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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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?

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?

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.