best for our country regardless of which party is temporarily in power. Many of us know what it feels like to be disappointed with decisions made by the courts. But instead of attacking the judges with whose opinions we disagree, we live by the rule of law and maintain respect for the courts.

I am genuinely dismayed and deeply concerned by the recent actions of some Republican leaders to undermine the rule of law by demanding the Senate be stripped of its right to unlimited debate where the confirmation of judges is concerned, and even to engage in outright threats and intimidation against federal judges with whom they philosophically disagree.

Even after a judge was murdered in Atlanta while presiding in his courtroom, even after the husband and mother of a federal judge were murdered in Chicago in retaliation by a disgruntled party to a failed lawsuit -- even then -- the Republican leader of the House of Representatives responded to rulings in the Terri Schiavo case, by saying ominously: "The time will come for the men responsible for this to pay for their behavior."

When the outrage following this comment worsened Rep. DeLay's problems during the House Ethics scandal, he claimed that his words had been chosen badly, but in the next breath, he issued new threats against the same courts: "We set up the courts. We can unset the courts. We have the power of the purse."

In previous remarks on the subject, DeLay has said, "Judges need to be intimidated," adding that if they don't behave, "we're going to go after them in a big way."

Moreover, a whole host of prominent Republicans have been making similar threats on a regular basis.

A Republican Congressman from Iowa added: "When their budget starts to dry up, we'll get their attention. If we're going to preserve the Constitution, we must get them in line."

A Republican Senator from Texas directly connected the "spate of courthouse violence lately" to his view that unpopular decisions might be the explanation. "I wonder whether there may be some connection between the perception in some quarters on some occasions where judges are making political decisions, yet are unaccountable to the public, that it builds and builds to the point where some people engage in violence."

One of the best-known conservative political commentators has openly recommended that "liberals should be physically intimidated."

The spokesman for the Republican chairman of the House Judiciary Committee said: "There does seem to be this misunderstanding out there that our system was created with a completely independent judiciary." Misunderstanding?

The Chief of Staff for another Republican senator called for "mass impeachment" by using the bizarre right-wing theory that the president can declare that any judge is no longer exhibiting "good behavior," adding that, "then the judge's term has simply come to an end. The President gives them a call and says: 'Clean out your desk. The Capitol police will be in to help you find your way home.'"

The elected and appointed Republican officials who made these dangerous statements are reflecting an even more broadly-held belief system of grassroots extremist organizations that have made the destruction of judicial independence the centerpiece of their political agenda.

Tony Perkins, leader of the Family Research Council, who hosted a speech by the Senate Majority Leader last Sunday, has said, "There's more than one way to skin a cat, and there's more than one way to take a black robe off the bench." Explaining that during his meeting with Republican leaders, the leaders discussed stripping funding from certain courts, Perkins said, "What they're thinking of is not only the fact of just making these courts go away and recreating them the next day, but also de-funding them." Congress could use its appropriations authority to just "take away the bench, all of its staff, and he's just sitting out there with nothing to do."

Another influential leader of one of these groups, James Dobson, who heads Focus on the Family, focused his anger on the 9th circuit court of appeals: "Very few people know this, that the Congress can simply disenfranchise a court. They don't have to fire anybody or impeach them or go through that battle. All they have to do is say the 9th circuit doesn't exist anymore, and it's gone."

Edwin Vieira (at the "Confronting the Judicial War on Faith" conference) said his "bottom line" for dealing with the Supreme Court comes from Stalin: "He had a slogan, and it worked very well for him whenever he ran into difficulty: 'no man, no problem.'"

Through their words and threats, these Republicans are creating an atmosphere in which judges may well hesitate to exercise their independence for fear of Congressional retribution, or worse.

It is no accident that this assault on the integrity of our constitutional design has been fueled by a small group claiming special knowledge of God's will in American politics. They even claim that those of us who disagree with their point of view are waging war against "people of faith." How dare they?

Long before our founders met in Philadelphia, their forebears first came to these shores to escape oppression at the hands of despots in the old world who mixed religion with politics and claimed dominion over both their pocketbooks and their souls.

This aggressive new strain of right-wing religious zealotry is actually a throwback to the intolerance that led to the creation of America in the first place.

James Madison warned us in Federalist #10 that sometimes, "A religious sect may degenerate into a political faction."

Unfortunately the virulent faction now committed to changing the basic nature of democracy now wields enough political power within the Republican party to have a major influence over who secures the Republican nomination for president in the 2008 election. It appears painfully obvious that some of those who have their eyes on that nomination are falling all over themselves to curry favor with this faction.

They are the ones demanding the destructive constitutional confrontation now pending in the Senate. They are the ones willfully forcing the Senate leadership to drive democracy to the precipice that now lies before us.

I remember a time not too long ago when Senate leaders in both parties saw it as part of their responsibility to protect the Senate against the destructive designs of demagogues who would subordinate the workings of our democracy to their narrow factional agendas.

Our founders understood that the way you protect and defend people of faith is by preventing any one sect from dominating. Most people of faith I know in both parties have been getting a belly-full of this extremist push to cloak their political agenda in religiosity and mix up their version of religion with their version of right-wing politics and force it on everyone else.

They should learn that religious faith is a precious freedom and not a tool to divide and conquer.

I think it is truly important to expose the fundamental flaw in the arguments of these zealots. The unifying theme now being pushed by this coalition is actually an American heresy -- a highly developed political philosophy that is fundamentally at odds with the founding principles of the United States of America.

We began as a nation with a clear formulation of the basic relationship between God, our rights as individuals, the government we created to secure those rights, and the prerequisites for any power exercised by our government.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident," our founders declared. "That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights..."

But while our rights come from God, as our founders added, "governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just power from the consent of the governed."

So, unlike our inalienable rights, our laws are human creations that derive their moral authority from our consent to their enactment-informed consent given freely within our deliberative processes of self-government.

Any who seek to wield the powers of government without the consent of the people, act unjustly.

Over sixty years ago, in the middle of the Second World War, Justice Jackson wrote: "If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion."

His words are no less true today.

The historic vulnerability of religious zealots to subordinate the importance of the rule of law to their ideological fervor was captured best in words given by the author of "A Man for All Seasons" to Sir Thomas More.

When More's zealous son-in-law proposed that he would cut down any law in England that served as an obstacle to his hot pursuit of the devil, More replied: "And when the last law was cut down and the devil turned round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast-man's laws, not God's -- and if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?"

The Senate leaders remind me of More's son-in-law. They are now proposing to cut down a rule that has stood for more than two centuries as a protection for unlimited debate. It has been used for devilish purposes on occasion in American history, but far more frequently, it has been used to protect the right of a minority to make its case.

Indeed it has often been cited as a model for other nations struggling to reconcile the majoritarian features of democracy with a respectful constitutional role for minority rights. Ironically, a Republican freshman Senator who supports the party-line opposition to the filibuster here at home, recently returned from Iraq with an inspiring story about the formation of multi-ethnic democracy there. Reporting that he asked a Kurdish leader there if he worried that the majority Shiites would "overrun" the minority Kurds, this Senator said the Kurdish leader responded "oh no, we have a secret weapon.... [the] filibuster."

The Senate's tradition of unlimited debate has been a secret weapon in our nation's arsenal of democracy as well. It has frequently serves to push the Senate-and the nation as a whole-toward a compromise between conflicting points of view, to breathe life into the ancient advice of the prophet Isaiah: "Come let us reason together"; to illuminate arguments for which the crowded, busy House of Representatives has no time or patience, to afford any Senator an opportunity to stand in the finest American tradition in support of a principle that he or she believes to be important enough to bring to the attention of the nation.

In order to cut down this occasional refuge of a scoundrel, the leadership would cut down the dignity of the Senate itself, diminish the independence of the legislative branch, reduce its power, and accelerate the decline in its stature that is already far advanced.

Two-thirds of the American people reject their argument. The nation is overwhelmingly opposed to this dangerous breaking of the Senate's rules. And, so the leadership and the White House have decided to call it a crisis.

In the last few years, the American people have been told on several occasions that we were facing a dire crisis that required the immediate adoption of an unusual and controversial policy.

In each case, the remedy for the alleged crisis was an initiative that would have been politically implausible at best -- except for the crisis that required the unnatural act they urged upon us.

First, we were told that the nation of Iraq, armed to the teeth as it was said to be with weapons of mass destruction, represented a grave crisis that necessitated a unilateral invasion.

Then, we were told that Social Security was facing an imminent crisis that required its immediate privatization.

Now we are told that the federal judiciary is facing a dire crisis that requires us to break the rules of the Senate and discard the most important guarantee of the deliberative nature of Senate proceedings.

As with the previous "crises" that turned out to be falsely described, this one too cannot survive scrutiny. The truth is that the Senate has confirmed 205 or over 95% of President Bush's nominees. Democrats have held up only ten nominees, less than 5 percent. Compare that with the 60 Clinton nominees who were blocked by Republican obstruction between 1995 and 2000. In fact, under the procedures used by Republicans during the Clinton/ Gore Administration, far fewer than the 41 Senators necessary to sustain a filibuster were able to routinely block the Senate from voting on judges nominated by the president. They allowed Republican Senators to wage shadow filibusters to prevent some nominees from even getting a hearing before the Judiciary Committee. Other nominees were victims of shadow filibusters after receiving a hearing and were not allowed a committee vote. Still others were reported out of committee, and not allowed a vote on the Senate floor.

To put the matter in perspective, when President Clinton left office, there were more than 100 vacant judgeships largely due to Republican obstructionist tactics. Ironically, near the end of the Clinton-Gore administration, the Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee said: "There is no vacancy crisis and a little perspective clearly belies the assertion that 103 vacancies represent a systematic crisis."

Comically, soon after President Bush took office, when the number of vacancies had already been reduced, the same Republican committee chairman sounded a shrill alarm. Because of the outstanding vacancies, he said, "We're reaching a crisis in our federal courts."

Now, the number of vacancies is lower than it has been in many years: 47 vacancies out of 877 judgeships -- and for the majority of those vacancies, the President has not even sent a nominee to the Senate. Yet still, the Republican drive for one-party control leads them to cry over and over again: "Crisis! Crisis in the courts!" It is hypocritical, and it is simply false.

Republicans have also claimed quite disingenuously that the filibustering of judicial nominees is unprecedented. History, however, belies their claim. I served in the Senate for eight of my 16 years in Congress -- and then another 8 years as President of the Senate in my capacity as Vice President. Moreover, my impressions of the Senate date back to earlier decades -- because my father was a Senator when I was growing up.

From that perspective, I have listened with curiosity to some of the statements made during the current debate. For example, I have heard the Senate Majority Leader, who is from my home state and should know better, say that no Court nominee has ever been filibustered before the current president's term. But I vividly remember not only the dozens of nominees sent to the Senate by President Clinton who were denied a vote and filibustered by various means, I also remember in 1968 when my father was the principal sponsor of another Tennessean -- Abe Fortas -- who was nominated to be Chief Justice by President Lyndon Johnson. Fortas was filibustered and denied an up or down vote. The cloture vote was taken on October 1, 1968. When it failed by a vote of 45-43, President Johnson was forced by the filibuster to withdraw the nomination.

My father's Senate colleague and friend from Tennessee, Howard Baker, said during that filibuster, "On any issue, the majority at any given moment is not always right." And no Democrat would take issue with that statement, then or now. It is part of the essence of the U.S. Senate.

This fight is not about responding to a crisis. It is about the desire of the administration and the Senate leadership to stifle debate in order to get what they want when they want it. What is involved here is a power grab -- pure and simple.

And what makes it so dangerous for our country is their willingness to do serious damage to our American democracy in order to satisfy their lust for total one-party domination of all three branches of government. They seek nothing less than absolute power. Their grand design is an all-powerful executive using a weakened legislature to fashion a compliant judiciary in its own image. They envision a total breakdown of the separation of powers. And in its place they want to establish a system in which power is unified in the service of a narrow ideology serving a narrow set of interests.

Their coalition of supporters includes both right-wing religious extremists and exceptionally greedy economic special interests. Both groups are seeking more and more power for their own separate purposes. If they were to achieve their ambition -- and exercise the power they seek -- America would face the twin dangers of an economic blueprint that eliminated most all of the safeguards and protections established for middle class families throughout the 20th century and a complete revision of the historic insulation of the rule of law from sectarian dogma. One of the first casualties would be the civil liberties that Americans have come to take for granted.

Indeed, the first nominee they've sent to the on-deck circle has argued throughout her legal career that America's self-government is the root of all social evil. Her radical view of the Social Security system, which she believes to be unconstitutional, is that it has created a situation where, in her words: "Today's senior citizens blithely cannibalize their grandchildren."

This family of 7 judicial fanatics is now being stopped at democracy's gates by 44 Democratic Senators, led by Sen. Harry Reid, and a small but growing number of Republican Senators who have more independence than fear of their party disciplinarians. If the rules of the Senate are broken and if these nominees should ever be confirmed, they would, as a group, intervene in your family's medical decisions and put a narrow version of religious doctrine above, not within, the Constitution. They have shown by their prior records and statements that they would weaken the right to privacy and consistently favor special interests at the expense of middle class America by threatening the minimum wage, worker & consumer protections, the 40-hour workweek, your right to sue your HMO, and your right to clean air and water.

Because of the unique lifetime tenure of federal judges, their legitimacy requires that they be representative of a broad consensus of the American people. Extremist judges so unacceptable to a large minority of the Senate clearly fall outside this consensus.

Yet today's Republicans seem hell-bent on squelching the ability of the minority in this country to express dissent. This is in keeping with other Republican actions to undercut the legislative process.

And in the filibuster fight they are doing it with utter disregard for the rule of law so central to our democracy. There is, of course, a way to change the rules if they so choose -- and that is to follow the rules.

When they decide instead to break the rules and push our democracy into uncharted, uncertain terrain, the results are often not to the liking of the American people.

That's what happened when they broke precedents to pass special legislation in the Terri Schiavo case -- by playing politics with the Schiavo family tragedy. And, the overwhelming majority of Americans in both political parties told the President and the Congress that they strongly disagreed with that extremist approach.

And now, all of the new public opinion polls show an overwhelming majority of the American people are opposed to this current effort to cripple the United States Senate's position in our constitutional framework by destroying the principle of unlimited debate. But, the congressional Republican leadership and the White House are so beholden to the extremists that they feel like they have to do what they say.

One reason that the American people are upset about what the Republican party is doing, is that while they are wasting time on their extremist agenda, they are neglecting issues like the crisis in the cost and availability of health care, the difficulty middle class families are having in making ends meet, etc.

Our founders understood that there is in all human beings a natural instinct for power. The Revolution they led was precisely to defeat the all-encompassing power of a tyrant thousands of miles away.

They knew then what Lord Acton summarized so eloquently a hundred years later: "Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely." They knew that when the role of deliberative democracy is diminished, passions are less contained, less channeled within the carefully balanced and separated powers of our Constitution, less checked by the safeguards inherent in our founders' design-and the vacuum left is immediately filled by new forms of power more arbitrary in their exercise and derived less from the consent of the governed than from the unbridled passions of ideology, ultra-nationalist sentiments, racist, tribal and sectarian fervor -- and most of all, by those who claim a unique authority granted directly to them by the Almighty.

That is precisely why they established a system of checks and balances to prevent the accretion of power in any one set of hands -- either in one individual or a group because they were wary of what Madison famously called "factions."

Yet today that is precisely what a small group of radical Republicans is trying to do. And they threaten a fundamental break with a system that has served us well for 230 years and has served as a model for the rest of the world.

In the words of columnist George Will, "The filibuster is an important defense of minority rights, enabling democratic government to measure and respect not merely numbers but also intensity in public controversies. Filibusters enable intense minorities to slow the governmental juggernaut. Conservatives, who do not think government is sufficiently inhibited, should cherish this blocking mechanism."

Senator McCain echoed Will's sentiments, reminding his conservative colleagues, "We won't always be in the majority... and do we want a bunch of liberal judges approved by the Senate of the United States with 51 votes if the Democrats are in the majority?"

The rules and traditions of the Senate all derive from this desire to ensure that the voice of the minority could be heard. The filibuster has been at the heart of this tradition for nearly the entire 230 years of the Senate's existence. Yet never before has anyone has felt compelled to try to eliminate it.

The proposal from the Senate majority leader to abolish the right of unlimited debate is a poison pill for America's democracy. It is the stalking horse for a dangerous American heresy that would substitute persuasion on the merits with bullying and an effort at partisan domination.  ¶ 5:25 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Holy Warriors

Before boarding his flight to Crawford to meet with President Bush Monday, Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Abdullah presided over the arrest of 40 Pakistani Christians on Friday. Their crime? The Pakistanis were caught praying in a private home in the capital Riyadh in violation of the state’s strictly enforced religious law that bans all non-Muslim worship.

As the State Department has determined, there is no religious freedom in Saudi Arabia and everyone there, Muslim or not, must obey the rules of the extreme sharia of the kingdom’s established religion, the Wahhabi interpretation of Islam. The Saudi state indoctrinates its nationals from an early age in the Wahhabi ideology of zero tolerance for the “other.” Government textbooks and publications teach that it is a religious obligation for Muslims to hate Christians and Jews and warn against imitating, befriending, or helping them in any way, or taking part in their festivities and celebrations. The state teaches a Nazi-like hatred for Jews, treats the forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion as historical fact, and avows that the Muslim’s duty is to eliminate the state of Israel...

So- exactly what got decided at this meeting, besides a lot of kissing and hand-holding?


President Bush and Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah emerged from their meeting here Monday with no agreement that would lower gasoline prices in the near term, although Saudi Arabia reiterated plans to increase oil production capacity in coming years in an effort to meeting fast-growing world demand...

...the two nations issued a joint statement in which they pledged continued cooperation in the war on terrorism, promised to work together toward a peaceful settlement between the Palestinians and Israel and expressed support for the Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon. The statement also praised the steps being taken toward democratic reforms in Saudi Arabia and announced the formation of a joint committee, to be headed by the U.S. secretary of state and the Saudi foreign minister, aimed at increasing educational, business and cultural exchanges between the two nations. The agreement also cited U.S. appreciation for the Saudi pledge to increase oil production.  ¶ 9:42 PM 0 comments links to this post

  News Not in American News

Why Sibel Edmonds has a gag order.

Former FBI contract translator and whistleblower Sibel Edmonds and her attorneys were ordered removed from the E. Barrett Prettyman U.S. Courthouse so that a three-judge U.S. Court of Appeals panel could discuss her case in private with Bush administration lawyers.

In an exclusive interview on Saturday, we asked Edmonds if she would deny that laundered drug money linked to the 911 attacks found its way into recent House, Senate and Presidential campaign war-chests, according to what she heard in intelligence intercepts she was asked to translate.

"I will not deny that statement; but I cannot comment further on it," she told TomFlocco.com, in a non-denial denial...

A longer version of the same story, with more backgorund is here at TomFlocco.com.

"It’s so simple," Edmonds told TomFlocco.com. "Nobody is looking at the Department of Defense aspect of the whole 911 cover-up. The FBI is citing two reasons for my gag order: to protect ‘sensitive’ diplomatic relations and to protect foreign U.S. business relationships."...

In attempting to let the American people how close the 911 cover-up comes to home, Edmonds told us, "I will say this: the FBI is only a mouthpiece for the State Department. The State Department is the main reason for the cover-up. It has to do with foreign business relationships and who they are...Pakistan, Turkey...espionage in the State Department...preventing an investigation."

The former FBI translator has implicated everything "from drugs to money laundering to arms sales. And yes, there are certain convergences with all these activities and international terrorism," adding "they don’t deal with 1 or 5 million dollars, but with hundreds of millions."

In an interview with the website Antiwar, Edmonds cryptically pronounced "...as for the politicians, what I can say is that when you start talking about huge amounts of money, certain elected officials become automatically involved. And there are different kinds of campaign contributions--legal and illegal, declared and undeclared."

Thanks to Rigorous Intuition for the link.  ¶ 6:32 PM 0 comments links to this post

  The American Taliban Gets a Judge Who Declares Jihad

Just days after a bitterly divided Senate committee voted along party lines to approve her nomination as a federal appellate court judge, California Supreme Court Justice Janice Rogers Brown told an audience Sunday that people of faith were embroiled in a "war" against secular humanists who threatened to divorce America from its religious roots, according to a newspaper account of the speech.

Brown's remarks come as a partisan battle over judges has evolved into a national debate over the proper mix of God and government and as Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) ponders changing the chamber's rules to prevent Democrats from using procedural moves to block confirmation of conservative jurists such as Brown...

"There seems to have been no time since the Civil War that this country was so bitterly divided. It's not a shooting war, but it is a war," she said, according to a report published Monday in the Stamford Advocate...

She added that atheism "handed human destiny over to the great god, autonomy, and this is quite a different idea of freedom…. Freedom then becomes willfulness..."

...she called the New Deal the "triumph of our socialist revolution." She has described herself as a "true conservative" who believes that "where the government moves in, community retreats, civil society disintegrates…. The result is a debased, debauched culture which finds moral depravity entertaining and virtue contemptible."

Ooohhh, baby, when do the fatwahs start?  ¶ 6:43 AM 0 comments links to this post

  If a Tree Falls, and Nobody Listens, Does It Make a Sound?

Ending Evil with the Power of Stupid

Over a week ago it came out that the State Department had decided to stop publishing its 19-year-old report on Patterns of Global Terror, based in part "because the 2004 statistics raised disturbing questions about the Bush's administration's frequent claims of progress in the war against terrorism." Unless another agency steps up to provide a new publicly available report, Americans will no longer have access to a definitive assessment of global terrorism, remaining ignorant of how many terrorist attacks have happened in which parts of the world, of how effective US counterterrorism policy is, of whether, in short, the war is being won. The Medium Lobster hails this as a masterstroke - possibly the final blow to crush the jihadists once and for all.

The war on terror is a war of ideas: Freedom versus Tyranny, Justice versus Injustice, Good versus Evil. On this iconic battleground, it doesn't matter whether actual terrorism increases or decreases; it only matters that the idea of terrorism disappear. It's not important that real terrorists be caught or killed; it's only important that Americans think of them less often. It's certainly not necessary or desirable to have a persistently negative terror report remind Americans that terrorism not only exists, but thrives overseas.

Taking the fight directly to the idea of terror, the Bush Administration has cleverly opted to abandon talk of Iraq and terrorism in order to let the very concept of terror fade from the public consciousness. Indeed, the President has gone so far as to spend weeks flying across the country filling the airwaves with thousands of hours of meaningless prattle on Social Security privatization, all to distract Americans from terror, driving the very notion of Islamism from the mental landscape, until it becomes impossible to even conceive of terror as an abstract principle. Oh, blow up all the buildings you want, Osama bin Laden... but what good will that do you when we don't even know they exist!...

The Medium Lobster: "a higher being with superior knowledge from beyond space and time. To your limited perception, he appears to be just another medium lobster. To your limited perception."  ¶ 10:12 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Let Them Eat Krispy Kreme Krullers

According to John Snow, the Treasury secretary, the global economy is in a "sweet spot." Conservative pundits close to the administration talk, without irony, about a "Bush boom."

Yet two-thirds of Americans polled by Gallup say that the economy is "only fair" or "poor." And only 33 percent of those polled believe the economy is improving, while 59 percent think it's getting worse.

Is the administration's obliviousness to the public's economic anxiety just partisanship? I don't think so: President Bush and other Republican leaders honestly think that we're living in the best of times. After all, everyone they talk to says so.

Since November's election, the victors have managed to be on the wrong side of public opinion on one issue after another: the economy, Social Security privatization, Terri Schiavo, Tom DeLay. By large margins, Americans say that the country is headed in the wrong direction, and Mr. Bush is the least popular second-term president on record.

What's going on? Actually, it's quite simple: Mr. Bush and his party talk only to their base - corporate interests and the religious right - and are oblivious to everyone else's concerns.

The administration's upbeat view of the economy is a case in point. Corporate interests are doing very well. As a recent report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities points out, over the last three years profits grew at an annual rate of 14.5 percent after inflation, the fastest growth since World War II.

The story is very different for the great majority of Americans, who live off their wages, not dividends or capital gains, and aren't doing well at all. Over the past three years, wage and salary income grew less than in any other postwar recovery - less than a tenth as fast as profits. But wage-earning Americans aren't part of the base.

The same obliviousness explains Mr. Bush's decision to make Social Security privatization his main policy priority. He doesn't talk to anyone outside the base, so he didn't realize what he was getting into.

In retrospect, it was a terrible political blunder: the privatization campaign has quickly degenerated from juggernaut to joke. According to CBS, only 25 percent of the public have confidence in Mr. Bush's ability to make the right decisions about Social Security; 70 percent are "uneasy."

Please, read it all. Again, Paul Krugman is one of the few mainstream media voices you can hear that speak plainly. Visit his own site here; visit a comprehensive compilation of his work here.

It's because his day job is tenured full professor of economics at Princeton.

How do they get away with it?, you may ask.

Simple: they own the voting machines and the mainstream media that reports all the news.


Another excellent essay can be found at the Truthout site by Stirling Newberry.

There are three basic pillars of constitutional order: the mandate of the government, the meaning which binds the people and the government together, and the mechanism by which the government pursues the mandate given to it by the people. Of the various mechanisms, money is the most important, though not in the crude sense merely of who gets money, but how money works, how it is created. Money determines, to no small extent, the incentives and range of actions that an individual has available to him.

The New Deal instituted a new kind of money, money based on assets that banks could show on their books, and backed by the Federal Reserve and deposit insurance. One of the key programs that the New Deal used to make this new kind of money work was Social Security. This money replaced the gold-backed money of the previous constitutional order, and changed, fundamentally, the way America worked as a nation. The mandate of the government was to balance the economy; the meaning was based on consensus for action; if there was a problem, or even a potential problem, then the public sense was that it had to be met head on.

Karl Rove has, more than any other single political operative, been responsible for designing a means of attacking that political order, and he has, in no small measure, accomplished this. Gone is the great spirit of bi-partisanship that dominated government from the chaotic early days of 1933 when "we weren't Democrats or Republicans, just Americans trying to save the banking system," in the words of one treasury official.

This cycle of American constitutional change, in which financial crisis leads, first, to a reactionary attempt to force the old system to work, has been seen three times before. Before the Constitution of 1787 was the financial crisis of the 1780s and the Articles of Confederation. Before the Civil War was a massive financial panic, and the infamous Dredd Scott decision, which overturned the Compromise of 1850, and opened the Great Plains to slavery. And before FDR were Hoover's futile attempts to save the gold standard and a government which was less involved in the economy than in religion.

This reactionary order has always failed in the past, because it must consume every cent of the economy. That is its nature: it is an attempt to preserve rent, which is any economic advantage that comes from position in time or space, even if it must sink the entire national surplus in the attempt. This is why the Republicans must borrow to effectively abolish Social Security; Rove knows that in order to secure Republican domination for a generation or more, he must place a weight on the back of government so heavy that no one can remove it. Should a Democrat manage to take the White House, then all that need happen is that a Republican Congress stop doing the behind-the-scenes juggling that keeps the economy going, a recession will ensue, and the Oval office will return to Republican control.

In the past, similar attempts have resulted in the bottom falling out of the economy, and a new political mandate, often one born of fire and crisis. The Civil War was such a crisis; the Great Depression was such a crisis.

Rove's strategy is to create a three-tier attack on the old order, and on anyone who would prevent his new order. That three-tier attack unifies the reactionary elements in society, by providing each one with a specific role to fulfill. His plan can be stated in three words: Bash, Break and Borrow.

Read it all, and think.  ¶ 11:08 PM 4 comments links to this post

  Don't tell the Grand Inquisitor

Evidence for intense local enhancements in methane on Mars has been bolstered by ground-based observations. The methane, as well as water on Mars, was detected using state-of-the-art infrared spectrometers stationed atop Mauna Kea, Hawaii and in Cerro Pachón, Chile.

Scientific teams around the globe are on the trail of methane seeping out of Mars. And for good reason: The methane could be the result of biological processes. It could also be an "abiotic" geochemical process, however, or the result of volcanic or hydrothermal activity on the red planet.

Many types of microbes here on Earth produce a signature of methane. Indeed, the tiny fraction of atmospheric carbon found as methane on our planet is churned out almost entirely biologically with only a very small contribution from abiotic processes...

But according to Joe Ratzinger, the Earth is still flat and the center of the universe and Galileo was wrong- or maybe it's just that Galileo was wrong to overide the Authorities and tell people what the facts really are...  ¶ 6:25 PM 0 comments links to this post

  DINOcrat Tactics, Wrethuglican Strategery, and the Conservative Conscience

Steven C. Clemmons has an excellent breakdown of the situation on the Senate floor regarding the U.N. candidate John Bolton, who represents not the Nation as a whole but the American Enterprise Institute, a subsidiary of the Halliburton Corporation.

Although many in the press are depicting this battle as one between the Democrats and Republicans, knowing what I now know about the extreme level of indigestion in Republican circles about the nomination, depicting this investigation as a partisan one seems nonsensical.

Thus, I think we need new terms to describe what is going on. I think we need to re-cast the players in three camps:
1. The Cheney-Bolton Advocates
2. The Cheney-Bolton Opponents
3. The Undecided and Wavering

The Cheney-Bolton Advocates include Senators Norm Coleman and George Allen. Senators John Sununu and Mel Martinez also fall into this category because they have given rumblings of their intent to support the President. Regrettably, TWN must include Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Richard Lugar who has decided to support Bolton it seems no matter what the evidence and no matter what the circumstances. He sees his job as getting the nomination of Bolton out of Committee and not having the Senate preempt this Bush administration choice -- no matter how bad it may be.

The Cheney-Bolton Opponents include all of the Democrats on the Committee: Senators Biden, Sarbanes, Dodd, Kerry, Feingold, Boxer, Bill Nelson, and Obama.

The Undecided and Wavering include Senators Lincoln Chafee, George Voinovich, Lamar Alexander, Lisa Murkowski, and Chuck Hagel.

Lisa Murkowski made her discomfort with circumstances known yesterday -- and this is something TWN thought might be cooking. While Lamar Alexander has not made such a public comment (yet), TWN has reason to believe that Senator Alexander may feel that John Bolton's dossier "offends the sensibilities" of many. Lamar Alexander, a former Presidential candidate, and someone who values decency and fair play probably shares the view that America ought to be sending someone to the United Nations whom America can be proud of -- and that person is not John Bolton.

So, there is a great deal of fragility in this battle. TWN believes that a 9-9 tie is no longer likely in the battle over Bolton. Either Senator Chafee or some other Senator will indicate a steadfastness to oppose Bolton and vote against him in Committee and bring with that vote several others, or alternatively, the Republicans will maintain a block.

That means we will either see something that looks like a 12-6 or even 13-5 vote against Bolton, or we will see a 10-8 vote in favor of Bolton. One Senator can make the difference, but once one Senator unambiguously moves and indicates a decision to oppose, then several other Senators will quickly move as well.

The ultimate issue is this: every legitimate conservative by now realizes that the TheoCon agenda cynically propagated by Bu$hCo is nothing like real conservatism nor does it represent the morals of real Christianity.

Next to Dick Cheney and James Baker, John Bolton has only one real master he serves: the financial interests of theCarlyle Group.

Thanks to Lauren Rozen at War and Piece for the link, a site that is proving to be an excellent resource for monitoring this situation.  ¶ 8:46 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Breaking the Rules to Change the Rules

Congressional Calvinball is in play.

From Lambert at Corrente:

The rule is, 60 votes to cut off debate. Yet Bill "Hello Kitty" Frist and his Dominionist owners claim that 50 votes can change that rule. Suppose your bass fishing club had a rule that a 60% vote was needed to admit a new member. And some guys wanted to admit a really obnoxious guy you didn't like, but only had 50% of the votes. So, with that 50%, they decide to change the rules requiring a 60% vote, so they can get their guy in. Would you stand for that? I didn't think so.

That's just what the Republicans are trying to do, and the Senate Parliamentarian (the umpire, the Republican-appointed expert on the rules) wouldn't stand for it either:

When he was majority leader, Lott appointed the parliamentarian, Alan Frumin, after firing his predecessor, Bob Dove.

Reid received the assurance from the parliamentarian during a private conversation within the past few weeks, according to aides. Reid told reporters this week that the parliamentarian assured him that, if Republicans go through with the move, “they will have to overrule him, because what they are doing is wrong.”

A Congressional Research Service report on the subject, updated this month, leaves little doubt that moves being contemplated by Republicans — specifically a ruling that a supermajority requirement to cut off debate is not in order — would not be based on previous precedents of the Senate.

The appeal of such a ruling would normally be debatable, although a Republican could move to table any such appeal — denying Democrats the opportunity to delay a ruling.

“Employment of either of these versions of the constitutional nuclear option’ would require the chair to overturn previous precedent,” according to the report, “either by ruling on a question that by precedent has been submitted to the Senate, or by ruling non-debatable a question that by precedent has been treated as debatable.”
(via The Hill)

Jim Lehrer and Norman Ornstein detail how this train wreck would happen:
JIM LEHRER: Now, let's go to the next step. Let's say the filibuster is on, the call is for the cloture vote, and then they don't have 60 votes.

NORM ORNSTEIN: Yes.

JIM LEHRER: Then Bill Frist will do what, under the nuclear option?

NORM ORNSTEIN: Under the nuclear option he will stand up and make a point of order that a filibuster against a judicial nomination is unconstitutional. And the chair, which very likely in this case will be Vice President Dick Cheney, the president of the Senate -- doesn't have to be -- will agree with that point of order, and say the opinion of the chair is unconstitutional.

JIM LEHRER: Then that goes to a vote, does it not?

NORM ORNSTEIN: Goes to a vote. There's a little bit of a catch-22 here, however that is that under the Senate rules, constitutional issues themselves are debatable. So the point of order, in effect, would be debatable. And that could be filibustered.

And what will have to happen here is that the chair [Cheney or, possible, Stevens] will have to ignore the parliamentarian, who has already said that in his opinion that's what would have to take place, or they would basically overrule the parliamentarian. Then the way the Senate operates is that points of order or challenges under the rules can come to a vote, and a majority can make that decision. So it will be a majority vote.

JIM LEHRER: So then assuming that Majority Leader Frist gets his way and through some combination, either it's 50/50 and then the vice president would cast the deciding vote, so you have a new set of rules that would apply to judicial nominations, right?
(PBS)


"Point of order, Mr. Chairman, point of order..." The past isn't dead, is it? It's not even past.

Frist and his Dominionist cronies might still be stopped, however, if there are a few sincere traditional conservatives left in the Senate.

This happened last week when Dick Lugar, Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee tried to ram through John Bolton's nomination over the objections of Joe Biden, John Kerry, and Barbara Boxer.

In a remarkable dramatic two hour video clip (requires Real Player or Windows Media which can be downloaded here: go down to "RECENT PROGRAMS" and "Senate Foreign Relations Cmte. Vote on John Bolton, U.N. Ambassador Nominee (04/19/2005)"), the Democrats actually earn their pay for a change.

They managed to get enough hard data out, in front of the C-SPAN cameras, over the objections of the Committee Chair, to convince several traditional Republican Senators that Bolton might be more than your garden variety NeoCon, but that he might have serious issues of emotional instability beyond his simple doctrine of insanity.  ¶ 6:28 AM 1 comments links to this post

  Your FBI at Work: Protecting Osama bin Laden's "Right to Privacy"

It's nice to see such concern for the little guy from a government agency.

Judicial Watch, the public interest group that fights government corruption, announced today that it has obtained documents through the Freedom of Information Act (“FOIA”) in which the Federal Bureau of Investigation (“FBI”) has invoked privacy right protections on behalf of al Qaeda terror leader Osama bin Laden. In a September 24, 2003 declassified “Secret” FBI report obtained by Judicial Watch, the FBI invoked Exemption 6 under FOIA law on behalf of bin Laden, which permits the government to withhold all information about U.S. persons in “personnel and medical files and similar files” when the disclosure of such information “would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.” (5 U.S.C. § 552(b)(6) (2000))

I guess if your Daddy owns the President of the United States of America, that entitles you to rights as an American citizen alright.

The actual redacted and hence declassified document from the FBI can be found here.

Thanks to QrazyQat on Digby's comment boards for the heads up.  ¶ 3:40 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Lose the System, Gain a Dear Leader

Via Alice, who says: "We have a hard enough time convincing lefty blogosphere, nevermind the news media."

If they can disable an election, what's coming next?

“That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn’t even any rioting in the streets. People stayed home at night, watching television, looking for some direction. There wasn’t even an enemy you could put your finger on.” — Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

What if it could happen here?

This is the disquieting question I hesitate to ask because, once asked, it pretty much changes everything. The answer roars in behind it, as obvious as a Florida hurricane, an Ohio twister, ripping up the complacent heart. What if it could? What if it did?

A number of voices think it just might have.

Was the election of 2004 stolen? Thus is the question framed by those who don’t want to know the answer. Anyone who says yes is immediately a conspiracy nut, and the listener’s eyeballs roll. So let’s not ask that question.

Let’s simply ask why the lines were so long and the voting machines so few in Columbus and Cleveland and inner-city and college precincts across the country, especially in the swing states, causing an estimated one-third of the voters in these precincts to drop out of line without casting a ballot; why so many otherwise Democratic ballots, thousands and thousands in Ohio alone, but by no means only in Ohio, recorded no vote for president (as though people with no opinion on the presidential race waited in line for three or six or eight hours out of a fervor to have their say in the race for county commissioner); and why virtually every voter complaint about electronic voting machine malfunction indicated an unauthorized vote switch from Kerry to Bush.

This, mind you, is just for starters. We might also ask why so many Ph.D.-level mathematicians and computer programmers and other numbers-savvy scientists are saying that the numbers don’t make sense (see, for instance, www.northnet.org/minstrel, the Web site of Dr. Richard Hayes Phillips, lead statistician in the Moss v. Bush lawsuit challenging the Ohio election results). Indeed, the movement to investigate the 2004 election is led by such people, because the numbers are screaming at them that something is wrong.

Avedon Carol says: People don't want to know when you point this stuff out. Even if they think we're right, they want to disassociate themselves from what the media wants us to believe is just "conspiracy theory".

But the Republicans were by no means all that secretive about their utter willingness to thwart a fair election - they openly worked to prevent paper trails, they overtly acted to keep adequate voting facilities from being provided where they were needed the most. And after what happened in 2000, what thinking person could disbelieve that they would go as far as they had to in order to retain power?

And for that matter, after the four intervening years, how else would the Republicans avoid facing the music for the litany of crimes they have committed while illegally at the helm of our democratic republic? They have trashed our Constitution and disgraced our nation in the eyes of the world in an act of mass murder and a celebration of arrogance and corruption. They have behaved as if they knew they would never be held to account; what did they know? They could not afford to have power put back into the hands of the people.

All the talk about religion and such is just a distraction used to keep our eye off the reality: that it was not how people voted at all that brought us to this pass. Invisible religious folk did not surreptitiously vote late in the day without anyone noticing. Republicans did not lie to exit-pollsters, nor Kerry-voters hog their attention. Bush was unpopular on election day just as he is now.

Of course the election was stolen. If anyone says otherwise, there's a simple rejoinder: Prove it.

They can't.

Finally, Arthur Silber:
You’re not a “conspiracy nut” if you think Bush actually lost the last election.

He did.

And for any hawks and/or Bush supporters who stroll by: even this guy thinks so.

Not that this helps us in our current awful predicament, as our country hurtles still closer to hell. Nonetheless, there is a certain value in knowing what the truth is. But it’s cold comfort. Very, very cold.

...But let me make one brief point, which relates to an important distinction. There are two separate issues involved in evaluating the results of last November’s election. The first is simply to note that numerous facts and a great deal of evidence exist that lead one to the inescapable conclusion that something is very wrong about certain of the reported election results...

I’m not at all a fan of conspiracy theories in general. Usually, events are fully explainable by the actions of the major players that are in full view, and by the ideas and other factors that motivate them. However, I also think it is true that we don’t know even a fraction of what actually goes in the world at the highest levels of government (and often, even at the local level). To acknowledge that simple truth is not to endorse conspiracies: it is only to recognize that many of those in our government feel they are under no obligation whatsoever to tell us the full truth about matters that affect our lives, or anything approaching it.

And I don’t see how that can be denied, at least not by anyone who is an adult. And that’s not being cynical. It’s just being realistic. Our government leaders tell us only what they must and can no longer avoid, or what they choose to reveal. And they consider that telling us anything further is a wonderful bonus, for which we should be appropriately and grovelingly grateful. As for “the people’s right to know,” please. Don’t make me laugh.

You don't need conspiracy theories to explain what the conspirators are doing when they come right out and brag about it.  ¶ 9:07 PM 0 comments links to this post

  A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Kremlin

Condi experienced a little different reality than her hosts.

Total Misunderstanding?
The Secretary of State was not understood in Moscow
Yesterday in Moscow, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice met with President of Russian Federation (RF) Vladimir Putin and Sergei Lavrov, head of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Rice made several unprecedented statements. She, in fact, admitted that the US will start to inspect Russian nuclear facilities. The Secretary of State demanded Putin resignation in 2008. She also hinted that Byelorussia is to expect “Orange Revolution” and Russia “a bright future.” Her Russian counterparts pretended stubbornly that they didn’t hear anything...

...In an interview with Echo Moskvy, the secretary of state said she was able to get agreement for the American side to get more access to Russian nuclear facilities. “We resolved better access for us for these facilities, but there is some work still left that we have to do,” she said. Rice also expressed hope that before the meeting of George Bush and Vladimir Putin in May in Moscow both sides will “achieve more progress on this issue.”

Responding to those who consider American access to the Russian nuclear facilities as infringing on Russian sovereignty, Rice answered “I do not consider the inspections that have to be done as a question of sovereignty. Nobody wants nuclear materials or weapons to get into the hands of the bad people. As well as the U.S., Russia also confronts very unpleasant incidents connected with terrorism. We know what is going to happen if terrorists will have access to such weapons.” Following the words of the secretary of state, it was understood that the issues of American inspections were discussed during her dinner with the Russian minister of defense on Tuesday.

However, Ivanov did not remember anything like that. He not only refuted Rice’s words but also he let it be understood that the issue of American inspections is not on the agenda at all. “The question of American experts visiting Russian nuclear facilities was not examined. And nobody’s talking about it,” he told the journalists yesterday.

...It is evident that there was no really pleasant conversation about democracy in the CIS between Putin and Rice as well. For instance, several hours before the negotiations with the president, Rice talking with Echo Moskvy said that “people of Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan made steps to freedom themselves,” and “Byelorussian people deserve better,” because “nobody’s benefiting from the last dictatorship in Europe which is the Lukashenko government in Byelorussia.” For the question “is she afraid to have an Orange Revolution in Russia,” Rice responded quite evasively by saying that “she’s not afraid for the Russian future and she thinks the Russian future can be very bright.”

Condoleezza Rice and her interviewer in the studio of Echo Moskvy didn’t understand each other even when discussing the only non-political question. Alexei Venediktov asked the state secretary if she is going to run for president in 2008. “Da” (Yes) she said in Russian, but then immediately realized that she most likely misunderstood the question. She hurried to correct herself and said the word “Nyet” (No) seven times.

She's just under the misapprehension that Putin cares what reality Bu$hCo thinks it's creating. They're on the same planet, but living in vastly different worlds.

Thanks to the Agonist for the link.  ¶ 8:53 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Unfair Comparisons

John R. Bolton's nomination to be ambassador to the United Nations suffered a setback yesterday when the Senate Foreign Relations Committee unexpectedly decided to spend three more weeks investigating allegations that he mistreated subordinates, threatened a female government contractor and misled the committee about his handling of classified materials.

John Bolton. Yosemite Sam with a milk moustache and a bad hairpiece. No, that's unfair to Sam, who never did Dick Cheney's dirty work to suppress the information there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

That rootin'-tootin' cowboy never dreamed up a story about Nigerian uranium yellowcake being sold to Iraq to make nukes as a justification for a war that would let his boss's Company charge over $212 million (and counting) in cost overruns.

Yosemite Sam never said anything like "Iraq, despite UN sanctions, maintains an aggressive program to rebuild the infrastructure for its nuclear, chemical, biological, and missile programs. In each instance, Iraq’s procurement agents are actively working to obtain both weapons-specific and dual-use materials and technologies critical to their rebuilding and expansion efforts, using front companies and whatever illicit means are at hand," in order to start a war to enrich his patrons in the Carlyle Group.

That mean little outlaw never successfully covered up the Reagan administration's role in supporting Contra gun-running and drug smuggling. Nor did he try to start a conflict with Cuba by unsuccessfully accusing them of producing bioweapons; nor did he ruin the career of a CIA agent who disagreed with him.

That red-haired gunslinger never advocated starting a war with China to his PNAC buddies, either, or nearly personally started a war with North Korea that would drag in China.

That short-tempered cowboy never pressed the AEI agenda he helped invent after a bloody unneccessary war was started to try to start up wars in other places as well.

Yosemite Sam never laundered dirty money for PACs.

So lay off the cartoon character, already. It's tough enough getting your rear kicked by a pesky rabbit. There's no reason to compare him to such a durned dude.

Thanks to Charles Judson Harwood Jr. for some of the links.  ¶ 10:41 PM 1 comments links to this post

  What Digby Says on How to Boil a Frog

...While Ann Coulter makes the cover of Time for writing that liberals have a "preternatural gift for striking a position on the side of treason," her followers actually side with Iraqi insurgents against an American charity worker. At freeperland and elsewhere they laughed and clapped and enjoyed the fruits of the enemy's labor. This is because if you listen to Ann and Rush and Sean and Savage and all the rest of these people you know that there is no greater enemy on the planet than the American liberal. That's what Ann Coulter and her ilk are selling and that is what Time magazine celebrated with their cover girl this week.

I'm not going to argue with my fellow Democrats any more about how Janet Jackson's nipple and Desperate Housewives' double ententres are coarsening American media culture. This is not because American media culture isn't being coarsened. But T&A is clearly not the problem. It's the... selling liberal death fantasies to the public... being aided by idiots in the mainstream press who are so in the (ever heating) tank that they have lost all sense of perspective.

The recently annointed GOP saint, Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan, was the one who coined the phrase "defining deviancy down" and I think he's been validated. When a deranged, flamthrowing fascist like Ann Coulter is called "amusing" and "entertaining", deviancy has definitely been redefined.

And pay careful attention to the "re-defining deviancy" statement. Let's place this in context with what Billmon has to say:

...The old Time mirrored the obsessions of its founder, which were only partially, and not even primarily, commercial. The new Time is only part – and probably not even the largest part – of a line item on a quarterly profit and loss statement. The Time drones are giving head to Ann Coulter for the same reason the NBC clones are putting Left Behind knock offs in the fall line up: They’re both terrified they’ve lost touch with the mass audience, which they believe (based on what evidence I don’t know) to be drifting deeper and deeper into wacko land.

But there’s absolutely no conviction behind it, no Lucian desire to smite the wicked and elect the virtuous. Heck, according to BuyBlue.org, Time-Warner is the bluest of the blue corporations, with its executives giving a cool 77% of their $1.7 million in political contributions to the Democrats in the 2003-04 cycle.

Which is exactly why the magazine's fawning treatment of the conservative Mafia is being repaid with such contempt. Time is offering the journalistic equivalent of protection money, but the crew has something bigger in mind – like busting up the joint and taking it over...

...But the corporate media’s present eagerness... is based on an increasingly frantic belief that this is what the audience wants. With their massive market power, however, the mega-monsters also have the ability to shape consumer appetites – creating, in effect, a demand for the kind of content they want to supply.

All the pieces are in place, in other words, for a self-perpetuating spiral into extremism – with the corporate bean counters smiling and clapping all the way. The evolution of talk radio into a contest to see who can shout the most deranged opinions into a microphone shows how the process can work. Something similar may now be happening in the print media.

In other words: if the Wrepublicans control the polling data input and all the companies monopolies advertising in the media, the marketing executives- MBAs more impressed with their shiny wingtips than the statistical validity of the data they're presented with- adjust their media focus a little to the right.

This pisses off most people- come on, really, is the average working mother or factory floor dad really going to pick up a copy of time with that hateful skank Coulter on the cover- so sales go down.

That's something the opinion pollsters can't hide.

So- the MBAs move it a little further right. The sales drop a little more. The hysteric unease is a vicious cycle, feeding on itself, as the frog reaches down and turns up the burner.  ¶ 6:46 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Fall in Antartica, and the ice shelf is still breaking up

An iceberg that collided with Antarctica has broken a piece of the continent off, forcing maps of the bottom of the world to be redrawn, European scientists said today.

The iceberg, named B-15A, is whopping 71 miles (115 kilometers) long. Scientists predicted an imminent collision back in January. Instead, the iceberg ran aground and stalled out. Then it broke free last month.

Now it has finally collided with the continent's Drygalski ice tongue and smacked a city sized chunk of it into the ocean.

The frigid carnage is visible in a new satellite image from the European Space Agency (ESA). The picture was taken April 15 and released today.

Winter approaches in Antartica, and the Ross ice shelf is still breaking up.  ¶ 6:30 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Welcome to SkyNet

One of the most interesting things about this year's DARPA budget is its foray into artificial intelligence.

A few weeks back I looked at some of their initiatives on robotics.

But it goes beyond that.

For example, over the next year, $33,678,000 will be spent on developing Cognitive Systems... different from conventional computing systems in that they draw inferences from rich structured representations of their knowledge, learn from experience, mix symbolic logical knowledge with uncertain and probabilistic information, allow reflective reasoning, and support the integration of perceptual (e.g., visual, auditory) data with symbolic information. The novel forms of computation developed in Cognitive Systems will revolutionize future military systems. Next-generation computer systems will rely upon reasoning, learning, and self-monitoring to handle increasingly complex tasks. These systems will be advisable, adaptable and able to cope with surprise. The Cognitive Systems Foundations project will develop the necessary foundational software methods and hardware architectures to facilitate the learning and inference crucial to intelligent computing. These new computing foundations will help us move far beyond today’s standard Von Neumann computing model.

Cognitive Systems... dynamically adapt, collect and assimilate large quantities of systems operation data, and remain robust even under aggressive attacks or failure conditions. Cognitive Systems Foundations will enable future computer systems to be more responsible for their own configuration, monitoring, protection and restoration to full functional and performance capabilities...

Overall this project seeks to make fundamental scientific improvements in our understanding of, and ability to, create more intelligent information and computing systems. Transition goals include next-generation network-centric systems and platform-specific information collection and processing systems in space, air, sea and land...

Really, who needs Total Information Awareness.

What's needed is a system that can decide what it needs, and obtain data for itself.  ¶ 10:15 PM 1 comments links to this post

  All your credit card numbers are ours- there's a War on, you know.

Via Defense Tech via Wired News:

The U.S. military has assembled the world's most formidable hacker posse: a super-secret, multimillion-dollar weapons program that may be ready to launch bloodless cyberwar against enemy networks -- from electric grids to telephone nets.

The group's existence was revealed during a U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee hearing last month. Military leaders from U.S. Strategic Command, or Stratcom, disclosed the existence of a unit called the Joint Functional Component Command for Network Warfare, or JFCCNW...

The JFCCNW is charged with defending all Department of Defense networks. The unit is also responsible for the highly classified, evolving mission of Computer Network Attack, or as some military personnel refer to it, CNA...

One expert on cyber warfare said considering the unit is a "joint command," it is most likely made up of personnel from the CIA, National Security Agency, FBI, the four military branches, a smattering of civilians [private contractors, like DynCorp no doubt] and even military representatives from allied nations...

"I've got to tell you we spend more time on the computer network attack business than we do on computer network defense because so many people at very high levels are interested," said former CNA commander, Air Force Maj. Gen. John Bradley, during a speech at a 2002 Association of Old Crows conference. The group is the leading think tank on information and electronic warfare...

Yes, DynCorp, the mercenary company that specialized in sex slavery in Bosnia, has access to some of the best hackers and snooping software in the world now that's it's part of the Team.

Which is about as good as putting drug smugglers in charge of the U.S. anti-crime database.

That little idea seems to have been shut down for awhile. You know, just like TIA was shut down.

Wasn't it?  ¶ 9:29 PM 0 comments links to this post

  None of that prickly heat for me, please.

Holden today picked up on the use of napalm in Iraq.

I seem to remember something some of us talked about during the Clinton administration... oh, yes, the Geneva Conventions:

International peace and security as an essential condition for the enjoyment of human rights, above all the right to life

Sub-Commission resolution 1996/16

The Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities,

Guided by the principles of the Charter of the United Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenants on Human Rights and the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949 and the Additional Protocols thereto,

Recalling General Assembly resolutions 42/99 of 7 December 1987 and 43/111 of 8 December 1988 reaffirming that all people have an inherent right to life,

Concerned at the alleged use of weapons of mass or indiscriminate destruction both against members of the armed forces and against civilian populations, resulting in death, misery and disability,

Concerned also at repeated reports on the long-term consequences of the use of such weapons upon human life and health and upon the environment,

Concerned further that the physical effects on the environment, the debris from the use of such weapons, either alone or in combination, and abandoned contaminated equipment constitute a serious danger to life,

Convinced that the production, sale and use of such weapons are incompatible with international human rights and humanitarian law,

Believing that continued efforts must be undertaken to sensitize public opinion to the inhuman and indiscriminate effects of such weapons and to the need for their complete elimination,

Convinced that the production, sale and use of such weapons are incompatible with the promotion and maintenance of international peace and security,

1. Urges all States to be guided in their national policies by the need to curb the production and the spread of weapons of mass destruction or with indiscriminate effect, in particular nuclear weapons, chemical weapons, fuel-air bombs, napalm, cluster bombs, biological weaponry and weaponry containing depleted uranium;

2. Requests the Secretary-General:

(a) To collect information from Governments, the competent United Nations bodies and agencies and non-governmental organizations on the use of nuclear weapons, chemical weapons, fuel-air bombs, napalm, cluster bombs, biological weaponry and weaponry containing depleted uranium, on their consequential and cumulative effects, and on the danger they represent to life, physical security and other human rights;

(b) To submit a report on the information gathered to the Sub-Commission at its forty-ninth session, together with any recommendations and views which he may have received on effective ways and means of eliminating such weapons;

3. Decides to give further consideration to this matter at its forty-ninth session, on the basis of any additional information which may be contained in reports of the Secretary-General to the Sub-Commission or to other United Nations bodies, or which may be submitted to the Sub-Commission by Governments or non-governmental organizations.

34th meeting
29 August 1996

...except, according to Eli, the Gingrich Republican Congress never really signed it.

So does that mean when the dust all settles we can send the entire PaleoCon, NeoCon, and TheoCon Wrepublican Congress that voted against the ratification of this treaty to the slammer for war crimes along with Rumsfeld, Cheney, and the Wrest of Bu$hCo?  ¶ 9:05 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Disaster Capitalism

Three months after the tsunami hit Aceh, the New York Times reported that "almost nothing seems to have been done to begin repairs and rebuilding". The dispatch could have come from Iraq, where, as the Los Angeles Times has reported, all Bechtel's allegedly rebuilt water plants have started to break down, one more in a litany of reconstruction screw-ups. It could have come from Afghanistan, where President Karzai blasted "corrupt, wasteful and unaccountable" foreign contractors for "squandering the precious resources that Afghanistan received in aid".

But if the reconstruction industry is stunningly inept at rebuilding, that may be because rebuilding is not its purpose. According to Guttal: "It's not reconstruction at all - it's about reshaping everything." The stories of corruption and incompetence mask this deeper scandal: the rise of a predatory form of disaster capitalism that uses the desperation created by catastrophe to engage in radical social and economic engineering. On this front, the reconstruction industry works so efficiently that the privatisations and land grabs are usually locked in before local people know what hit them. Herman Kumara, of the National Fisheries Solidarity Movement in Negombo, Sri Lanka, sent an email to colleagues around the world warning that Sri Lanka is facing "a second tsunami of corporate globalisation and militarisation ... We see this as a plan... to hand over the sea and the coast to foreign corporations ... with military assistance from the US marines."

Paul Wolfowitz, the US deputy defence secretary, oversaw a similar project in Iraq: the fires were still burning when US officials announced that the country's state-owned companies would be privatised. Some argue that Wolfowitz is unfit to lead the World Bank; in fact, nothing could have prepared him better.

'Post-conflict" countries now receive 20-25 % of the World Bank's lending, up from 16% in 1998. Rapid response to disaster has traditionally been the domain of UN agencies. But today, with reconstruction revealed as tremendously lucrative, the World Bank leads the charge. There are massive engineering and supplies contracts ($10bn to Halliburton in Iraq and Afghanistan alone); "democracy building" has exploded into a $2bn industry; and times have never been better for the private firms that advise governments on selling off their assets. (Bearing Point, the favoured of these firms in the US, reported that revenues for its "public services" division "had quadrupled in five years".)

But shattered countries are attractive to the World Bank for another reason: They take orders well and will usually do whatever it takes to get aid dollars - even if it means racking up huge debts and agreeing to sweeping policy reforms. Even better, many war-ravaged countries are in states of "limited sovereignty" and considered too unstable to manage aid money, which is often put in a trust fund managed by the World Bank - in East Timor, the bank doles out money to the government as long as it shows it is spending responsibly. Apparently, this means slashing public-sector jobs (the government is half the size it was under Indonesian occupation) but lavishing aid money on foreign consultants. In Afghanistan, the World Bank mandated "an increased role for the private sector" in water, telecommunications, oil, gas and mining and directed the government to leave electricity to foreign investors. Few outside the bank knew of these changes, as they were buried in a "technical annex" attached to an emergency-aid grant.

Reconstruction colonialism. Coming to a devastated country near you.

China and Japan. India and Pakistan.

When war breaks out, who always seems to profit?  ¶ 9:59 PM 0 comments links to this post

  What Greenspan forgot to tell you...

Billmon goes into the details of what's bugging Wall Street. With hard data.

For the financial markets, last week had a ugly feel to it, both on Wall Street and globally. It wasn't a crash, certainly, but also more than just a garden-variety correction. It felt like the preliminary stages of a sea change in sentiment -- the kind that either accompanies the popping of a bubble, or causes it, depending on your economic point of view.

The Dow dropped 420 fast points in the final three days of the week, interrupted by nothing that could be called a significant countertrend rally. This despite positive earnings surprises from both GE and Citigroup.

When the market ignores good news from those two, it's essentially a storm flag for the entire economy, since between them you have a pretty good proxy for GDP -- particularly now that passing electrons with dollar signs attached to them has become such a big part of the U.S. economy. While first quarter earnings may yet be OK, the market is looking further ahead -- and seeing a sharp slowdown in both sales and profits...

...The standard bear case -- as expounded by Roach and others -- sees a creditors' strike as the end game for the current U.S. consumption binge. The bears generally advocate a hefty dose of "tough love" -- higher interest rates, tighter fiscal policy -- to ward off disaster.

I've no doubt that if left on autopilot the current system (i.e. "Bretton Woods II") would lead to a great big debt/dollar crisis -- eventually. At some point, the bubble would simply become too big and too absurd to protect, even for a cartel of Asian central banks. But, given the structural and institutional obstacles to change (both here and abroad) that point might not be reached for years.

Long before then, however, the weight of the global savings glut might bring the U.S. locomotive to a halt -- or even start pulling it backwards. And the "tough love" remedies proposed by the bears, while inevitable in the long run, could make things much worse in the short run, by further sapping global aggregate demand.

Read it all. Follow the links. And think about it.

Stirling Newberry also has a worthwhile post, analyzing why the "New Economy" boom fell short.

The investment deficit and budget deficit together create conditions in which real wages do not increase as quickly and there is less growth in the kind of upwardly mobile employment that people need. This situation also creates incentives for government to tax consumption, both because this reduces the trade deficit, and because the wealthy cannot be taxed. This creates a wages deficit. The wages deficit, in turn, gives people an incentive to borrow more, particularly against their homes. This creates a wealth deficit, with increasing inequality in assets. The solution to the wealth deficit is for people to use gasoline to shop around for better bargains, and to buy homes further from where they work, and in areas that do not have to pay the carrying costs of large metropolitan areas. This means they burn more energy, and this loops back around to the beginning of the cycle. The whole cycle then is:

1. Energy deficit creates trade deficit.
2. Trade deficit creates investment deficit.
3. Investment deficit creates budget deficit.
4. Investment deficit and budget deficit creates wages and wealth deficit.
5. Wages and wealth deficits create pressure to use energy to generate housing wealth, which starts the cycle over again.

Each stage pushes the next along, because at each stage there is a group of people that can benefit by pushing the problem to the next group of people.

It's also good to review Stirling Newberry's explanation why the situation benefits Bu$hCo.  ¶ 9:21 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Sins of Omission

Via kos, a compilation of the special relationship Bu$hCo has with inconvenient facts.

Then, there's the special relationship with what's going on with Iraq .

Notice the special way the lead paragraph to the front page story of the New york Pravda describes what's going down in Iraq today: Anyone in Baghdad on Sunday morning could have been forgiven for thinking the country was on the verge of civil war.

When you won't talk about the sunset or the nightfall, it's always morning in America. Or Iraq. Or wherever the latest Company venture is.

Still, if I want a idea of what's on the street in Baghdad, I go to where they speak the language.

But it's not just America where the less said, the better for those with power.  ¶ 8:48 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Shadows of Unease in the Company

Via the farmer, Frederick Clarkson notes the days of denial about the TheoCons are over.

Now the voice of Pravda for the Company notes that the TheoCons are declaring themselves.

It is one thing when private groups foment this kind of intolerance. It is another thing entirely when it's done by the highest-ranking member of the United States Senate, who swore on the Bible to uphold a Constitution that forbids the imposition of religious views on Americans. Unfortunately, Senator Frist and his allies are willing to break down the rules to push through their agenda - in this case, by creating what the senator knows is a false connection between religion and the debate about judges.

I would say it's another thing altogether if factions within the world's largest global equity investment firm start to get uneasy about slick Elmer Gantry types taking over their spiel.  ¶ 2:31 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Putting the Organization in Place

Local, state and federal law enforcement officers announced Thursday they have arrested more than 10,000 fugitives across the nation in what the U.S. Marshals Service said was the single largest sweep of its kind.

The dragnet saw 3,000 officers from 960 police agencies fan out in the last week to track down felons wanted on a wide variety of charges. Nationally, more than 150 of those arrested were sought on murder charges, another 550 on rape allegations and more than 600 for armed robberies.

Those arrested in the Chicago area included a man who escaped from a federal detention center in New Jersey eight years ago and another wanted in connection with a pair of murders in a south suburb.

The dragnet also pulled in 100 unregistered sex offenders and 150 gang members, with reports on captures still trickling in earlier this week, officials said.

Code-named Operation FALCON, for Federal and Local Cops Organized Nationally, the sweep was aimed at concentrating police resources and sharing information across jurisdictional lines in a 24-hour-a-day, seven-day push to round up fugitives, said Marshals Service Director Benigno Reyna. He announced the results at a Washington news briefing with Attorney General Alberto Gonzales...

I hate having these paranoid flashes.

If you had a list of the 10,000 most politically dangerous individuals in the country, and you wanted to grab them all at once, wouldn't it be good to have a practice run?

Just to sort of get the framework of the system in order?  ¶ 6:05 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Frist's Fatwah Fingering Filibusters

A lot of people from Tennessee realize that one of their Senators has a Special relationship with his Creator.

Bill Frist is just such a Special Senator.

Yes, people from the Anti-Defamation League to the Mormons realize Frist is making a polarizing statement ...in which Democratic opposition to President Bush's most conservative judicial appointments will be cast as a Democratic war against believing Christians.

In any other times, this would be jumping the shark. But we're missing something here.

It really doesn't matter that public support of Bu$hCo and the Wrepublican Congress is at an all time low.

The Republican president's job approval is at 44 percent, with 54 percent disapproving. Only 37 percent have a favorable opinion of the work being done by Congress, according to an AP-Ipsos poll...

...The president was asked Friday about his falling ratings in some polls, and he claimed indifference.

They're riding a tiger they know will do the trench fighting.

The Storm Troopers of the New World Order for Rambo Jesus.

They've got the Big Money.

They've got the voting machines.

Public support? They don't need no steenkin' badges- or public support.  ¶ 10:17 PM 0 comments links to this post

  What's a few $ trillion $ in the War on Terra?

Tena spots this:

INSTITUTE INDEX — Tax Dollars at Work

* Percent that state income tax collected from corporations has dropped since 1989: 40%
* Amount of federal revenue lost due to corporate offshore tax havens: $255 billion
* Amount lost from corporate underreporting of income: $30 billion
* Of 275 largest corporations, number that didn't pay any taxes at least one year between 2001 and 2003: 82
* Amount of spending the Pentagon admits it cannot account for: $2.3 trillion
* Amount this represents for every person in the United States: $8,000
* Amount that Halliburton is known to have overcharged taxpayers on one of its Iraq contracts: $212 million
* Amount of federal money earmarked for Wal-Mart in 2005 transportation bill to widen the road to their headquarters: $37 million
* Number of hours it takes for Wal-Mart to make $37 million in profits: 31


Now that's a Top Secret!

Some Democratic members of the Democratic Party are pissed.

Mr. Chairman, we know the right questions to ask: about Iraq, the budget, waste, fraud and abuse by contractors including Halliburton. After seeing scenes from an Iraqi prison, we know what we don't know. What are we going to do about all this?

We know the right questions to ask, but we also know these questions will not be answered--unless we reach back into recent history and reinstitute an independent, bi-partisan internal watchdog.

In the 1940s, the Truman Committee saved the government and the American people $15 billion dollars. They asked the right questions and were empowered to get the answers. The American people got what they paid for and someone made sure of it. There was truth in government. There was trust in government.

We don't have that kind of faith, confidence, or oversight anymore. Instead of scrutiny, there is subterfuge.

Already, America has spent $200 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet two years after the start of the war, many troops and their transports still do not have adequate protection.

This week, the Administration will use the supplemental process to obtain new billions for Iraq. The fact is, the supplemental process carries less scrutiny than the normal budget process.

We know the right questions to ask, but getting the answers is a different story.

Billions of dollars have been awarded in non-competitive contracts. Recently, the military acknowledged that 8 billion in cold, hard cash is missing in Iraq. It's happened before in Iraq, and unless something changes, there is no reason to believe it won't happen again.

Halliburton has already been found to have overcharged the Pentagon by billions of dollars for providing meals to soldiers and importing fuel. They're still getting paid and no one really knows if we are getting what the American people are paying for.

On a rare occasion, the Defense Secretary admits there is an issue; quoting Secretary Rumsfeld: "According to some estimates, we (DOD) cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions." The Pentagon's own auditors admit that the military cannot account for as much as 1/4 of what it spends. Defense makes up half of all the discretionary spending in the budget.

Very nice. I voted for Jim McDermott years ago when I lived in Seattle, and he makes me proud now. It's good to know there a still a few Democrats with a spine.  ¶ 9:41 PM 0 comments links to this post

  The Constitution Restoration Act

Via TJ via Atrios a post by Max Blumenthal about the Judeo-Christian Council for Constitutional Restoration's most heavily promoted piece of legistlation:

"...the 'Constitution Restoration Act,'" [is] "a bill relentlessly promoted during the conference that authorizes Congress to impeach judges who fail to abide by "the standard of good behavior" required by the Constitution. If they refuse to acknowledge "God as the sovereign source of law, liberty, or government," or rely in any way on international law in their rulings, judges also invite impeachment."

TJ does a fine smackdown of the rationale behind the Restorationists, using (among others) the words of none other than that wild-eyed terra'ist, Thomas Paine:

"I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.

"All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit."

...and that liberal libertarian libertine (just jokin', Martha) George Washington:

Of all the animosities which have existed among mankind, those which are caused by difference of sentiments in religion appear to be the most inveterate and distressing, and ought most to be deprecated.

Check out the links in the original.

By all means, Restore the Constitution- keep your God to yourself.  ¶ 8:54 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Back in Black

You may have thought the DARPA budget was kinky.

But the real hot stuff you'll never see- until it's too late.

Why?

Noah Shachtman says "The Defense Department is now spending more of its money on "black," or classified, programs than at any time since 1988.

"19 percent of the Pentagon's acquistion budget -- the money to research and buy things -- is being devoted to super-secret items, according to the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. That comes out to about 28 billion dollars, almost double what was spent in 1995...

"THERE'S MORE: 'The Defense Department is unable to track how it spent tens of millions of dollars in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere in the U.S. war on terrorism, Congress's top investigator said on Wednesday.'

Links in the original aren't included here, so surf over to Defense Tech and check it out.  ¶ 8:40 PM 0 comments links to this post

  DINOcrat Solutions Further Dominionist Agendas

Oliver Willis notes the stampede of the "me, too" DINOcrats to emulate the Wrepublican stance in attacking those Hollywood libertines.

Moralizing DINOcrats like Sullivan fall into the same category as Luddite DINOcrats like Kunstler.

They're right about some things: the soft- and hard-commercial sex industry is exploitive, and we are running out of fossil fuels.

But their solutions are dead wrong, their arguments use disinformation, and their attitude is contrary to democracy.

You take the wind out of the porn industry by taking the money out of it, not by squelching free speech and throwing loose people in jail.

You solve the energy problem by developing viable alternatives that are already out there, not by throwing up your hands and meekly returning to a pre-industrial agrarian (read feudal master and serf/slave ) society.

Sullivan, Kunstler, and by extension Lieberman and Nader, are wrong headed and DINOcrat and serving the Rovian Wrepublican Dominionist agenda.  ¶ 9:53 AM 2 comments links to this post

  Attempted Sucker Punch

In grilling the nascent war criminal wanna-be John Bolton, Attaturk has spotted an attempted set-up of John Kerry in the AP. Kos's joejoejoe has also picked up on this.

I assume this had its origins with Rove, it certainly stinks like his offal.

An AP reporter asserts:

"Committee Chairman Richard Lugar, R-Ind., and Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., both mentioned a name, Fulton Armstrong, that had not previously come up in public accounts of the intelligence flap.

It is not clear whether Armstrong is the undercover officer, but an exchange between Kerry and Bolton suggests that he may be.

In questioning Bolton, Kerry read from a transcript of closed-door interviews that committee staffers conducted with State Department officials prior to Monday's hearing.

"Did Otto Reich share his belief that Fulton Armstrong should be removed from his position? The answer is yes," Kerry said, characterizing one interview. "Did John Bolton share that view?" Kerry said, and then said the answer again was yes..."

But BuShCo has been after Fulton Armstrong for quite awhile, since he's on record dissing the missadministration about Cuba in 2003:

But why does the intelligence community appear increasingly to be in open revolt against the White House? If the political pressures are nothing new, why the unprecedented degree of protest?

Put it this way, with this White House, I see an outright pattern of bullying: Gen. Eric Shinseki, the former Army chief of staff, warned that the U.S. was going to need several hundred thousand troops in Iraq, and he's attacked for that, and basically told that he doesn't know what he's talking about -- and he's fired essentially a year before he's out of that job. When it's time for him to retire, not a single senior representative of the Department of Defense or White House leadership is there for his retirement. Then there was Thomas White, the secretary of the Army who was forced out. There was a senior CIA analyst by the name of Fulton Armstrong who was attacked, using leaks to the press, which alleged that he was disloyal and somehow under the influence of the Cuban government. There was a prosecutor [ousted from] the Department of Justice who had warned that John Walker Lindh's father had hired a lawyer and that [the DOJ] needed to consider the Miranda rights.

So what we've seen is a repeated pattern across different agencies, all with the apparent sanction of the White House, of going after anybody who's a critic, or who's seen as not being in tune with the administration's message. When people raise legitimate issues that may not be consistent with existing policy, instead of conducting a fair intellectual assessment of those issues, those people are attacked and their character is impugned.

In fact Armstrong basically got Plamed about Cuba in 2003 when he contradicted the White House's assesment Cuba was harboring Weapons of Mass Destruction to use against America.

Since then, Fulton Armstrong's job as a CIA Analyst has been in the public domain.

Both 2003 posts in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal are nicely presented here.

A dirty trick indeed, Mr. Bolton and Mr. Rove.

Somewhere in Hell, Richard Nixon is smiling. He loved a dirty trick and later hated Bu$hCo version 1.0 as preppy-pants rivals even though they served the same masters.  ¶ 5:59 PM 0 comments links to this post

  The Rude Pundit Reads Past the First Two Lines

And so, has a few things to say about them:

...The creepy intellectual wannabes of the conservative bathhouse known as the Heritage Foundation also see Hamilton as siding with them: "As Alexander Hamilton correctly noted in Federalist 78, it is the province and duty of judges to say what the law is rather than what they want it to be. Judges faithful to their constitutional role exercise legal 'judgment' to enforce the original understanding of the law." Do we need, really, to define the word "judgment"? Has it gotten that stupid? Well, yeah, since supporters of Ten Commandments fetishist ex-judge Roy Moore and the batshit insane Jesus babblers at the Family Research Council also quote Hamilton out of context...

Hilarious. Read it all.  ¶ 12:01 PM 0 comments links to this post

  DisInformation on the End of the World as We Know It

Riggsveda has a nice post on James Wolcott's admonition of Trouble Coming. But, I have a real disagreement with parts of Kunstler's description of the Long Emergency.

Agreed, we've peaked our world-wide fossil fuel supply. Unlike some estimates that say it's happening now, others say that may well have happened in 2003. Prices can only rise.

Fossil fuel is a finite resource- but fossil oil is originally produced by biological processes. Methane is continually being produced by living organisms, for example on the ocean floor. Biotechnology has long specialized in tailoring exotic organisms to produce unlikely products: for example, virtually every bit of "human" insulin sold to diabetics is produced in bacteria. And there are biological process that produce hydrogen using water and photosynthesis that biotechnology could develop.

There are alternative energy sources out there that could be developed on a scale to run a vibrant industrial manufacturing-based economy.

There is no reason to stop the advance of earth-friendly technology, nor to think that the development of alternative fuels is impractical, nor eventually return most the world to a pre-industrial state, but the oil companies sure want you to think it's inevitable.

Agreed, most the alternative fuel sources the Energy Companies like Halliburton talk about are infeasible.

They aren't trying- because they want to ride the wave down and stay on top.

Any development of a cheap alternative fuel source puts the Carlyle Group in the can.  ¶ 10:46 AM 1 comments links to this post

  Deconstructing Reconstructionists

Much ado has been made over the weekend about the gathering of the Faithful of the American Taliban- otherwise known as the Judeo-Christian Council for Constitutional Restoration- and it's call to Jeebus the Barbarian to deliver Judge George Greer "as the Apostle Paul said in First Corinthians 5, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, when you are gathered together, with the power of our Lord Jesus Christ, deliver such a one to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that his spirit may be saved in the day of our Lord Jesus."

Michelle Goldberg posted a great article on Salon about it; Truthout has a commercial-free version for us heathen to appreciate without ads.

But it's educational to read about. I'm leaving out the particulars of the Schiavo case for you to read at the Truthout site- the disinformation of the religious right is a tired litany having nothing to do with the facts of the case, which is why not even Wrepublican judges would support them. Instead, let us focus on the background the American Taliban advocates:

The Judeo-Christian Council for Constitutional Restoration is a new coalition whose membership includes major figures in the religious right. Jerry Falwell, Phyllis Schlafly and Ray Flynn, the former U.S. ambassador to the Vatican, are among those sitting on its executive committee. During the conference, though, the JCCCR's public face was interim chairman Rick Scarborough, the former pastor of Texas' First Baptist Church of Pearland. Scarborough, a close ally of DeLay, now runs a group called Vision America, which is working to mobilize a network of "patriot pastors" for nationwide political action. He's also the author of a booklet titled "In Defense of…Mixing Church and State." It argues that the belief that the Constitution provides for separation of church and state is "a lie introduced by Satan and fostered by the courts. Unfortunately, it is embraced by the American public to our shame and disgrace, and that lie has led us to the edge of the abyss."

The sense that America is on the cusp of chaos was nearly universal at the conference, leading to calls for a radical restructuring of American government. On panel after panel, speakers -- including Michael Schwartz, Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn's chief of staff -- demanded the impeachment of judges who disagree with the doctrine of Antonin Scalia-style strict constructionism. Several asserted the right of the president and Congress to disregard court decisions they think are unconstitutional. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy was excoriated with the kind of venom the right once reserved for Hillary Clinton.

On a Friday panel titled Remedies to Judicial Tyranny, a constitutional lawyer named Edwin Vieira discussed Kennedy's majority opinion in Lawrence vs. Texas, which struck down that state's anti-sodomy law. Vieira accused Kennedy of relying on "Marxist, Leninist, Satanic principals drawn from foreign law" in his jurisprudence.

What to do about communist judges in thrall to Beelzebub? Vieira said, "Here again I draw on the wisdom of Stalin. We're talking about the greatest political figure of the 20th century…He had a slogan, and it worked very well for him whenever he ran into difficulty. 'No man, no problem.'"

The audience laughed, and Vieira repeated it. "'No man, no problem.' This is not a structural problem we have. This is a problem of personnel."

As Dana Milbank pointed out on Saturday in the Washington Post, the full Stalin quote is this: "Death solves all problems: no man, no problem." Milbank suggested that Kennedy would be wise to hire more bodyguards...

One conference speaker was Howard Phillips, the hulking former Nixon staffer who helped midwife the new right. Years ago, Phillips, along with Richard Viguerie and Paul Weyrich, recruited a little-known Baptist preacher named Jerry Falwell to start the Moral Majority. Though he was raised Jewish, Phillips is now an evangelical Christian who told me he was profoundly influenced by the late R.J. Rushdoony, the founder of Christian Reconstructionism. "Rushdoony had a tremendous impact on my thinking," Phillips said. As time goes on, he said, Rushdoony's influence is growing.

Christian Reconstructionism calls for a system that is both radically decentralized, with most government functions devolved to the county level, and socially totalitarian. It calls for the death penalty for homosexuals, abortion doctors and women guilty of "unchastity before marriage," among other moral crimes...

The conference attendees took their warfare metaphors seriously. They exist in a parallel reality, with its own history and its own news, and in that reality, the Schiavo case dwarfs the war in Iraq or the budget deficit in its import. The Terri Schiavo story that has so galvanized them isn't the same one shown on CNN or reported in the New York Times. Rather, it was an act of, as one conference participant called it, state-sponsored terrorism, designed to demonstrate the court's terrible power to take life at will...

"Our founding fathers," he said, "they were going to take the word of God, and God has given us in the Bible his word, and they said this book will always be true, and if there is ever a close call in policy, in leadership, in law, in society, if there's ever a question, we want to look to the source of absolute truth. That's why the Ten Commandments are so important. They were the original source of American law."

That version of history is taught at Christian schools like Jerry Falwell's Liberty University, Gibbs' alma mater. It is also a virtual fairy tale. The Constitution contains not a single mention of God, Christianity or the bible. As the historians Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore wrote in their book The Godless Constitution, such secularism wasn't lost on an earlier generation of Christian conservatives, who decried America's founding document as a sin against God.

They quote Reverend Timothy Dwight, president of Yale College, who said in 1812, "The nation has offended Providence. We formed our Constitution without any acknowledgement of God; without any recognition of His mercies to us, as a people, of His government or even of His existence. The [Constitutional] Convention, by which it was formed, never asked even once, His direction, or His blessings, upon their labours. Thus we commenced our national existence under the present system, without God."

If the Judeo-Christian Council for Constitutional Restoration has its way, that present system will soon be coming to an end.

Why imagine secret conspiracies trying to take over the world when these lunatics gather by the hundreds right out in the open and pray for it?  ¶ 6:17 PM 0 comments links to this post

  The Nature of the Beast

TJ asked a really good question yesterday, and it's an issue I dance around a lot at this site.

Who's controlling whom? The Wrepublicans, or the Dominionists?

I think she has it right: Karl Rove's actions are those of a ruthless politician, but I'm cautious about using the term "controlled" by the Dominionists.

Rove is plenty ambitious all on his own. But what makes him particularly dangerous is that he realizes his limitations. He's lacking the personal charisma to be anything more than a power behind the throne.

But given his history and biases he's definitely one of the Dominionists. He has used their organization to climb to the top of the bloody pile. And he's a cold blooded killer of his own when they become a liability, as both TJ and Bob Fertik point out.

I think it's time to put my views on the Dominionists a little more in focus.

There's a lot of disinformation floating around in cyberspace. You often find succinct well documented accounts of the criminal activities of Bu$hCo on the same sites that espouse things that obviously aren't reality-based. For example, one of the best compilations about the coincidences of 9/11 occurs on a site where the author goes quite barking mad about occult connections on other posts. The Wrepublicans are more than happy to use sites like this to advocate that democrats in general are a bunch of raving moonbats.

On the other hand, organizations like the Klan and the more mainstream Council for National Policy are quite real. So are the American Enterprise Institute and the Project for a New American Century. So is the Carlyle Group.

These are organizations. They are conspiracies to change the world and, incidently, our nation and Constitution into what they think it ought to be. On the side, the individuals running these organizations also intend to gain one whole hell of a lot of power and money, and they're more than willing to use your religious beliefs and take your money and life to do it.  ¶ 8:59 AM 0 comments links to this post

  The Evil Powers of Judges Run Amok

Where is Tom DeLay to save us?

"Judicial independence does not equal judicial supremacy," Mr. DeLay said in a videotaped speech delivered to a conservative conference in Washington entitled "Confronting the Judicial War on Faith."

Mr. DeLay faulted courts for what he said was their invention of rights to abortion and prohibitions on school prayer, saying courts had ignored the intent of Congress and improperly cited international standards and precedents. "These are not examples of a mature society," he said, "but of a judiciary run amok."

I know I'm a couple of days late on this, but my right not to have my kids forced to pray the way Tom DeLay wants is an "invention of rights".

What a great invention, I say. Rank it up there with the Constitutional Bill of Rights. Which were, as I recall invented by people, along with the rest of Civilization.  ¶ 8:37 PM 3 comments links to this post

  The Rule of Law vs. the Rule of Faith

Digby had a great response to Joe Klein's condemnation ("The Democrats' relative silence on all this has been prudent, but telling. Their implicit position has been to err toward law.") of the Democrats during the Schiavo debacle.

"Would it be terribly politically incorrect of me to wish that Joe Klein would just succumb to his impending persistent vegetative state? I promise to let the Schindlers adopt him and they can pump his feeding tube full of homemade butterscotch puddin' 24/7 if he will just shut his burbling piehole.

"In spite of the fact that three quarters of the country were repelled by the Republican grandstanding in the Schiavo circus, Klein insists, as always, that it is the Democrats who have it wrong. We need to give 'careful consideration to what thoughtful conservatives are saying about the role of the judiciary in our public life.'...

...it was a curiously sterile pronouncement, bereft of the Congressman's usual raucous humanity. It exemplified the Democratic Party's recent overdependence on legal process, a culture of law that has supplanted legislative consideration of vexing social issues. This is democracy once removed.

"Huh? The libertine left is now overly dependent on the rule of law? WTF? And who says that liberals are supplanting legislative consideration of vexing social issues? We are happy to pass laws on all these things. But, we just have a little expectation that these laws should be constitutional that's all. We're not in favor of inflicting particular religious doctine on those who don't believe and we don't think that the government should intrude on purely private matters. If that's a 'culture of law' count me in.

"There must be some kind of computer program you can buy in DC that scolds Democrats like a drunk and bitter stepmother no matter what the circumstances. If there isn't, I'm going to invent one so that Joe Klein can spend even more time kissing the flatulent asses of sanctimonious Republican gasbags who insist that James Dobson and his zombie nation represent 'real" America...'

Go read it all.  ¶ 6:31 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Death Cult

What Frank Rich says in the NY Times today.

...Mortality - the more graphic, the merrier - is the biggest thing going in America. Between Terri Schiavo and the pope, we've feasted on decomposing bodies for almost a solid month now. The carefully edited, three-year-old video loops of Ms. Schiavo may have been worthless as medical evidence but as necro-porn their ubiquity rivaled that of TV's top entertainment franchise, the all-forensics-all-the-time "CSI." To help us visualize the dying John Paul, another Fox star, Geraldo Rivera, brought on Dr. Michael Baden, the go-to cadaver expert from the JonBenet Ramsey, Chandra Levy and Laci Peterson mediathons, to contrast His Holiness's cortex with Ms. Schiavo's.

As sponsors line up to buy time on "CSI," so celebrity deaths have become a marvelous opportunity for beatific self-promotion by news and political stars alike. Tim Russert showed a video of his papal encounter on a "Meet the Press" where one of the guests, unchallenged, gave John Paul an A-plus for his handling of the church's sex abuse scandal. Jesse Jackson, staking out a new career as the angel of deathotainment, hit the trifecta: in rapid succession he appeared with the Schindlers at their daughter's hospice in Florida, eulogized Johnnie Cochran on "Larry King Live" and reminisced about his own papal audience with MSNBC's Keith Olbermann.

What's disturbing about this spectacle is not so much its tastelessness; America will always have a fatal attraction to sideshows. What's unsettling is the nastier agenda that lies far less than six feet under the surface. Once the culture of death at its most virulent intersects with politicians in power, it starts to inflict damage on the living.

When those leaders, led by the Bush brothers, wallow in this culture, they do a bait-and-switch and claim to be upholding John Paul's vision of a "culture of life." This has to be one of the biggest shams of all time. Yes, these politicians oppose abortion, but the number of abortions has in fact been going down steadily in America under both Republican and Democratic presidents since 1990 - some 40 percent in all. The same cannot be said of American infant fatalities, AIDS cases and war casualties - all up in the George W. Bush years. Meanwhile, potentially lifesaving phenomena like condom-conscious sex education and federally run stem-cell research are in shackles.

This agenda is synergistic with the entertainment culture of Mr. Bush's base: No one does the culture of death with more of a vengeance - literally so - than the doomsday right. The "Left Behind" novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins all but pant for the bloody demise of nonbelievers at Armageddon. And now, as Eric J. Greenberg has reported in The Forward, there's even a children's auxiliary: a 40-title series, "Left Behind: The Kids," that warns Jewish children of the hell that awaits them if they don't convert before it's too late. Eleven million copies have been sold on top of the original series' 60 million.

These fables are of a piece with the violent take on Christianity popularized by "The Passion of the Christ." Though Mel Gibson brought a less gory version, with the unfortunate title "The Passion Recut," to some 1,000 theaters for Easter in response to supposed popular demand, there was no demand. (Back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that at many screens the film sold fewer than 50 tickets the entire opening weekend.) "Passion" fans want the full scourging, and at the height of the protests outside the Schiavo hospice, a TV was hooked up so the assembled could get revved up by watching the grisly original on DVD.

As they did so, Mr. Gibson interjected himself into the case by giving an interview to Sean Hannity asserting that "big guys" could "whip a judge" if they really wanted to stop the "state-sanctioned murder" of Ms. Schiavo. He was evoking his punishment of choice in "The Passion," figuratively, no doubt. It was only a day later that one such big guy, Tom DeLay, gave Mr. Gibson's notion his official imprimatur by vowing retribution against any judges who don't practice the faith-based jurisprudence of which he approves.

This Wednesday the far right's cutting-edge culture of death gets its biggest foothold to date in the mainstream, when NBC broadcasts its "Left Behind" simulation, "Revelations," an extremely slick prime-time mini-series that was made before our most recent death watches but could have been ripped from their headlines. In the pilot a heretofore nonobservant Christian teenage girl in a "persistent vegetative state" - and in Florida, yet - starts babbling Latin texts from the show's New Testament namesake just as dastardly scientists ("devil's advocates," as they're referred to) and organ-seekers conspire to pull the plug. "All the signs and symbols set forth in the Bible are currently in place for the end of days," says the show's adult heroine, an Oxford-educated nun who has been denounced by the Vatican for her views and whose mission is underwritten by a wealthy "religious fundamentalist." Her Julie Andrews affect notwithstanding, she is an extremist as far removed from the mainstream as Mel Gibson, whose own splinter Traditionalist Catholic sect split from Rome and disowned the reforms of Vatican II, not the least of which was the absolution of Jews for collective guilt in the death of Jesus.

It's all too fitting that "Revelations," which downsizes lay government in favor of the clerical, is hijacking the regular time slot of "The West Wing." Perhaps only God knows whether it will prove as big a hit as "The Passion." What is clear is that the public eventually tires of most death watches and demands new meat. The tsunami disaster, dramatized by a large supply of vivid tourist videos that the genocide in Darfur cannot muster, was so completely forgotten after three months that even a subsequent Asian earthquake barely penetrated the nation's Schiavo fixation. But the media plug was pulled on Ms. Schiavo, too, once the pope took center stage; the funeral Mass her parents conducted on Tuesday was all but shunned by the press pack that had moved on to Rome. By the night of his death days later, even John Paul had worn out his welcome. The audience that tuned in to the N.C.A.A. semifinals on CBS was roughly twice as large as that for the NBC and ABC papal specials combined. The time was drawing near for the networks to reappraise the Nielsen prospects of Prince Rainier.

If there's one lesson to take away from the saturation coverage of the pope, it is how relatively enlightened he was compared with the men in business suits ruling Washington. Our leaders are not only to the right of most Americans (at least three-quarters of whom opposed Congressional intervention in the Schiavo case) but even to the right of most American evangelical Christians (most of whom favored the removal of Ms. Schiavo's feeding tube, according to Time magazine). They are also, like Mel Gibson and the fiery nun of "Revelations," to the right of the largely conservative pontiff they say they revere. This is true not only on such issues as the war in Iraq and the death penalty but also on the core belief of how life began. Though the president of the United States believes that the jury is still out on evolution, John Paul in 1996 officially declared that "fresh knowledge leads to recognition of the theory of evolution as more than just a hypothesis."

We don't know the identity of the corpse that will follow the pope in riveting the nation's attention. What we do know is that the reality show we've made of death has jumped the shark, turning from a soporific television diversion into the cultural embodiment of the apocalyptic right's growing theocratic crusade.

I look on the fact that the Times published this as a positive development.

Maybe some Carlyle Group and CIA Company board members are starting to get creeped out by their Bu$hCo peers, too.  ¶ 3:16 PM 3 comments links to this post

  One Dominion to Rule Them All

Meet the Dominionists -- biblical literalists who believe God has called them to take over the U.S. government. As the far-right wing of the evangelical movement, Dominionists are pressing an agenda that makes Newt Gingrich's Contract With America look like the Communist Manifesto. They want to rewrite schoolbooks to reflect a Christian version of American history, pack the nation's courts with judges who follow Old Testament law, post the Ten Commandments in every courthouse and make it a felony for gay men to have sex and women to have abortions. In Florida, when the courts ordered Terri Schiavo's feeding tube removed, it was the Dominionists who organized round-the-clock protests and issued a fiery call for Gov. Jeb Bush to defy the law and take Schiavo into state custody. Their ultimate goal is to plant the seeds of a "faith-based" government that will endure far longer than Bush's presidency -- all the way until Jesus comes back.

"Most people hear them talk about a 'Christian nation' and think, 'Well, that sounds like a good, moral thing,' says the Rev. Mel White, who ghostwrote Jerry Falwell's autobiography before breaking with the evangelical movement. "What they don't know -- what even most conservative Christians who voted for Bush don't know -- is that 'Christian nation' means something else entirely to these Dominionist leaders. This movement is no more about following the example of Christ than Bush's Clean Water Act is about clean water."

What is Dominionism about?

Dominionism is a natural if unintended extension of Social Darwinism and is frequently called “Christian Reconstructionism.” Its doctrines are shocking to ordinary Christian believers and to most Americans. Journalist Frederick Clarkson, who has written extensively on the subject, warned in 1994 that Dominionism “seeks to replace democracy with a theocratic elite that would govern by imposing their interpretation of ‘Biblical Law.’” He described the ulterior motive of Dominionism is to eliminate “…labor unions, civil rights laws, and public schools.” Clarkson then describes the creation of new classes of citizens:

“Women would be generally relegated to hearth and home. Insufficiently Christian men would be denied citizenship, perhaps executed. So severe is this theocracy that it would extend capital punishment [to] blasphemy, heresy, adultery, and homosexuality.”[10]

Today, Dominionists hide their agenda and have resorted to stealth; one investigator who has engaged in internet exchanges with people who identify themselves as religious conservatives said, “They cut and run if I mention the word ‘Dominionism.’”[11] Joan Bokaer, the Director of Theocracy Watch, a project of the Center for Religion, Ethics and Social Policy at Cornell University wrote, “In March 1986, I was on a speaking tour in Iowa and received a copy of the following memo [Pat] Robertson had distributed to the Iowa Republican County Caucus titled, “How to Participate in a Political Party.” It read:

“Rule the world for God.

“Give the impression that you are there to work for the party, not push an ideology.
“Hide your strength.

“Don’t flaunt your Christianity.

“Christians need to take leadership positions. Party officers control political parties and so it is very important that mature Christians have a majority of leadership positions whenever possible, God willing.”[12]

Read the links, please.

Thanks to TJ for the links.  ¶ 9:11 PM 0 comments links to this post

  The Unitarian Jihad

Jon Carroll at SFGate got this in the mail:

Greetings to the Imprisoned Citizens of the United States. We are Unitarian Jihad. There is only God, unless there is more than one God. The vote of our God subcommittee is 10-8 in favor of one God, with two abstentions. Brother Flaming Sword of Moderation noted the possibility of there being no God at all, and his objection was noted with love by the secretary.

Greetings to the Imprisoned Citizens of the United States! Too long has your attention been waylaid by the bright baubles of extremist thought. Too long have fundamentalist yahoos of all religions (except Buddhism -- 14-5 vote, no abstentions, fundamentalism subcommittee) made your head hurt. Too long have you been buffeted by angry people who think that God talks to them. You have a right to your moderation! You have the power to be calm! We will use the IED of truth to explode the SUV of dogmatic expression!

People of the United States, why is everyone yelling at you??? Whatever happened to ... you know, everything? Why is the news dominated by nutballs saying that the Ten Commandments have to be tattooed inside the eyelids of every American, or that Allah has told them to kill Americans in order to rid the world of Satan, or that Yahweh has instructed them to go live wherever they feel like, or that Shiva thinks bombing mosques is a great idea? Sister Immaculate Dagger of Peace notes for the record that we mean no disrespect to Jews, Muslims, Christians or Hindus. Referred back to the committee of the whole for further discussion.

We are Unitarian Jihad. We are everywhere. We have not been born again, nor have we sworn a blood oath. We do not think that God cares what we read, what we eat or whom we sleep with. Brother Neutron Bomb of Serenity notes for the record that he does not have a moral code but is nevertheless a good person, and Unexalted Leader Garrote of Forgiveness stipulates that Brother Neutron Bomb of Serenity is a good person, and this is to be reflected in the minutes.

Beware! Unless you people shut up and begin acting like grown-ups with brains enough to understand the difference between political belief and personal faith, the Unitarian Jihad will begin a series of terrorist-like actions. We will take over television studios, kidnap so-called commentators and broadcast calm, well-reasoned discussions of the issues of the day. We will not try for "balance" by hiring fruitcakes; we will try for balance by hiring non-ideologues who have carefully thought through the issues.

We are Unitarian Jihad. We will appear in public places and require people to shake hands with each other. (Sister Hand Grenade of Love suggested that we institute a terror regime of mandatory hugging, but her motion was not formally introduced because of lack of a quorum.) We will require all lobbyists, spokesmen and campaign managers to dress like trout in public. Televangelists will be forced to take jobs as Xerox repair specialists. Demagogues of all stripes will be required to read Proust out loud in prisons.

We are Unitarian Jihad, and our motto is: "Sincerity is not enough." We have heard from enough sincere people to last a lifetime already. Just because you believe it's true doesn't make it true. Just because your motives are pure doesn't mean you are not doing harm. Get a dog, or comfort someone in a nursing home, or just feed the birds in the park. Play basketball. Lighten up. The world is not out to get you, except in the sense that the world is out to get everyone.

Brother Gatling Gun of Patience notes that he's pretty sure the world is out to get him because everyone laughs when he says he is a Unitarian. There were murmurs of assent around the room, and someone suggested that we buy some Congress members and really stick it to the Baptists. But this was deemed against Revolutionary Principles, and Brother Gatling Gun of Patience was remanded to the Sunday Flowers and Banners committee.

People of the United States! We are Unitarian Jihad! We can strike without warning. Pockets of reasonableness and harmony will appear as if from nowhere! Nice people will run the government again! There will be coffee and cookies in the Gandhi Room after the revolution.

Billmon suggests:

For the record, I should note that church members generally refer to themselves as Unitarian Universalists, although some of the more wacked-out splinter sects prefer the term Universalist Unitarian. (Not that there's anything wrong with that.)

Clearly, Unitarian Jihad has undergone some kind of savage internal purge. (By majority vote, no doubt, with minority views fully noted for the record.) That would also explain the wild rhetoric about "calm" and "moderation," and the ominous hints of future symbolic protest actions. What we have here is a ticking time bomb of thoughtful dissent, which could explode at any time.

I know, because I myself am a "rainbow diaper" baby, raised in a family of softcore Unitarian Universalists. I can see now that my parents were actually agents of a foreign power (reality) who should have been executed as traitors and spies. But for many years I was also a semi-hardened moderate activist, dedicated to the cause of world evolution.

Second thoughts (plus a generous grant from the Sarah Scaife Foundation) eventually led me to see the church for what it really is: a non-dogmatic, non-authoritarian institution sincerely, if politely, opposed to those traditional moral values -- hatred, intolerance, cruelty -- that have helped make Bush Country what it is today.

The closer I looked, the more I realized what a threat "UUism" posed to our red-state way of life. It hardly took a weatherman to see which way the wind was blowing inside the church: Potluck suppers, youth camp singalongs, respect-in-the-sanctuary training -- the whole liberal totalitarian tool set. So I got my family out, while there was still time.

Now I see how right I was. It seems some religions (Unitarian Universalism, Christian Science, the Teletubbies) just have a fatal attraction towards rationality. It's a disease -- a symptom of a backward culture in deep crisis, unable to cope with the xenophobic bigotry and fundamentalist superstitions of modern society.

Some people say we should destroy these intellectual terrorists -- invade their churches, kill their discussion leaders and convert them all at gunpoint to our mainstream conservative values. But that would be futile. Force is useless against the rational mind. The only thing these terrorists understand is cold, hard reason.

That's why the only solution, I'm afraid, is to hunt them down, one by one, and persuade them -- with massive, overwhelming logical firepower -- that resistance is futile, and that the archaic Enlightment values they hold dear are now as obsolete as democracy itself.

It won't be easy: Unitarian Jihad is cunning, and can count on the support of Bush Country's other mortal enemies: the Democrats (except Joe Lieberman, of course), the French, the liberal arts majors. But with time, and a relentless religious witch hunt, I'm sure this war can be won.  ¶ 6:18 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Twilight of the Enlightenment

Quoting Pharyngula quoting Donald Kennedy...

For much of their existence over the past two centuries, Europe and the United States have been societies of questioners: nations in which skepticism has been accepted and even welcomed, and where the culture has been characterized by confidence in science and in rational methods of thought. We owe this tradition in part to the birth of the Scottish Enlightenment of the early 18th century, when the practice of executing religious heretics ended, to be gradually replaced by a developing conviction that substituted faith in experiment for reliance on inherited dogma.

That new tradition, prominently represented by the Scottish philosopher David Hume, supplied important roots for the growth of modernity, and it has served U.S. society well, as it has Europe's. The results of serious, careful experimentation and analysis became a standard for the entry of a discovery or theory into the common culture of citizens and the policies of their governments. Thus, scientific determinations of the age of Earth and the theories of gravity, biological evolution, and the conservation of matter and energy became meaningful scientific anchors of our common understanding.

In the United States, that understanding is now undergoing some dissolution, as some school boards eliminate the teaching of evolution or require that religious versions of creation be represented as "scientific" alternatives. "Intelligent design," a recent replacement for straight-up creationism, essentially asserts that a sufficient quantity of complexity and beauty is by itself evidence of divine origin--a retrogression to the pre-Darwinian zoologist William Paley, who saw in the elegant construction of a beetle's antenna the work of a Creator...

Alternatives to the teaching of biological evolution are now being debated in no fewer than 40 states. Worse, evolution is not the only science under such challenge. In several school districts, geology materials are being rewritten because their dates for Earth's age are inconsistent with scripture (too old).

Meanwhile, President Bush's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief policies recommend "evidence-based" risk-reduction strategies: abstinence for youth, fidelity for married couples, and condoms recommended only for infected or high-risk individuals, such as sex workers. Failure rates for condoms are commonly quoted, apparently to discourage their use by young people for risk prevention. Mysteriously, the policy doesn't seem able to cite a failure rate for abstinence.

Finally, certain kinds of science are now proscribed on what amount to religious grounds. Stem cell research is said by its opponents to pose a "moral dilemma." Yet this well-advertised dilemma does not arise from a confrontation between science and ethical universals. Instead, the objections arise from a particular belief about what constitutes a human life: a belief held by certain religions but not by others. Some researchers, eager to resolve the problem, seek to derive stem cells by techniques that might finesse the controversy. But the claim that the stem cell "dilemma" rests on universal values is a false claim, and for society to accept it to obtain transitory political relief would bring church and state another step closer.

The present wave of evangelical Christianity, uniquely American in its level of participation, would be nothing to worry about were it a matter restricted to individual conviction and to the expressions of groups gathering to worship. It's all right that in the best-selling novels about the "rapture," the true believers ascend and the rest of us perish painfully. But U.S. society is now experiencing a convergence between religious conviction and partisan loyalty, readily detectable in the statistics of the 2004 election. Some of us who worry about the separation of church and state will accept tablets that display the Ten Commandments on state premises, because they fail to cross a threshold of urgency. But when the religious/political convergence leads to managing the nation's research agenda, its foreign assistance programs, or the high-school curriculum, that marks a really important change in our national life. Twilight for the Enlightenment? Not yet. But as its beneficiaries, we should also be its stewards.

Well said.  ¶ 5:31 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Slouching Towards Mammon

... Mammon led them on--
Mammon, the least erected Spirit that fell
From Heaven; for even in Heaven his looks and thoughts
Were always downward bent, admiring more
The riches of heaven's pavement, trodden gold,
Than aught divine or holy else enjoyed
In vision beatific. By him first
Men also, and by his suggestion taught,
Ransacked the centre, and with impious hands
Rifled the bowels of their mother Earth
For treasures better hid. Soon had his crew
Opened into the hill a spacious wound,
And digged out ribs of gold...
- Paradise Lost, Book i, 678-690

Stirling Newberry's come out with another fine analysis:

It makes many angry that, in a time when America seems to be strip-mining its environment, its credit and its people, we are ruled by the most reactionary American political party to take power since the days when strikers were shot by state militia units, a party that has chosen not to address any of these problems, but instead, tells us that all will be well.

For many, the theory of why this is happening centers around the top-down media system and its vitriolic faux populism that is used to cover an agenda of concentration of power and economic elitism, and an American public that is enthralled by the political machinations of the Republican Party. For others, the root cause is corporate-driven globalization, which sets the workers of different states and different nations against each other in a grim race to the bottom. It seems inconceivable to many writers that, in an era in which so much is headed in the wrong direction, the Republicans have been in the White House 6 of the last 9 terms, and have not lost control of Congress since the elections of 1994, except during a very brief period when the Democrats wrangled the Senate based on a party switch by a Republican. Not only this, but they have controlled the debate, pushing the Democratic Party farther and farther to the right. Even while the approval numbers of both Republican President and Republican Party are below 50% in recent polls, the media treats them with kid gloves, and the Democrats defer to Bush on what the agenda of the nation should be.

What has not been made clear to most people, even to many people who are following the deficits and problems in wages, is how all of these forces fit together and create an environment which is favorable to reactionary government and reactionary social movements. Americans are not as far to the right as the media portrays them, nor as far to the right as the Washington DC power structure behaves: Americans do not favor the war in Iraq, nor the Congress intervening in court cases, nor are they supportive of plans to cut Social Security benefits and turn the stock market into a giant uninsured savings program. And yet, the Bush agenda has moved relentlessly through Congress, and many Americans see Ronald Reagan through a haze of light, as if he set the country on a better road...

The key is not only oil, nor only money, nor only corporate concentration, but how each of these pushes the other along a cycle. Each one maintains the others in place. To understand how, it is important to look at the deficits that America faces.

The reality is that all of the deficit problems, the energy deficit, the trade deficit, the budget deficit, and the wages and wealth deficit, are connected, each one reinforcing the others. They cannot be solved piecemeal: increasing real wages will mean that Americans will burn more oil, and import more, which means a higher trade deficit. ..

The root of problem is that the American economy has become a giant "paper-for-oil" deal. We buy energy, both directly as energy, and indirectly by importing goods made more cheaply in other nations where people command a smaller bundle of energy...

Because America runs an energy deficit, and must import it, and we cannot export other goods to others to pay for it, we run a trade deficit. It is a problem because there is one scarce commodity which all others are denominated in: oil. Oil is scarce, not because there is not enough energy in the world, but because it is so much cheaper to extract energy from oil than from other sources, and oil can be used to transport goods and people.

The competition is not over scarce energy in itself, but over a particular form of energy which can be used to substitute for everything else. There is nothing in this world that one cannot get more cheaply by using more oil to get it - whether by importing it, mechanizing its production, or using more energy to extract it. ..

But what happens when America buys energy? What does that trade deficit mean? This is the second step of the vicious circle: while many nations sell some energy, a few nations export energy, but import virtually nothing. A nation like Nigeria, with a large population, does not pile up energy wealth because it has many demands on the flow of money coming in. A nation like Saudi Arabia on the other hand, which has a small population and a much greater concentration of the control of oil, piles up profits year after year. Those profits, rather than going into developing Saudi Arabia, are poured back into the US.

The reason oil causes a particular problem in the world economy is that one can make huge profits in an oil economy, without having the entire superstructure of a cosmopolitan, entrepreneurial, liberal and technological society around it...

This means the trade deficit creates an investment deficit: the US takes in more investment from the rest of the world than it sends out to the rest of the world...

However, with investment pouring in from nations where the investors are also the government, more and more control over the US economy at its highest levels is in the hands of the wealthy of nations like Saudi Arabia. Should they chose to pull their wealth from the US, or even simply stop rolling over their financing, the result would be a rapid drop in the value of US stocks and assets. This is what happened in the Summer of 2002...

To prevent investors in these countries from gaining control, the developed world, and particularly the US, is forced down a particular path: it must cut taxes on our wealthy, so that they match the taxes on the wealthy of Saudi Arabia. The "race to the bottom" starts at the top. This cutting of revenues is what drives the US budget deficit: without the reduction in revenues from upper-bracket tax rates being lowered, and without the interest on the National debt, there is no financial crisis. This means that the trade deficit, combined with the nature of a few energy exporting states, creates the budget deficit.

The money then comes back to the United States at the top of the economy - in the purchase of financial stocks primarily - and then filters downward. This "top down economy," called "trickle down economics," means that America cannot invest in getting out of the energy trap, because the very people who hold the purse strings have no interest in ending it...

...the reason Reagan won, and gradually pulled the media and much of the public mood behind him, was that in a world which is zero sum - and the amount of oil being the basis of profit meant it was zero sum - people become conservative, grasping at whatever bits of their bundle of ultimate scarcity they hold. It meant that allowing the rich to become richer was essential to keep America under the control of Americans. It meant that corporations had to be allowed to become larger and larger, so that they were harder and harder to hold accountable through political means...

The vicious cycle is this: that a cheap energy deficit created a trade deficit, creating an investment deficit, which then created the political pressure for a wages and wealth deficit, which, in turn, made the cheap energy deficit worse, and even more political pressure for even more inequality of wealth and to keep the one lever Americans still had - the ability to drive further to keep costs down, since they could no longer strike or organize to raise real wages. This started the cycle all over again. This is the key to the move to the right - by creating an economy which is determined by the scarcity of one commodity: oil, and a money system which bends around the dynamics of that one commodity, an environment is fostered in which people think as conservatives first...

And they not only gain power, they get filthy rich doing it.  ¶ 9:23 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Bad Ideas by Golden Gate

Sean Paul pointed out this really bad idea to me.

Just when you thought the Federal Election Commission had it out for the blogosphere, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors took it up a notch and announced yesterday that it will soon vote on a city ordinance (PDF) that would require local bloggers to register with the city Ethics Commission and report all blog-related costs that exceed $1,000 in the aggregate.

Blogs that mention candidates for local office that receive more than 500 hits will be forced to pay a registration fee and will be subject to website traffic audits, according to Chad Jacobs, a San Francisco City Attorney.

The entire Board is set to vote on the measure on April 5th, 2005. I wonder if they'll be forced to register their own blogs!

The legislation was written by Supervisor Sophie Maxwell.

That's

sophie.maxwell@sfgov.org
(415) 554-7670 - voice
(415) 554-7674 - fax

Drop her a line to tell her how much you love her.

This is the worst idea from a progressive since Conyers suggested a draft.

via kos.  ¶ 9:03 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Just the Same but Almost Completely Different

A majority of U.S. Catholics surveyed want the next pope to have a theological outlook similar to that of Pope John Paul II, but they would also like to see changes on issues such as birth control, stem cell research and allowing priests to marry, according to a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll released Sunday.
...

Asked about the selection of the next pontiff, a third said they want a pope who is more liberal, while just 4 percent said they want someone more conservative. More than half -- 59 percent -- said they want someone about the same as John Paul.

Seventy-eight percent said the next pope should allow Catholics to use birth control, 63 percent said he should let priests marry and 59 percent said the next pope should have a less-strict policy on stem cell research.

Fifty-five percent said the next pope should allow women to become priests, while 44 percent said he should not.
...

Respondents were split on the question of divorce. Asked whether the next pontiff, unlike John Paul, should allow Catholics to divorce and remarry, 49 percent said yes, while 48 percent said no.

In other words, Catholics also are part of the rising tide of conservative fundamentalism- like Opus Dei- sweeping the country.

Except, they aren't, mostly. Details, details... more than you need to hear from CNN, doubtless.

Thanks to Josh Marshall and Atrios.  ¶ 6:48 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Traditional 'Murikan Fun

One of the biggest private security firms in Iraq has created outrage after a memo to staff claimed it is 'fun' to shoot people.

Emails seen by The Observer reveal that employees of Blackwater Security were recently sent a message stating that 'actually it is "fun" to shoot some people.'

Dated 7 March and bearing the name of Blackwater's president, Gary Jackson, the electronic newsletter adds that terrorists 'need to get creamed, and it's fun, meaning satisfying, to do the shooting of such folk.' ...

It is one of the fastest growing private security firms in the world, and achieved global prominence last year when four of its men were ambushed by a crowd of Iraqis and their bodies mutilated and dragged around the Iraqi city of Falluja.

I can't imagine why.

Other Blackwater emails seen by The Observer, from last year, indicate the large market for civilian contractors in war zones. 'We will probably require at least 3000-4000 professionals above and beyond what we have in the Blackwater employment and resource system,' states one.

There are thought to be as many as 20,000 private enterprise soldiers in Iraq, with the US military an advocate of their use. This system allows governments to save money on paying permanent soldiers, and offers the political bonus that it is unlikely to attract as much media attention as conventional troops.

The media seems to disregard pretty much everything going on in Iraq that reflects poorly on Dear Leader, but...

According to figures current during the active war a year ago, the salary of a soldier in the lowest rank who has one year's service was $15,480 a year - only a thousand dollars more than the average pay for an usher in a movie theatre in the USA. The pay for an experienced corporal of three years of service was $19,980 a year.

For this, US soldiers are on the frontlines in Iraq, risking their lives; with over 700 dead, and many more returning home amputees and permanently impaired, they have much at risk, yet their nation recompenses them with minimal pay.

Meanwhile, the government pays private firms between $500 and $1,500 a day for the experienced military personnel they supply in Iraq. That works out to mercenaries who often earn between $150,000 and $250,000 a year.

And those are just the muscle guys we've contracted. Specialists make far more money. And when the going gets tough, the hired help get going... away, as fast as possible.

Since contractors are private corporations not directly included in the chain of command, they retain the right to refuse to perform certain operations. That is, they can quit at any time without fear of repercussions, whereas in the army, soldiers are required to obey orders. Refusal to perform generally occurs when the contractors consider the situation too dangerous, i.e. in a situation which could result in kidnapping and/or death. Unfortunately, this is also when their services are most needed. Consequently, at vital times, front-line soldiers find themselves without the support they require to perform their missions (GlobalPolicy.org). A career contracting officer, Colonel Steven Zamparelli stated in the Air Force Journal of Logistics, "Today, the military relies heavily on contractors for this support. If death becomes a real threat, there is no doubt that some contractors will exercise their legal rights to get out of the theater.

I know, I know, if we're not for them, we're against them. Support our troops and all that. Still, what color ribbon to put on the SUV for people who kill for fun and profit?

Thanks to rorsach for the link.  ¶ 7:36 AM 2 comments links to this post

  On the record- of Congress and those British Frenchmen, anyway.

Will Pitt has made a couple of nice posts- and some links to the British press- about how the CIA warned Bu$hCo that there were no WMD, and how they pushed it anyway.

White House 'exaggerating Iraqi threat'

Bush's televised address attacked by US intelligence

Julian Borger in Washington
Wednesday October 9, 2002
The Guardian

President Bush's case against Saddam Hussein, outlined in a televised address to the nation on Monday night, relied on a slanted and sometimes entirely false reading of the available US intelligence, government officials and analysts claimed yesterday.

Officials in the CIA, FBI and energy department are being put under intense pressure to produce reports which back the administration's line, the Guardian has learned. In response, some are complying, some are resisting and some are choosing to remain silent.

"Basically, cooked information is working its way into high-level pronouncements and there's a lot of unhappiness about it in intelligence, especially among analysts at the CIA," said Vincent Cannistraro, the CIA's former head of counter-intelligence...

...and...

Why the CIA thinks Bush is wrong
By Neil Mackay
The Sunday Herald

13 October 2002

The president says the US has to act now against Iraq. The trouble is, his own security services don't agree.

GEORGE Bush was about to be hoist by his own petard. It was Monday last week, and the president was glad-handing with the great and the good at the Cincinnati Museum Centre in Ohio as he waited to give one of his most bellicose speeches yet.

In the audience were Ohio state governor Bob Taft and a host of business and political luminaries. As the deadline approached for the Senate and House of Representatives vote on whether or not to give Bush the backing he wanted to attack Iraq, this speech was to be the president's final flourish in the propaganda war to get the US marching in line behind him.

Calling Saddam Hussein a 'murderous tyrant', he made it clear why America had to finish off the Iraqi dictator. 'Facing clear evidence of peril,' he told the audience, 'we cannot wait for the final proof -- the smoking gun -- that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.' He went on: 'We have every reason to assume the worst and we have an urgent duty to prevent the worst from happening.'

What Bush could not have guessed was that his claims that Iraq was intent on attacking the USA had already began to unravel. The denouement started a few days before, on Thursday, October 3, when Senator Bob Graham, chair of the Senate intelligence committee, metaphorically donned his hob-nailed boots and began delivering some well-aimed kicks to the head of George Tenet, the director of the CIA. The CIA, Graham said, were monkeying with democracy. The agency was not telling his committee what they needed to know about the Iraqi regime. Tenet was damaging the ability of Congress to assess the need for military action.

With one week until Congress voted on authorising Bush to use force, Graham was impatient. These are serious times, he said , and he needed serious answers. Graham and the committee had received an anodyne intelligence report from the CIA on the threat posed by Iraq the day before -- Wednesday, October 2. This, however, answered none of the questions the Senate committee wanted answered: would Saddam use weapons of mass destruction (WMD); how would his regime react if attacked; and what would be the consequences of war?

On October 9, almost a week after Tenet received his whipping at the hands of Graham, the senator's hardman approach paid off when the director of the CIA admitted that the only reason Saddam would use WMDs against the United States was if he was backed into a corner -- due to a strike by the American military -- and realised he was about to fall. Saddam, Tenet was saying, would only become the nightmare that Bush envisaged, if Bush attacked him first. Within two days, then, of Bush's flag-waving call to arms, his most senior intelligence officer had pulled the rug from under the biggest project of his presidency.

Tenet's admission left Bush in disarray with revelations making it appear as if the president was exaggerating the threat from Iraq, to say the least. Tenet, a loyal subject of the Bush administration, had no option but to come clean -- no matter how difficult a position it put the president in.

The CIA director's hands were tied on October 3 by Senator Graham, a democrat who represents Florida, when he told the CIA it was acting 'unacceptably', and added: 'We're trying to carry out a very important responsibility, and given the nature of this classified information, we are the only means by which the intelligence community can communicate to the legislative branch of government.'

There was no way that Tenet could play fast and loose with the Senate. Both the FBI and CIA have been attacked repeatedly in Congressional hearings since September 11 for a series of intelligence cock-ups.

Later on October 3, after Graham met with Tenet, his mood had changed -- Graham seemed to be cooler, calmer. He said the meeting had been frank and candid. What Graham wanted was a flavour of the classified National Intelligence Estimates, prepared by the National Intelligence Council, whose analysts report directly to Tenet. On Monday, October 7, around the time Bush was in Ohio cheerleading for war , Graham received just what he had been looking for -- it came in the shape of a letter from the CIA director. It made astonishing reading. Two days later, on Wednesday, October 9, the Senate intelligence committee voted to make the full text of Tenet's letter public.

Tenet's letter said he was declassifying selected material to help the Senate's deliberations on whether or not to support the president over attacking Iraq. 'Baghdad, for now, appears to be drawing a line short of conducting terrorist attacks with conventional or CBW (chemical and biological weapons) against the United States,' the declassified material read.

'Should Saddam conclude that a US-led attack could no longer be deterred, he probably would become much less constrained in adopting terrorist actions. Such terrorism might involve conventional means ... or CBW.

'Saddam might decide that the extreme step of assisting Islamist terrorists in conducting a WMD attack against the US would be his last chance to exact vengeance by taking a large number of victims with him.'

Tenet went on to declassify formerly secret evidence given at a closed hearing of the Senate's intelligence committee in which democrat Carl Levin, was told by a 'senior intelligence witness' that the 'probability ... would be low' of Saddam initiating a WMD attack. The agent also said the chances were 'pretty high' that Saddam would launch a WMD attack 'if we initiate an attack and he thought he was in extremis'. Tenet's revelations left the entire basis of Bush's call to arms in ruins, and the CIA director swiftly became an embarrassment to the president as the propaganda war backfired . Tenet was not deliberately trying to undermine Bush -- he was simply forced into a corner by the Senate and compelled to reveal his true understanding of the Iraqi crisis.

It's a good thing some people have memories longer than the last 5 minutes.

So Bu$hie can set up all the Commissions to cover his tracks he wants.

It's on the record. Some of us take notes. Bu$hCo's caught in another whopper- but if a whopper lands on the floor, and the mainstream media won't report it, does it make a mess?  ¶ 5:23 PM 0 comments links to this post