Mighty, Like the Oak

Sometimes I feel as if Rush Limbaugh isn't entirely to be trusted

2009-06-11T15:49:00.010-05:00

Another day, another act of lone-wolf right-wing terror. In what is sure to a standard-issue argument from the right, Republican Party Leader Rush Limbaugh claims that the attacker was inspired by the American left. According to Limbaugh, you can make this connection because:

He hated both Bushes...he hated neocons...he hated John McCain...he hated Republicans, he hated Jews, as well. He believed in an inside job conspiracy of 9/11. This guy is a leftist, if anything...

Unfortunately for Rush, it does not take long to find von Brunn's connections to the world of right-wing extremism (emphasis mine):

(Von Brunn's) book, "Kill the Best Gentiles," is a screed against the Talmud and is dedicated to Revilo Oliver, a well-known denier of the Holocaust. Von Brunn's writings condemning "Negroes" and Jews were prolific...

...Todd Blodgett, a former Reagan White House aide who later worked with several extremist groups, met regularly with von Brunn in the 1990s and early 2000s.

"Von Brunn is obsessed with Jewish people," Blodgett said. "He had equal contempt for both Jews and blacks, but if he had to pick one group to wipe out, he'd always say it would be Jews."

Blodgett was part-owner of Resistance Records, which distributed music by white racist groups, and worked for Willis Carto, the founder of Liberty Lobby, a radical right group...

...Von Brunn apparently supported himself through much of the 1980s and '90s by distributing copies of the Spotlight, the Liberty Lobby's racist newspaper. "A lot of people like Von Brunn made some good money taking those around to senior homes, restaurants, gun shows and places like that," Blodgett said.

Unless the political scene has altered greatly, I don't believe aides to the Reagan administration, owners of white racist record companies, and frequenters of gun shows distributing racist literature are people regularly associated with the left wing, at least not since the Southern Strategy during the Nixon era.

Then there is this:

On Dec. 7, 1981, he (von Brunn) walked into the Federal Reserve headquarters on Constitution Avenue NW with a handgun and threatened to take members of the Board of Governors, including then-Chairman Paul A. Volcker, hostage.

Police said he had an 11-page document, which he characterized as an exposé of an "international bankers' conspiracy to rule all nations from one central seat of government." Court records said he intended to place them under citizens arrest and charge them with treason.

At his trial, von Brunn said that his goal was to "deport all Jews and blacks from the white nations" and that statistics on IQs of black and white Americans "proved that there is one race that is better than another." He also testified that "Jews were the greatest liars that have ever afflicted mankind."

This conspiratorial obsession with the Federal Reserve is a well known facet of right wing extremists, a much discussed and disseminated belief amongst right-wing "Patriot" groups and considered to be a key part of rule by ZOG (the so-called Zionist Occupational Government). These groups are right wing, consider themselves "real" Americans by virtue of the "organic" Constitution, and amongst other things, often believe the paper money printed by the Federal Reserve is counterfeit, part of a general belief about the sovereignty of America being usurped by outside (usually Jewish) forces long associated with the right wing in groups like the John Birch Society and the Posse Comitatus. It's the same belief system that explains the far right's obsession with leaving the United Nations, or their obsession with Mexico reconquering southwestern America.

Rush is, as usual, very careful in his choice of examples, focusing on targets-the Bushes, neocons, an inside job on 9/11-that are often associated with anger on the left, which can make his claim seem plausible on first hearing it. And that's the point-by weeding out the larger context of von Brunn's belief system and only focusing on a few disembodied, cherry-picked items, he can make it seem like this was an act of left-wing extremism, if you are inclined or wish to think it so. However, right-wing extremists were always suspicious of the internationalist Bushes, the mostly-Jewish neocons, and Israel. This by no means makes such people leftists.

Christian Terror: More Than Just Abortion Clinic Violence

2009-06-08T16:06:00.018-05:00

Blah. Engaging any argument made by Ann Coulter seems like an exercise in futility. However, this bit from her syndicated column on June 3 extends an idea that has been floated by conservatives often, especially during the height of the Bush II years, and I suspect that over time we'll hear a similar argument from the right over and over again, so it makes sense to take it on:

Why aren't liberals rushing to assure us this time that "most pro-lifers are peaceful"? Unlike Muslims, pro-lifers actually are peaceful.
According to recent polling, a majority of Americans oppose abortion - which is consistent with liberals' hysterical refusal to allow us to vote on the subject. In a country with approximately 150 million pro-lifers, five abortionists have been killed since Roe v. Wade.
In that same 36 years, more than 49 million babies have been killed by abortionists.

Let's recap that halftime score, sports fans: 49 million to five.
Meanwhile, fewer than 2 million Muslims live in America and, while Muslims are less murderous than abortionists, I'm fairly certain they've killed more than five people in the United States in the last 36 years. For some reason, the number "3,000" keeps popping into my head.
So in a country that is more than 50 percent pro-life - and 80 percent opposed to the late-term abortions of the sort performed by Tiller - only five abortionists have been killed. And in a country that is less than 0.5 percent Muslim, several dozen Muslims have killed thousands of Americans.

Let's dissect this. Coulter is attempting to call out liberals, who she claims are quick to tell conservatives that Muslims are generally peaceful, and that terrorist attacks on their part are the acts of extremists; she wishes to know why liberals don't make the same claim about the forced-pregnancy movement. Furthermore, she claims that while a majority of Americans oppose abortion, and a very large majority oppose the kind Tiller performed, there have been only 5 deaths of doctors who perform them; while a far smaller group of Muslims living in America have killed a greater number of Americans by far.

The point of all this is to extend the idea that Islam is a religion of violence, an idea the right in America disseminated in large quantities during the height of the Bush II administration-a tool in the attempt to "other" Muslims generally. By contrast, the forced-pregnancy movement, who liberals accuse of being a domestic terrorist movement according to her, is in her estimation the very picture of peaceful protest for change, based on the fact that the forced-pregnancy movement has only murdered 5 abortion-clinic workers. And, of course, liberals are the worst of hypocrites, simply the very worst, for protecting the larger reputation of Muslims in the wake of their terrorist acts, while not doing the same for forced-pregnancy advocates in the wake of their terrorist activities.

The problem with her position is that she has singled out extremism in the name of forced pregnancy as a movement unto itself, disconnected from any larger movement of right-wing Christian extremism; while she lumps all factions and beliefs within Islam together as if it is a monolithic whole, committed in full to the extremist viewpoints of Al Quaeda, all over the Muslim world from the Middle East to Indonesia. That's obviously a false comparison. Leaving aside the mistake of putting all Muslims under one classification, abortion-clinic terrorism is part of a larger, Christianist extremist movement that has as its target not simply abortion clinics but homosexuals, the federal government, or anyone who threatens "traditional values" as they interpret them (excerpt from NPR, May 2, 1995):

LYNN NEARY: It would be wrong to say that all groups on the extreme right are influenced by religion. The right-wing militias that have sprung up around the country vary widely, but there is evidence that some of them believe that the justification for their cause can be found in The Bible, a manual for setting up militias, which is distributed by a group called the Free Militia, begins with a quote from Jesus. The first chapter outlines the biblical inspiration and authority for forming a militia.

John White [sp] is an expert in terrorism, who also teaches Christian ethics at Western Theological Seminary in Michigan.

JOHN WHITE, Christian Ethics Teacher, Western Theological Seminary of Michigan: Many times the call to religion is a call to violence because the groups are so heavily involved in ontological arguments in the sense that they claim that the deity has chosen them to represent divine will, and they're also reflective of eschatological arguments, believing that they- the end times are upon humanity, in Christian terms that Armageddon is near, and they are ready to fight the final battle of creation for- for God and for America.

This view of the state of America's increasing moral degeneracy and a belief that the nation has strayed from its God-ordained path informs this movement, regardless of the target:

LYNN NEARY: The suggestion that religious freedom was involved at Waco resonates with the extreme right, says James Davison Hunter [sp], author of Culture Wars. Hunter says the underlying political philosophy of the extreme right is a belief that the government has lost its legitimacy in part because it has forgotten its religious heritage.

JAMES DAVISON HUNTER, Author, 'Culture Wars': Corresponding to this broader political philosophy are certain religious understandings about the nature of America and its history, a kind of historical philosophy, if you will, that views America as having been at one time Christian and departing from its Christian roots.

Abortion clinic shootings are but one aspect of a larger right-wing, Christianist-based brand of terrorism. The Christianist perspective regarding the direction they see America taking is what drives people like Shelley Shannon, Paul Hill, and Scott Roeder to do what they do, just as it motivated Eric Rudolph, just as it motivated Robert "Jack" Jackson and Doug Sheets in Shelby, North Carolina. And there clearly is an overlap between the tax-protester, sovereign-citizen movement, militia movement and Christianist beliefs that has contributed to violence such as the bombing of the Murrah building in Oklahoma City.

When Tiller's shooting is put in the proper, real context of Christianist-based terror in America, the number of similar terrorist acts committed jumps considerably-certainly well over Coulter's preferred number of five. This is, of course, excluding the threats and attempts that have been thwarted, of which there are many. Muslim extremists may have killed many Americans in one fell swoop on September 11, but Christianists have certainly tried to keep up over the years, so if their numbers lag behind those of Islamic extremists, its hardly for lack of trying.

Ann Coulter is aware of all of this. Her framing of the event is simply a little trick, a way for her to portray Islam as a religion of violence, liberals as hypocrites, and anti-abortion activists as peace-loving civil protesters all at once, by whiting out the context behind the act.

The real comparison, were she to make it, might be this: Much as all of Islam should not be stained by the acts of a few fool extremists in their midst, neither should all Christians be tainted by the acts of a few fool extremists in their midst. As for the forced pregnancy movement specifically, their rhetoric has been increasingly incendiary for years, in keeping with the rhetoric and actions of Christianist extremists generally, so I have no problem whatsoever with directly linking them with domestic terrorism. The blood of George Tiller is on their hands whether they acknowledge it or not.

George Tiller and Domestic Terror

2009-06-01T10:39:00.027-05:00

For someone who's first political awakening revolved around supporting abortion rights, this was depressing and sad, but not terribly surprising (not the part where his shooter was charged). The extremist right wing had started ramping up its violent rhetoric when it became clear that their side was not going to win in 2008, with some notable results.

Acts like this are terrorism. While the singular act of assassinating George Tiller had a specific material purpose in killing one of the few doctors in America willing to perform late term abortions, the more important motive and result is the instilling of fear amongst those that support abortion rights, or even amongst those who don't overtly support the right-wing Christian based forced-pregnancy movement. The choice of churches in both of the examples I linked to above is an important aspect of the overall timbre of the attacks (Sara Robinson, Orcinus):

First Knoxville, then this. Sherilyn Ifill once made the point that lynchings typically occurred on courthouse lawns as a symbol that the mob had overridden the authority of the state and taken justice into its own hands. So what does it mean when right-wing terrorists start gunning down progressives in the pews of their own churches? Two events do not a pattern make -- but if this keeps happening, it'll be clear that there's a message being sent...

...(Christian) fundamentalists have never been willing to recognize the legitimacy of other faiths.* And certain factions on the far right have never had qualms about vandalizing mosques or synagogues in order to harass Muslims and Jews into political and social silence.

But they used to leave Christian churches pretty much alone. The fact that this shooting occurred in a church (again) suggests that this tactic is now being tried out on more closely related faith groups whose views don't comport with the fundamentalist party line. As Dave has often pointed out, bringing violence to houses of worship is usually an overtly eliminationist act. They are trying to terrify liberals by making us feel at risk and unsafe inside our own spiritual sanctuaries -- the very places we go to feel the most security and peace. This is terrorism, plain and simple -- Christian fundamentalist terrorism, committed by people Sam Smith has started referring to as "Jesus's Jihadis."

Sara Robinson hits the right points, because terrorism is only partially about the violent act-it is also about the symbolism. If you are a terrorist, what you do, how you do it, and where you do it are all important facets of sending a specific message to your opponents-if you don't believe as we believe, or if you are not just like us, you are not safe, even in the sanctuary of a church, a previously near-untouchable target.

Seeing this act for what it really was-a stepping-up in the extremist right-wing of it's intent to resort to violence-is of the utmost importance, partially because of the way America's democracy works, and partially because of the nature of leaderless resistance. In order to ensure that a broad array of political voices can be heard without retribution, our nation's Çonstitution allows for almost unlimited political, social and artistic voice, regardless of how extreme it may be. While this is in the main a good feature of our democracy, it does allow for the use of scapegoating, nativism and claims of un-Americanism to be used as weapons to gain political advantage. The freedom that allows for vigorous political debate also allows for this kind of low manipulation-it is part of the bargain that we strike in America to run a workable democracy. And ultimately, rhetoric is only rhetoric. Rush Limbaugh may be a lying asshole, Michelle Malkin may write a book in favor of interment camps for Muslims, Ann Coulter might wish publicly for the New York Times to be bombed, but their words, no matter how vile, don't make their opponents disappear (though they clearly wish for this to be so). In fact, if the last two elections are any indication, Americans have rejected their message in large numbers. But therein lies the problem-rhetoric about liberals and attempts to associate Barack Obama with terrorists or to claim he isn't really an American, and attempts to demonize liberals generally, didn't do the job.

The conundrum between the need for almost unlimited speech freedom, even in the case of liars or violently-oriented people; and the degree to which eliminationist rhetoric and resentment over the loss of power can lead to acts of violence; demands that the terms of the debate be very clear and as truthful as can be. This is why it is important to define acts like killing George Tiller as terrorism. Because that is what this was-an act on the part of right-wing, Christianist extremists to send a message to their opponents that they are not safe from extra-governmental acts of violence, including death. And if it is not seen and understood as such amongst the broader public, and not reported that way in the media, it will be very difficult to fight it effectively on the rhetorical battleground, where the seeds for future terrorist acts are either sown or washed away.

This act should be defined as terrorism because of its symbolic intent. All acts of terrorism are intended to do this-it is what defines terrorism, as the very word connotes the spreading of terror and fear within a population, through targeting that population for violent or intimidating acts. The social or political motivations can vary, as can the degree of organization, but the effort of the tactic itself is always the same-to intimidate. To that end, symbolism is key. For example, during the height of the lynching era in the American south, many of the lynchings had a highly public element:

On 2 April 1899, approximately two thousand white men, women, and children participated, as both witnesses and active agents, in the murder of Sam Hose in Newman, Georgia. Sam Hose was burned alive. In the final moments of his life, the assembled crowd descended upon his body and collected various parts of it as souvenirs. The Springfield (Massachusetts) Republican recounted the scene of Hose's dismemberment in the following manner:

Before the torch was applied to the pyre, the negro was deprived of his ears, fingers and genital parts of his body. He pleaded pitifully for his life while the mutilation was going on, but stood the ordeal of fire with surprising fortitude. Before the body was cool, it was cut to pieces, the bones were crushed into small bits, and even the tree upon which the wretch met his fate was torn up and disposed of as "souvenirs." The negro's heart was cut into several pieces, as was also his liver. Those unable to obtain ghastly relics direct paid their more fortunate possessors extravagant sums for them. Small pieces of bones went for 25 cents, and a bit of liver crisply cooked sold for 10 cents.

Seven months later in December 1899, the New York World, in an article entitled "Roasted Alive," reported on the similar fate of Richard Coleman in Maysville, Kentucky, before a crowd of "thousands of men and hundreds of women and children." The article noted that "Long after most of the mob went away little children from six to ten years of age carried dried grass and kindling wood and kept the fire burning all during the afternoon." It also revealed that "Relic-hunters visited the [End Page 639] scene and carried away pieces of flesh and the negro's teeth. Others got pieces of fingers and toes and proudly exhibit the ghastly souvenirs to-night."3 In a 27 February 1901 Chicago Record article on the hanging and burning of George Ward before a crowd of four thousand people in Terre Haute, Indiana, the newspaper gave the following account of the scene of Ward's murder:

When the crowd near the fire tired of renewing it after two hours, it was seen that the victim's feet were not burned. Someone called an offer of a dollar for one of the toes and a boy quickly took out his knife and cut off a toe. The offer was followed by others, and the horrible traffic was continued, youths holding up toes and asking for bids.
(Harvey Young, The Black Body as Souvenir)

This kind of highly public, grisly killing was integral to maintaining the subordinate status of African Americans in the south. The actual amount of lynchings, though substantial, was not nearly enough to eradicate the presence of black people in the south, and in any case, this would not have been desirable, as their labor was needed:

There was, however, no possibility that a color line could be drawn literally; blacks in the south could not be locked out or driven away, because the south's economy was tottally dependent on their labor, and no definition rooted in biology could successfully be used to assign every individual his or her proper place (J. William Harris, Ettiquette, Lynching, and Racial Boundaries in Southern History: A Mississippi Example).

Thus, to demarcate the "color line" in a manner that would effectively render blacks subordinate without literally driving them out of the south entirely, highly ritualized acts, like those described above, acted as a symbolic warning. Similarly, the choice of targets or dates of acts will be imbued with symbolic meaning. Al Quaeda could have chosen any of millions of targets within America-it chose the World Trade Centers and the Pentagon, symbols of America's economic and military might. An attack like that will not, as a singular event, cause the existential destruction of the U.S., nor would Al Quaeda believe that it would. Rather, by choosing those particular symbols of America, they are attempting to send a message, both about their grievances with the U.S., and, in the case of the Pentagon, about what little security military strength can really provide, even on your home turf, when faced with dedicated, extremist religious fundamentalism mixed with a willingness to resort to violence. So too is the assassination, in his church, of Tiller such a symbolic act, with the same desired result. Christianist extremists are attempting to sow insecurity amongst the population, specifically the non-Christianist, non-forced pregnancy supporting population, choosing a highly significant target imbued with meaning and with a well-known history for his part in this particular struggle.

Unfortunately, there is already some resistance to calling this act terrorism, as will be seen below. During the mid to late 1990s, acts like this and the Oklahoma City bombing were often commonly described as domestic terrorism. However, the election of George Bush, who the extreme right wing found more favorable, tamped down much of the right-wing militant activity, and thus it was not so much in the media spotlight. Furthermore, the rise of Islamic terrorism in the public consciousness after 9/11 pushed memories of that era out of the public mind.

An equally difficult hurdle to overcome is the "lone wolf" image that singular acts such as this are often described as. This muddies the waters in correctly defining acts like this, even amongst people who may be otherwise sympathetic to Tiller, like in this exchange from Rachel Maddow's show on June 1:

JONATHAN TURLEY, GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR: Hi, Rachel.
MADDOW: I`m making these observations politically just as a citizen, but I wanted to ask you tonight if it`s legally appropriate, legally useful, to approach this problem as terrorism?
TURLEY: Well, in some cases, it is. You know, some of these past cases have elements of terrorism. Rudolph is a good example of that -- although, you know, he was not just anti-abortion, he was anti-homosexual. He was sort of at war with the world. And that makes this definition a little more difficult.
Some of us, particularly on the civil libertarian side, are uncomfortable with using the terrorism label because, you know, the Bush administration expanded this definition to the breaking point. I testified not long ago in Congress of how the Bush administration would classify what were rudimentary criminal cases as terrorism cases and use these laws against them.
The problem we have, as you know, is to deal with lone actors like this. I don`t believe that the man who killed Dr. Tiller was a classic terrorist. I think that he was a murderer. He assassinated him.
But I don`t see the elements of an organized terrorist plot. And in many ways, he`s the most dangerous thing that we face.

or another example here, from CNN on May 31st, before his shooter was apprehended:

MIKE BROOKS, CNN SECURITY ANALYST (via telephone): You know, Don, what you just heard from that great affiliate reporter who has been working hard on this story, that he did wear a bulletproof vest, and he was shot in the head.
So to me, that says it's someone who probably had been looking at him, knew his actions. This subject has also apparently had been seen there at the church.
So it's probably someone that he knew, had some contact with, or someone who was actually planning this for quite some time.
But you talked about back, and we talked Don back in 19'84. I was on the FBI joint terrorism task force in Washington, D.C. and was involved in an investigation that dealt to see whether or not there was a nationwide conspiracy to kill abortion doctors and to bomb abortion clinics.
LEMON: That was called VAAPCON, right? Violence Against Abortion Providers Conspiracy. It was a grand jury, right, in that case?
BROOKS: That's correct, Don. It was a grand jury that was sitting in the eastern district of Virginia.
The investigation lasted for almost two years, and there were about 13, roughly 13 subjects that we were looking at, to say, OK, are these people involved in a conspiracy?
After the investigation, a little over two years, it was decided that, you know what, there is not a conspiracy. These were all basically lone actors, because it started right after July, 1994, Paul Hill in Pensacola killed Dr. John Britain. And right after that, there had been a bombing of an abortion clinic falls church. And that's when we decided -- the Justice Department decided we have to take a closer look.
LEMON: Paul Hill was the first -- I believe he was the first man, or the first person who got the death penalty for killing an abortion provider. So that's very interesting.
So this tells you -- you're saying this guy acted alone, maybe with some sort of vigilante, and was following this guy, and just had a vendetta and wanted to get him.
BROOKS: Just hearing what I'm hearing right now, Don, that's what it sounds like.

and further on down, here:

LEMON: I was wondering if it was going to change, and it might change that.
Bill, in the short time that we have left, talk to me about -- you said both sides will be tamping down and really monitoring themselves. But does this offer and fodder for either side in this issue?
SCHNEIDER: Well, I think it would be unfortunate if people exploit what was possibly, likely an individual act of violence. I don't think you can characterize it as a policy on the part of abortion opponents.

These statements skirt around the issue, and in the last statement, deny, the reality of the leaderless resistance movement in America. In this permutation of right-wing extremist terror, groups are made up of cells of 2-6 people, working autonomously for an understood goal, but without any centralized plan:

Leaderless resistance ensures that the larger movement can never be concretely linked to these individual acts. The important connection, though, can easily be found on a broader scale...

"There is a problem talking about 'a conspiracy' or 'a national conspiracy,'" says Michael Reynolds, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center's Klanwatch arm. "What we may have, looking at the overall pattern, are several conspiracies."

The arsonists (church arsonists in the 1990s) rely on leaderless resistance: "It's a guerrilla strategy. Instead of a top-down structure, you have cells of two to six individuals going out and committing whatever acts they choose, whether it's assassination, robberies, arson or bombings...
(In God's Country, Dave Neiwert)

This concept of leaderless resistance reaches back to at least 1992, in the aftermath of the Ruby Ridge meltdown. The keynote speaker in the meeting in Estes Park, Colorado was former Klan leader Louis Beam, an early proponent of leaderless resistance:

This Louis Beam (sp) created this plan, he wrote it out in one of his last publications when he was the leader of the Klan, called "The Seditionist." And what it means is that small groups, with no leaders that can be caught and topple the whole group, will go out and plan their own acts of domestic terrorism and act when they feel like they should act, based on the conditions and the material. And the purpose of the movement, in its many postings on the Internet and the World Wide Web and the publications and videos and books they sell, is to give inspiration to the Timothy McVeighs in our society. (National Press Club Luncheon Speaker Morris Dees, APRIL 16, 1996)

It's important to remember that while there is no centralized plan to this kind of terrorism, as there would be with a group such as Al Quaeda, there is a generally known and understood concept of action that its adherents recognize and act on, disseminated through literature and the internet. Thus, these actors, whether they be lone wolves like Paul Hill or small groups like those linked to the bombing in Oklahoma City, know what to do and can plan their attacks without having to be told by a central leader or committee.

Abortion clinics have often been targets of this kind of terrorism:

Attacks on abortion clinics and their workers are perhaps less common but often command more attention, especially when they entail horrifying murders like Paul Hill's fatal shotgun attack on Dr. John Britton and his escort, James Barrett. Hill is only one of several anti-abortionists who have used lethal force agains clinics and their employees: John Salvi III killed two women in two gun attacks on abortion clinics in Brookline, Massachusetts, in 1994; Michael Griffin, a onetime associate of Hill, fatally shot abortion doctor David Gunn in 1993...A Grants Pass, Oregon, woman named Shelley Shannon shot and wounded a Wichita, Kansas, abortion doctor in 1993; from prison, her correspondence to other anti-abortionists has indicated a nationwide underground network of like-minded activists inclined to commit violence against abortion workers. One of these groups linked to Shannon, the Army of God, later claimed credit for setting off pipe bombs at an abortion clinic and a gay nightclub in Atlanta.

While I am sympathetic to claims of civil libertarians that the Bush Administration stretched the definition of terrorist to the breaking point, the specific issue regarding the Bush Administration revolved around using such definitions to grab unprecedented executive power, for which the terrorism issue acted as a tool. Such expansion of executive power is a real problem, but it is a separate one. By no means should it allow us to shy away from calling acts like the murder of George Tiller terrorism. Terrorists use violence as a way of "achieving a radical change in the status quo, which would confer a new advantage, or the defense of priveleges they perceive as threatened" (Martha Crenshaw, The Strategic Logic of Terrorism). There is no doubt that acts like this are an attempt to both confer a new advantage and to protect privileges right-wing Christian extremists perceive to be under attack.

Paragraph after paragraph of self-justifying crapola

2009-05-27T14:45:00.014-05:00

Well. According to blogger, it looks as though the last time I actually attempted this was in 2007. About 2 years have passed since my last post. After such a long time not blogging, and given the fact that my skills at such were not strong, it would be a fair question to ask exactly why I decided, now, out of nowhere, to begin this again. After all, the form is no longer remotely novel. I have not shown in the past I have anything particularly new or insightful to add to the world of political discourse. My older posts were generally poorly constructed rants-frankly, most are embarrassing to me now that I read them again-not the opinions necessarily, but the way I wrote them and the lack of real thought I put into them, and my tendency to follow the lead of, or to be more precise, completely rip off, other more established, higher-quality blogs. Furthermore, when I started 3 or whatever years ago, I had visions of truly making an impact on our political world, using my insight and knowledge to help establish a new progressive way of thinking-with all of the attendant prestige that such influence would bestow. Unfortunately, my output was, well, what you see on this blog-which is to say, it was at the low end of mediocre. Given this, I now have no such delusions of grandeur. I can't even remember why I had them in the first place.

Furthermore, the tone of my previous writing was, well, bizarre. It's like I was shouting on a street corner. I've been forced to write throughout my life on many occasions, and I can honestly say I have never written like this before or since. It's hard for me to believe that I actually made any of this tripe public. It might have been ok for, say, a diary or personal journal or something, but I put these things in places where people could actually read them. Considering that I made all kinds of pronouncements about the State of The World Today for all the world to read, you might think I would put a little thought into it. But you would be wrong.

On top of the fact that my skills were lacking, the fact is that, as I mentioned above, blogging on politics is not a new or novel idea anymore. The medium is beyond saturated, and there is a well-established hierarchy of elite bloggers with large followings. While there are far better reasons to do this than to garner attention, the blog medium's most useful (to me) innovation is the comment thread, where the ideas of a post can be debated by readers and the original writer. Without readers who are willing to criticize and comment (hopefully constructively, with solid logic or information), I would be writing journal entries again, only in a place where people could read them and snicker. But any hopes I might have of attracting a group of readers would have to be minimal at this point, as the limited market for political blog readers has almost certainly been comprehensively reached by now. This was probably the case a few years ago, when I started writing here, but at least then there was some general buzz about those new-fangled blog thingamajigs. At least to me, the idea of writing political commentary on a blog that people might actually read seemed so COOL, and I just wanted to get going RIGHT NOW!!, so much so that I just started writing posts and linking to things, often without completely reading them. That exciting time, when it seemed that this was a Wave Of The Future upon which brave souls such as myself could ride, is well over, and now I wonder if it just wasn't something that largely existed in my head. Now, the idea of a left-leaning hack blathering on a blog is of no consequence at all-I would be one of thousands, doing something that most people feel they can go back to ignoring, now that a Socialist Muslim used ACORN to commit voter fraud to get into the Presidency and force us into FEMA camps. Why read this little nobody when there are other writers in blogoland of greater consequence and influence?

And thus, why should I bother? I just spent three paragraphs making a convincing argument that I had no business writing a blog, so why have I decided I would anyway? And furthermore, why explain why? If I wanted to start again, couldn't I have just started posting again? Why this infernal metablogging? Don't I have other things to do? Is my life really this empty?

Actually, no. I have a lovely wife I love; a beautiful six month old son with gorgeous blue eyes, ridiculously fat cheeks and a hilarious, maniacal giggle; and I am in school to become a teacher, which I am really excited about. My life is fuller and more satisfying than it has ever been. This lengthy explanation is about something else. I really just think that my previous writing was really, really bad. It was just junk. It was bad enough that I think it merits some explanation, or at least acknowledgement. And I think that starting again after such a long (and unlamented) hiatus requires some justification. Based on my previous work, anyone reading me would have to have thought I was an idiot. I look at it this way: If someone reading me agreed with me, that meant they already agreed with me in the first place. Anyone that didn't agree with me would certainly not have walked away convinced. And, worst of all, anyone that was on the fence about a subject would have had little reason to think I knew what I was talking about, and thus would have had no reason to listen to me. I might have been trying to provoke thought, but I mostly provided unintended comedy.

So, why would I risk further embarrassment? There are some actual reasons, and now that I no longer think that I am going to build some massive, adoring following, I can pursue them without trying to be clever, which is good, since I am not. The first reason is simply because I want to have a forum to organize my thoughts on things I find important. There are things in the world I find important; I'd like to force myself to figure out what I think of them. While I could do this in a journal or something like that, doing this in a public forum will force me to be more careful. Why I think that will make a difference I don't know, since it didn't before, but maybe this time it will stick. Also, the occasional presence of comments is, again, from my perspective, a truly useful tool. At least, I think so theoretically. It might turn out that people tune in simply to call me a douche bag. True that may be, but it will hardly help me to organize my ideas. And it will make me cry. But, that's a chance I will have to take.

The second reason I have decided to re-start my silly little blog is because I wish to construct a political and social narrative that reflects my beliefs and ideas about the world and how it works, including the way I think it should work. I also want to build a counter-narrative to those narratives that I think impede my vision of the world. The mainstream media has, by and large, accepted the narrative presented by America's right wing in an often undiluted format since at least the 1980s, and during that span it usually had a monopoly on how events were presented. Until blogs, few alternative ideas made it through that noise. The rise of left wing blogs was a godsend for people like me who felt, during the Bush II administration early on, that the world had completely lost its bearings altogether. Obviously, times have drastically changed since I first attempted this. The economic crisis is the most important issue of the day, as opposed to the Iraq War a few measly years ago, there is a new president, the Republicans have been reduced to idiotic theater like teabagging, and all of that original anger that served as the original impetus to start blogs a few years ago is different. It is a far more established medium, and I'm not sure I would have much to add to it.

Yet here I am doing it anyway, at great length, wasting all manner of time justifying this excursion. Lord, make me get to the end. In any case, another reason I want to waste precious space is, well, because I am just egocentric enough to think I might be able to contribute to a general store of knowledge. I like knowing and learning things, I formulate opinions about those things, and I want to write about them. Furthermore, as I am back in college to get a new degree, I have access to our university library's resources, including all kinds of scholarly articles, books, etc., all on the magical internet, right at my fingertips. I could quote from obscure journals! I could post someone else's charts! I could footnote! I could write at the level of a hung-over college junior! How exciting! Ok, not really exciting. Perhaps not even interesting. But anyway, I actually enjoy writing in that way, and doing the research, and having to think things through and then presenting them to a potential audience. Given that, it makes sense to write on a blog. Since I am now freed from feeling I have to make some kind of immediate impact, I am free to write on topics in a broader way. Since I am freed from feeling I will ever draw an audience, I can fill paragraph after paragraph with self-indulgent pablum like this, or drone on in the stilted style of a scholarly journal-I mean, who really cares? Who is really reading this anyway? And could it really be any worse than, say, David Broder's work? Or George Will's?

Oh, my, yes. Yes it very well could.

So, what will I be blogging about? I really don't know. Some people have subjects they specialize in or have expertise in. I don't have those particular advantages, so I really don't know where this will take me (although hostility towards Evangelical Christianity will certainly make repeat appearances). Well, politics will come up. I won't attempt to be current-events driven, because that takes up a lot of time I won't have. My topics will have to be broader. I am hoping that writing on various subjects will help me develop a theme that I can pursue in greater depth-more than one, hopefully. I will also probably throw in posts about my mundane life, like stories about how I was riding my bicycle on a training ride when I was T-boned by a pickup truck, and then I had to be taken to the hospital, and then, when I went to the police station later that night to pick up my wreck of a bike and write out a police report, I was arrested on a four-year-old contempt of court charge (this is all true, by the way). Since stupid shit like that happens to me all the time, it will probably find its way into this blog.

And that, mercifully, wraps up this bright new beginning. As anyone could see, I have set the bar low, in a very obvious attempt to make even barely competent writing seem like a success. Hopefully, I will be able to clear that bar in the future.

Mitt and His Magic Moment

2007-12-07T16:55:00.001-06:00

I wanted to write something witty and clever about Mitt's so-called "Kennedy Moment." However, since I lack cleverness or wit, I'll defer to the great Charles Pierce, who crystallizes my thoughts exactly:

Hey, Mitt. They think your religion is a cult and they think you're pretty much a foof. They're always going to think that, even when and if you're the nominee and some of them beg their Personal Lord And Strength Coach for permission to vote for you. Ain't going to be pretty, son. I feel for my former governor. I truly do. He's taking an unfair rap for his religion, and an unfair rap for his gardeners, all in the same week. However -- and it is a big However -- he's the one who decided to run for the nomination of a party that has enthralled itself to shoeless fundamentalist rubes and anti-immigration yahoos. He could have gone two ways. He could have stood against this and argued, correctly, that the GOP is on its way to becoming a regional, racialist-based, minority party. (The approach John McCain briefly tried on in the aftermath of the 2000 South Carolina primary, but which he thereupon abandoned for the next seven years.) He could have done us all a favor and Souljah'ed the lunatic portions of his base. He had the money and the record to do it. Instead, he pandered, over and over again, to the crazy people, and now the crazy people are acting like crazy people act, and all the chickens are coming home to roost on his handsomely chiseled head.

Further, the endless fake parallels to John F. Kennedy's speech to the Baptist ministers are as ahistorical as they are clumsily drawn. Kennedy was addressing a still-extant cultural anti-Catholicism in the South and nativist Know-Nothingism in the North that had remained virulent within his lifetime. He was addressing his speech to the entire country and, if you read it very carefully, you discover that he essentially was telling the Baptist ministers to go to hell, that they were crackpot religious bigots whom he very subtly marginalized from a changing political process. Most of what he told them they didn't really believe, and he knew it, and they knew it. Kennedy wasn't appealing for their support. He was warning them that their stale religious prejudices were being left behind in the New Frontier. As is plain from the text to everyone except, apparently, David Brooks, Romney's speech was narrowly aimed at garnering the support of an important slice of the base he needs to win his party's nomination. The deliberate misreading of the Constitution. The Meacham-esque blathering about the religiosity of the Founders. The monumentally indiscreet -- and philosophically risible -- equation of freedom with public god-babbling. This is all nothing except more pandering. And shouldn't someone making this facile comparison point out that Romney is a Mormon bishop and is thus tied more closely to his church's power structure than Kennedy ever was? I mean, Jack wasn't even a very good Catholic. Gene McCarthy was right about that.

That's pretty much it in a nutshell. That Mitt would say there should be no religious test, then would basically turn around and say that there should be a religious test and that he passes! is basically what I expected. This parallels the immigration debate, where Bush was hoping that he could bring the more socially conservative Hispanic vote to the Republican party and add to his base, forgetting that the odious Republican base doesn't like people who don't shimmer with lily whiteness, which, of course, is how the Republicans wanted it. They built their base, in large part, on racial and religious bigotry, and they still want to use it when it's convenient (like when there are Muslims afoot). Maybe this nonsense still speaks to them enough for Mitt the Duplicitous to win the primary (I doubt it, but what do I know? Little). But the coalition of pricks has been showing signs of fraying lately.

Our long national nightmare is over

2007-12-06T20:30:00.000-06:00

Well, it's the season for Jesus Claus and Santa Christ. I am hoping to get through it without hearing too much of the yearly blather about the non-existent War on Christmas, a cousin to the shibboleth of Political Correctness that still seems to fuel the fires of conservative outrage (I suppose something has to, since things like Mike Huckabee's release of a serial rapist for political reasons and Rudy!s sex on the city raise nary a grumble on the right). Nothing ruins Christmas like Christians, of course, and over the last couple of years those of us with rational temperaments have had to endure a war on intelligence during the holiday season.

I worry no more. Bill O'Reilly has declared the war on intelligence a success. Christmas is saved from those "forces of darkness" that would allow businesses to cater to actual non-Christians during the holiday season by greeting people with "Happy Holidays" instead of "Get out of my store, you kike/raghead/atheist commie/dark person of indeterminate non-Christian religion-this is Our Time!" Or, well, whatever it was that privately-owned businesses were supposed to be forced to say to pay homage to the theocrats. Whatever. Anyway-to whom do Christians owe this overwhelming victory over the forces of almost nobody? Why, none other than-Bill O'Reilly himself! By jingo, Bill, you did it, with the strength of your hand and heart and your pure Christian spirit! Why, if it weren't for you, the overwhelmed, persecuted Christians would have had nowhere to turn, since they clearly have no power or support within our government or the media. But lucky for them, there was you, a man on a culture mission, making the world safe from licentious, amoral, sex-crazed anti-Christian liberals and their Christ-less allies. You know, when I think about it, that's probably the intersection between liberals and the terrorists. So, O'Reilly didn't really just save Christmas-he indirectly saved all of western civilizaion. That's quite a feat.

The War on the (non-existent) War on Christmas is stupid on so many levels that you could write a book about that alone and get a firmer understanding of the vapidity of the conservative Christian "movement." This, though, is a whole new level of dim. The ego of this man is stunning. The idea that America would become a Christmas-less nation (almost as though it were run by those anti-Christian heretics in Massachusetts) but for his tireless work is, well, ridiculous. For his support of this non-issue, he gives himself a public pat on the back. What I don't understand is, how can conservatives follow this nonsense? This little self-congratulatory wank inadvertently shows that his yammering about the non-existent War on Christmas was little more than cheap self-promotion. Beyond that, it has little meaning to him. You could say that about almost any subject he covers. Yet, he remains the idiot-king of the conservative talk-show world, the cubic zirconium in the Fox News tin crown. Liberals will generally eviscerate supposedly liberal pundits when they make fact-free or foolish assessments, or represent them poorly, as a quick Google search with the words "Joe Klein" will reveal. Yet, dunderheads like O'Reilly get a free pass, even though their ideology largely revolves around their wonderful selves and little else. When you're voting for a politician, you're forced to make a choice, even if it will be an imperfect one, and self-interest may be a part of the personality. That's just a part of the compromises one has to make in a democracy. But no one is forced to listen to a self-serving pudsmack like O'Reilly. That's a choice. That it's a choice conservatives make in such numbers is mightily revealing.

A long-winded post about Elite Mythology

2007-10-20T19:50:00.001-05:00

I read this by Judith Warner in the New York Times, an article about the allegedly divisive, polarizing Hillary Clinton's surprising strength in this campaign, even when head-to-head against Rudy! Giuliani. I've never been quite as surprised as everyone else is that she might prove to be more popular than the punditocracy would believe-they mostly could never get their minds around the fact Bill Clinton was popular, either. While I don't plan to vote for her myself due to the fact I find her far too hawkish in her foreign policy, I can certainly see where she might be better liked by others.

There were a couple of things that stood out in the entry. There was this:

The “we” world of Tucker Carlson knew what they knew about Hillary Clinton — right up until about this week, I think — because they spend an awful lot of time talking to, socializing with and interviewing one another.

What they don’t do all that much is venture outside of a certain set of zip codes to get a feel for the way most people are actually living. They don’t sign up for adjustable rate mortgages, visit emergency rooms to get their primary health care, leave their children in unlicensed day care or lose their jobs because they have to drive their mothers home from the hospital after hip replacement surgery.

Hillary Clinton’s supporters, it turns out, do.

Alongside the newest set of poll results showing Clinton’s surprising levels of popularity among lower- and middle-class women, white moderate women, even black voters, was another story this week, based on a new set of data from the I.R.S.

It showed that America’s most wealthy earn an even greater share of the nation’s income than they did in 2000, at the peak of the tech boom. The wealthiest 1 percent of Americans, the Wall Street Journal reported, earned 21.2 percent of all income in 2005 (the latest date for which these data are available), up from the high of 20.8 percent they’d reached in the bull market of 2000. The bottom 50 percent of people earned 12.8 percent of all income, compared with 13 percent in 2000. And the median tax filer’s income fell 2 percent when adjusted for inflation (to about $31,000) between 2000 and 2005.

More and more people are being priced out of a middle class existence. Because of housing prices, because of health care costs, because of tax policy, because of the cost of child care, The Good Life – a life of relative comfort and financial security – is now, in many parts of the country, an upper-middle-class luxury.

Given all this, you would think that Clinton’s big policy announcement this week on improving life for working families would have been big news.

After all, it contained a number of huge new middle class entitlements: paid family leave and sick leave, most notably. There were a number of tried-and-true triggers for outrage from the right wing and the business community like government standards and quality controls for child care. There could have been debate stoked among the many childless workers who now feel parents are getting too much “special treatment” in the workplace (Clinton supports legislation to protect parents and pregnant women from job discrimination). At the very least, someone could have accused Clinton of trying to bring back welfare. (She supports subsidies for low-income parents who wish to stay home to raise their children.) Or someone could have questioned how realistic it really is to pay for all that – to the tune of $1.75 billion per year – simply by cracking down on the “abusive” use of tax shelters, as Clinton proposes to do.

snip

(“I do see you and I do hear you,” Clinton said in a speech on “rebuilding the middle class” earlier this month. “You’re not invisible to me.”)

In contemplating the disconnect, as I often have done, between Hillary and her upper-middle-class peers, I find myself thinking of psychologist Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

In Maslow’s theory of human motivation, needs were mapped out in a pyramid form. The broad array of physiological needs was at the bottom, followed by the almost equally wide range of safety needs: things like bodily and financial security, secure physical health and work, and property ownership. Transcendent needs, like truth, justice, wisdom and self-actualization, were in the tiniest triangle up at the top. As their “lower-level” needs were met, Maslow theorized, people moved up the pyramid; they did not – unless the material circumstances of their lives changed dramatically – move back.

The American middle class, it seems to me, is looking to politicians now to satisfy a pretty basic – and urgent – level of need. Yet people in the upper middle class — with their excellent health benefits, schools, salaries, retirement plans, nannies and private afterschool programs — have journeyed so far from that level of need that, it often seems to me, they literally cannot hear what resonates with the middle class. That creates a problematic blind spot for those who write, edit or produce what comes to be known about our politicians and their policies.

Okay, I really pulled a lot from that. But the connection of ideas needed to be seen. The disconnect between the punditocracy, mostly upper middle to upper class, and the wider world outside of Washington is very real. It's utterly impossible to them to believe that Hillary Clinton might not be a harpy villainess in the eyes of the exalted salt-of-the-earth middle America. Nor are the upper classes classes going to be wildly thrilled with Hillary's appeal to lower middle class voters. Neither of those groups like her, in fact they tend to despise her, and yet there she is, positioned to win, pulling away against her Democratic foes and even, according to polling, winning in a general election, against all the conventional wisdom. Hillary is supposed to be a polarizing, unelectable bitch, and here she is, the strongest contender. It can't be explained as identity politics alone, since she leads Obama amongst African-Americans, and it can't be explained by anti-war sentiment alone, since she's always been rather hawkish and supported the Iraq war a long time, and remains hawkish towards Iran. It has to be, at least in part, because she's making her appeal to those caught trying to make it in a hardening economy, and it's working, in a way that it has not for, say, John Edwards. (All those stupid stories about Edward's haircuts seemed to work, except that they benefited not Rudy! or Mitt or St. McCain, they helped Hillary, who is hitting on some of those same two Americas themes. I can't tell you how funny I find that).

I don't think, at all, that the disconnect between the perception of upper class folk and lower class folk of Hillary, or any Democrat, is because of a wealth gap producing a blind spot, as Judith Warner puts it. A blind spot implies that if you merely could get such people to understand what it is like to live in harder circumstances, they would be less likely to dismiss politicians that appeal to people under duress. They might even develop sympathy for them. I see zero evidence of this. As the Frost family fiasco showed, even when presented with clear facts of the difficulties faced by middle and lower-middle income families, the right still reacts with crude, ugly personal attacks and claims that these "other" people are taking something that is rightfully the property of the elite. No, the disconnect stems from the great conservative myth of the Elite as Meritocracy.

I'm about to use anecdotal evidence to help make my point, so take that with the generous helping of salt it deserves. I grew up in an upper class community in the midwest (they do exist there). My own family is upper middle class, and certain branches of it fit into the upper class top 5% section of the economy. (I guess this makes me a limousine liberal or some such shit). I have seen, my whole life, this group of people as they are, not as they like to present themselves in public. A large proportion of the kids I grew up with stand to inherit large sums of money. Many of them were able, without any particularly special achievements, to go to elite universities, with all that entails. Some were accepted to these universities simply due to legacy, since they were not terribly high academic performers in high school. Many would have nice jobs waiting for them when they were done, either through family or connections with family or friends. Essentially, most of them were mini-George Bushes-not terribly talented, not terribly hard working, not terribly motivated born-on-third-basers. The one thing that really struck me about these people wasn't that they didn't understand the lives of less well-off people, though indeed they didn't (neither did I, at the time)-it was that they didn't understand they had not EARNED this lifestyle.

This is the wellspring from which this mentality really flows, an ignorance of their own passive acceptance of wealth with no work. They simply cannot accept the fact that they did not make this all happen, and thus feel that it is all deserved, as opposed to it being a gift. They really, really believe that their elite status stems from hard work and general personal worthiness, not lucky birth.

This misconception of their toil allows them to believe that they don't need to bother with those other people who haven't reached such heights. "Those people aren't rich, they aren't successful, they didn't go to the really good schools, etc...well, that's because they didn't work hard enough," they think. "Not like me. I did what needed to be done, and that's why I'm here." Thus rolls on the myth in their own mind.

I think that is what many liberals really don't get about these people. We tend to think they are nefarious plotters hatching manipulative schemes. And they often do. What we miss, though, is that they are also true believers-they really think their crony capitalism, avaricious tax cuts, corporate welfare, etc. are all the righteous and just rewards for the hard, hard work they put in to get there. This true belief has helped conservatives build the myth of the self-made bootstrapper, much to the Republican party's benefit. Ideologically, they have used it to manipulate middle and lower middle class voters, telling them that if they just work hard enough they can grab the brass ring--then, more importantly, telling them when they CAN'T that it's because some "other" person is TAKING it from them. That thief can be an immigrant, a woman, a black person through affirmative action, a lib'rul who taxes them, a commie, a feminazi, but someone is always ruining it for those people, who could have joined the elite if it weren't for those meddling darkies/women/immigrants/liberals/commies/feminazis/whoever. This is how they were even able to sweep up formerly Democratic constituencies like labor, selling them lies about how their success was being stunted by dark skinned devils and welfare queens, the lib'ruls are helping them do it, drop your union, vote Republican, tax cuts for the rich, this will help YOU succeed.

It's been difficult to pierce this haze. John Edwards has tried and tried and been childishly mocked for it, but the growing gap between the rich and poor, the disappearing middle class, the health care crisis and the failure of "movement" conservatism to improve life on a widespread scale are all combining to change people's minds about what the Elite as Meritocracy and Bootstrapper myths can really do for them.

And of course, there is the war. Not only is it bad and failing in and of itself, it also, as the most important manifestation of "movement" conservatism ever, calls into question the entire "movement" conservatism enterprise. And it is hard to position yourself as a supporter of regular, salt-of-the-earth people when your "movement" cuts veteran's benefits, or lets the VA hospital become a run-down hellhole, or keeps extending soldiers tours, or lets out of control mercenaries threaten soldiers, or loses millions of taxpayer dollars, all while being run by a fat, pear-shaped "elite" who will never face a shot fired in anger in their entire lives.

Yet this elite's self-image remains as it ever was; deserving, hard-working, and heroic, thus beyond any self-reflection. And so there is this disconnect, where people in this upper strata cannot for the life of them understand why Obama, or Edwards, or especially Hillary might actually appeal to people in, say, middle America. So, sure, maybe it is a blind spot. But if it is, it's a purposeful one. Calling it that gives them a little too much credit.

Then there was this:

Given all this, you would think that Clinton’s big policy announcement this week on improving life for working families would have been big news.

snip

But there was none of this. Clinton’s family policy speech in New Hampshire all but sank like a stone. If it was covered at all, it was often packaged as part of a feature on her attempts to curry favor with female voters. (“Clinton shows femininity,” read a Boston Globe headline.) It was as though the opinion-makers and agenda-setters, waiting with bated breath for Bill to slip up, just one more time, couldn’t see or hear the message to middle-class voters.

Well, anyone who has followed along with the news over the last 15 or so years would be familiar with that scenario. When it comes to reporting on politics, the "liberal" media cannot wait to disparage Democrats, and is impossibly vapid and out of touch. I urge anyone who is reading my incoherent tripe to read this. It is much better and covers most of this territory very well.

Friday Cat Blogging

2007-10-12T18:23:00.000-05:00

Jackson.

Diego.

Diego looks surprisingly smug, considering the hat and all.

Christianist Third Party Possibilities

2007-10-08T19:46:00.000-05:00

I agree with Mr. Matthew Yglesias here. It is my half-cocked opinion that pressure groups and special interest groups value their role as kingmakers more than they do as policy influencers (not an actual word, I know). The power (and money) they get from their supporters comes from their ability to get their chosen politicians to heel. Pro-choice cross-dressing serial cheaters/divorcees who win Republican presidential nominations obviously aren't counting on the fundamentalist vote, and if one Republican can win without them, it opens up the floodgates for all Republicans to win without them. Though this would hardly render them powerless in the future, it would prove once and for all that it is not necessary to kowtow to them to win, making them simply one more chattering voice in a crowd of them, instead of the all-important Leviathan they built themselves into over the years. Judging from the grassroots popularity of McCain in 2000, there might be a lot of Republicans who would like to boot the fundy vote if they could. Not that this will help the Republican party for the time being-losing that voting bloc will derail their party for a long time to come.

From another angle, it would seem that Rudy's Clash-of-Civilizations-Crusades nuttery isn't appeasing the Christianists, which would be his best hope of making them happy.

They are the wind beneath our wings

2007-10-08T18:12:00.005-05:00

I am only a part time blogger. I'm not in an academic or politically connected field, so most of my day I can only barely keep up with current events. It makes my blog less satisfactory than I would like it to be. I would like to cover, for example, why libertarians and assorted Randroids give me a pain in my ass, or why I think the Straussian imperial project will suck America dry, or how I think the connection between private money, Christian fundamentalist theocracy, and the Republican party form a cancer on our political system. Doing that, however, takes a lot of time and research. I try, sometimes, but I have a hard time justifying to my employers why I am running down loopy documents from the AEI, for example, when I should be, you know, doing my work, which they pay me for. I have a lot of other commitments in my personal life, as well.

This leaves me only able to write, sporadically, about Republican windbaggery, hypocrisy, and assholery. Luckily for me, "movement" conservatives are the gift that keeps on giving, if by "gift" you mean chlamydia. Thus, within the last week or so we have had The Rush Phony Soldier Debacle, Tranny Annie Coulter's desperate wish to repeal the 19th Amendment, and my personal favorite, the smearing of a twelve-year-old boy. Smoove.

So, to recap: a man so cowardly he sent his maid to score his drugs for him in case the deal went bad chooses to disparage actual Iraq vets because they don't mindlessly follow the Dear Leader; right wing bloggers and politicians decide to attack the character of that highest symbol of political power in our world, a middle-school student; and, well, Chix-with-Dix Ann...what can you say? She is her usual asshat. These are amongst the leading voices of the right, lighting the way rhetorically for our great nation.

Movement conservatism is a cesspit.

Democracy at work, part II

2007-10-01T16:29:00.002-05:00

Since the last couple of weeks have been the "Democrats as Spineless Curs" show, it will be interesting to see if they grow some testicles and do something about this:

Today, Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) gave a speech on the Senate floor condemning Rush Limbaugh for calling troops who support American withdrawal from Iraq “phony soldiers.” He urged his colleagues — both Democratic and Republican — to sign a letter of disapproval to the CEO of Clear Channel.

Instead, Rep. Jack Kingston (R-GA) — who voted to criticize MoveOn.org — has decided to commend Limbaugh. Today at 3:16 PM, Kingston introduced a resolution “[c]ommending Rush Hudson Limbaugh III for his ongoing public support of American troops serving both here and abroad.”

What Rush has done to "Support the Troops!" exactly, beyond being a loudmouth windbag Republican with a thing for Dominican sex parties, is beyond me. Anyway, given the bold, strong leadership style of the Democratic majority, I'm sure there is no way they will cower before a known Republican drug-abusing liar.

I am so glad our leaders are spending time on important tasks like this.

Confidence!!!

2007-09-30T18:07:00.000-05:00

"I don't think Hillary will have me."

— Former Republican presidential candidate Tommy Thompson, in response to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel's question about whether he would want to serve in the next president's cabinet.

Dick Cheney as Saruman

2007-09-30T17:19:00.000-05:00

Whenever lib'ruls like me claim the Iraq war is about oil/rich guys or whatever, we're always told that we're moonbatty conspiracy theorists no one should take seriously. It would be a lot easier to accept that attitude if Republicans weren't always acting like a secretive conservative Legion of Doom.

Via a commenter at Lawyers, Guns and Money.

UPDATE: Via Digby, I see the plot thickens. A split like this would be disaster for the Republicans in 08. Obviously this is merely a guess, but I would see this trip as an effort to convince the fundies that whoever wins will toe the Christianist line just fine. Eventually, the limitations of associating with rigid, fundamentalist religionists was bound to show itself, and now it might just finally be happening. In any case, it's fun watching the conservatives eating themselves.

An Opportunity Denied

2007-09-29T15:27:00.000-05:00

I see that Newt Gingrich is declining to run for President. That's too bad indeed.

As a committed lefty blogger of no consequence, I am truly disappointed. A Newt Gingrich Presidential run is a Christmas gift for those on the left. For me, it combines all the personal animosity I feel for his hand in foisting the Monica Lewinski "scandal" on me with the opportunity to rip apart his colossal ideas that the media is so infatuated with. He has it all, in abundance-hypocrisy, lunacy, cliche right-wing ideas masquerading as innovation, jowls-a lefty blogger's wet dream. If he had won the nomination, and been thumped as solidly in the general election as I'm certain he would have been, it would have left a whole pile of "conservative ideas" mouldering as a dung pile for years and years to come. As soon as I heard he was publicly making a play for the nomination, I started gathering ammunition. I know I was not alone.

And now it's over. Curse you, Newt!

As for this:

Rick Tyler said Gingrich realized he couldn't run a political action committee -- his American Solutions group -- and form an exploratory committee to run for president as well.

This sounds an awful lot like horseshit to me. Newt's self-regard is boundless. If he felt that he could manage to win, he wouldn't give it up to keep a comparatively small-time position leading a political action committee.

I think it probably has more to do with this. Scroll down and check out Newt's numbers. Newt may want to kiss himself, but the rest of the country will politely decline. I think his handlers got wind of the political realities and, realizing he might outdo even Fred Thompson for a sluggish campaign, put an end to things, lest this embarrassment give Newt's ego a terminal hematoma.

9/11 Forever

2007-09-29T14:58:00.000-05:00

So, when Rudy takes a dump, is it because of 9/11?

Democracy at Work

2007-09-26T17:29:00.000-05:00

Could this really, actually happen? I guess so...

Faced with the prospect of losing a committee vote, Democratic Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Richard J. Durbin Wednesday backed down a bit from their opposition to a Republican nominee to the Federal Election Commission accused of stymieing minority voting power.

Feinstein of California and Durbin of Illinois had expressed serious reservations over Republican Hans von Spakovsky’s nomination to a 6-year term on the FEC. And Feinstein, chairwoman of Senate Rules Committee, seemed to be setting the stage to vote against his nomination, signaling she would take the unusual step of seeking individual votes in her committee for von Spakovsky and three other pending FEC nominations – a Republican and two Democrats.

But Feinstein and Durbin on Wednesday joined a unanimous vote to move von Spakovsky’s nomination and those of the three others to the full Senate without recommendation.

Lithwick's article lays out most of Spakovsky's crimes. Spakovsky is one of the masterminds behind the "Voter Fraud" fraud, which was used to give intellectual cachet to the idea generally that voter fraud was widespread, and that specifically voter identification laws, targeted at minorities that usually vote Democratic, was the solution:

In support of his position that voter-ID laws did not unconstitutionally suppress the votes of poor and minority voters, Hearne cited the decision of the DoJ to approve the pre-clearance of Georgia's voter-ID law, and a law review article supporting such laws, written under the pseudonym Publius. Hearne didn't reveal that the decision on Georgia was made by political appointees of the DoJ over the strong objections of career attorneys there who believed the law was indeed discriminatory. Nor did he explain that (as I discovered and blogged about a few years earlier) Publius was none other than Hans von Spakovsky, then serving as one of the political DoJ officials who approved the Georgia voter-ID law. (President Bush later gave von Spakovsky a recess appointment to the Federal Election Commission.)

There is simply no way the Democratic Senate can let this slide. Spakovsky is a walking, talking affront to democracy. The Democrats approving this would be akin to a mass neutering. Of course, after that gutsy vote to condemn MoveOn.org for their ad in the New York Times, there's no telling what decision they might make.

My tax dollar at work

2007-09-21T14:04:00.000-05:00

There is really nothing to say about this. Well, yes there is. It's stupid. What a colossal waste of time. One of my own Senators, Herb Kohl, voted Yea on this dog, instead of walking out, laughing, as he should have.

I guess I can expect to see John Cornyn pushing legislation condemning ads that impugned the character of Vietnam Vets John Kerry and Max Cleland coming right around the corner, right? Not something I would bet on.

While the blatant hypocrisy of the Republican party is as aggravating as ever, it comes as no surprise. Intellectual and moral consistency is not a conservative hallmark. What I don't understand is why the Democrats let this come to a vote at all. The "outrage" over this ad and the way it dared to "impugn" the mighty colossus Petraeus is a sideshow. Letting it happen at all validates this nonsense. Actually voting for it gives the Republicans political cover. Do they think they're going to get some kind of political capital out of this crap? The only thing I can think of is that they were actually worried that people would see Petraeus' shiny medals and be hypnotized into supporting the war. If so, that was a grave miscalculation. Americans still hate the war. They still want to leave. Shiny generals and rants about advertisements haven't changed any of that. Even though they are the majority party and are on the right AND popular side of the issue, they still lead frightened.

These attempts at some kind of short-term political gain always come at the expense of long-term victory, which is one of the reasons why I think the Republicans can always bully Democrats into nonsense storylines. When you're trying to do something good but difficult, sometimes you have to take some early hits. Trying to defuse the usual Republican you're-all-traitors-lefties-hippies-weaklings-pussies-blah-blah-blah by voting on useless crap won't work, because they'll do it anyway and when you really need to do something useful later, you'll have no credibility and thus, no influence. The Democrats are still trying to play by Republican rules. That's a losing proposition every time.

Blogging again

2007-09-17T16:16:00.000-05:00

Well, looking at my blog entries it seems I have not blogged since July 21. A long time, that. I have to assume that my 3 readers have long since left and I am in essence starting from scratch. Almost 2 months have passed since I have bothered to write my usual pablum, and thus I feel disengaged from current events. It's taking some time to catch up.

The war plods predictably on. Since I started poking around news outlets and blogs again, it seems that a drawdown of troops is in the offing, which the MSM claims is a change of course by the Bushies. Unfortunately, the drawdown was inevitable-it had to happen because there are no more new troops to bring in once the current surge troops are done with their tours. So, not really a concession. No change of course. There never will be, as long as he is President. Keeping troops in Iraq, and hopefully expanding the war to Iran, Syria, wherever, establishing permanent bases, kicking the can, make the war someone else's problem, in 45 years people will say we were right you'll see, blah blah blah...in the two months that I shifted focus to my personal life and travelled abroad, there has been lots of heat and noise, but no essential change in the situation in even the smallest way.

To address the so-called "Anbar Miracle"...I'll start by saying that initially I thought some progress of some kind was being made, hence this post. I was wrong. I was wrong in the sense that it would clamp down on the violence in a meaningful way-the dip in violence is questionable, and even if it is kind of occurring, it isn't really MEANINGFUL-but I was also wrong in a more essential sense. I hadn't really given thought to the fact that the very Sunni militia members we were arming to fight AQI were the same insurgents that we were fighting ourselves not so very long ago. I hadn't given thought to the fact that by doing this, we were arming Sunni insurgents who would fight Shiite insurgents once we were out of the way. I hadn't given thought to the fact that this switch of convenience could and probably would be switched back if AQI were controlled. I hadn't really considered how this might play out with the Maliki government, arming Sunni insurgents in this manner-and of course, they would be a direct threat to the government Bush touted so highly before. In short, I didn't really think...I grabbed at any piece of news that might have seemed good or positive. And, worse yet, I realize now I did it so I wouldn't be a constant naysayer about Iraq. I was worried that the escalation might work and that I would be caught on the wrong side of it. I wrote stupid, thoughtless crap (as I often do) and didn't really bother to get a broader picture. And worst of all, I did this even though I have been against the war from the beginning. I had made it a point to disbelieve everything the Andover Cowboy and his crew of criminals have ever claimed since 2000 and never been disappointed, but as soon as I started writing it down someplace I cowered. Over time my mistake became clear to me, but I now see how easy it is to get sucked into intellectually-challenged mush, out of ego or fear or lack of original thinking. Without the existence of blogs, political websites, online news and reliable news outlets like McClatchy, I don't know if I would be any more reality -based than the average fundy I am so dismissive of. It's not a good feeling. I'll have to be more careful in the future to check myself.

My wife and I just returned from our honeymoon in Ireland, a country uninvolved in our war. For the first time since 2001, no constant barrage of the Republican cudgel known as 9/11, no surge, no Petraeus, no war. No one even asked us about it. Their newspapers front pages were often devoid of Iraq coverage, which was what I was hoping for on my honeymoon. This disconnection from the day-to-day news, spin, counterspin, posturing, etc. gave me a new perspective when I came home. I knew the war was a tragedy and a travesty, of course, but from a distance in seems blindingly absurd. At the time I arrived home, the talk amongst pundits and politicians was, essentially, that the deteriorating situation was the fault of Maliki. Christ Almighty, what? The plan was to depose and replace him. Details aside, what are we talking about here? We destroyed their country, it's businesses, infrastructure, it's basic services for living, it's army. We let the country slide into chaos. We were in charge. This mess is ours, no one else's. Furthermore, this governemnt is one Iraqis elected, for better or for worse. We mandated this happen, it did, this is what they chose. Whatever weaknesses it has, we helped to create, and in any case, it is ostensibly their country. Iraq is not the 51st state, or an errant colonial territory. Deposing their leadership when it displeases us or it's politically convenient is the hallmark of an imperial country kicking a puppet government in a satellite country, akin to the actions of the USSR-a country I was brought up to despise for exactly that. Coming back home to that, and the dog and pony show that was the Petraeus report, was like some kind of dark metaphor that escapes me right now. Whatever. I'm ranting in unsubstantiated fashion. I should really, really stop for now, and get some sleep.

World's Lamest Blogger Part Two

2007-07-21T09:14:00.000-05:00

Well, I haven't done an entry in over a week. I will pick it up again, real soon like, but I am 1) helping plan my wedding 2) just sold my condo 3) just bought a duplex that 4) I have to move into in about a week and a half. All of the usual stuff that I do is being pushed to the side for the time being. I can't even do something as mindless as catblogging. Anyway, I will get back to my regularly scheduled left-wing puerility this upcoming week, for all two of my readers.

But it would be an American Theocracy, so it would be ok

2007-07-13T16:23:00.000-05:00

I see the Christianists are showing their usual respect for our constitutional rights again:

Christian activists disrupt Hindu prayer in US Senate

WASHINGTON: Christian activists briefly disrupted a Hindu invocation in the U.S Senate on Thursday, marring a historic first for the chamber and showing that fundamentalism is present and shouting in the U.S too.

Invited by the Senate to offer Hindu prayers in place of the usual Christian invocation, Rajan Zed, a Hindu priest from Reno, Nevada, had just stepped up to the podium for the landmark occasion when three protesters, said to belong to the Christian Right anti-abortion group Operation Save America, interrupted him by loudly asking for God's forgiveness for allowing the ''false prayer'' of a Hindu in the Senate chamber.

"Lord Jesus, forgive us father for allowing a prayer of the wicked, which is an abomination in your sight," the first protester shouted. "This is an abomination. We shall have no other gods before You."

Democratic Senator Bob Casey, who was serving as the presiding officer for the morning, immediately asked the sergeant-at-arms to restore order. But they continued to protest as they were headed out the door by the marshals, shouting, "No Lord but Jesus Christ!" and "There's only one true God!"

Zed, sporting a saffron robe, a rudraksh mala round his neck, and a prominent tilak on his forehead, then nervously went through the invocation chosen from the Rig Veda and Bhagavad Gita.

"Let us pray," he began, "We meditate on the transcendental glory of the deity supreme, who is inside the heart of the earth, inside the life of the sky and inside the soul of heaven. May he stimulate and illuminate our minds.

"Lead us from the unreal to real, from darkness to light, and from death to immortality. May we be protected together. May we be nourished together. May we work together with great vigor. May our study be enlightening."

This was from "Operation Save America," an anti-abortion group. From their press release:

Theology Moved to the Senate and was Arrested

Theology has moved from the church house onto the floor of the United States Senate, and has been arrested.

Ante Pavkovic, Kathy Pavkovic, and Kristen Sugar were all arrested in the chambers of the United States Senate as that chamber was violated by a false Hindu god. The Senate was opened with a Hindu prayer placing the false god of Hinduism on a level playing field with the One True God, Jesus Christ. This would never have been allowed by our Founding Fathers.

"Not one Senator had the backbone to stand as our Founding Fathers stood. They stood on the Gospel of Jesus Christ! There were three in the audience with the courage to stand and proclaim, 'Thou shalt have no other gods before me.' They were immediately removed from the chambers, arrested, and are in jail now. God bless those who stand for Jesus as we know that He stands for them." Rev. Flip Benham, Director, Operation Save America/Operation Rescue

Well, at least they're not trying to be subtle or clever about establishing a theocracy. Too bad there is this:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances

You'll note there is no asterisk there. No special "this does not count for non-Christian religions clause." No "except for atheists" addendum. Nope. It just exressly prohibits establishing a state religion, and prohibits others, including religious people, from preventing others from practicing theirs.

I know there will be caterwauling on the right wing and amongst the Christianists about their poor martyrs being hauled off to jail. Whatever. No one is going to try to stop them from being Christians. No one is forcing their religion on them in the form of specific laws designed to render them into second class citizens. They wish to do that. That's their thing. And in that vein, they tried to stop a ceremony not to their liking, as they would regularly do if their religion were the state one. How that isn't an attempt at a Christian Taliban I don't rightly know.

And of course, let's not forget which party scratches their back.

With people like this working for him we would definitely be in good hands

2007-07-13T14:22:00.000-05:00

I see from Rick Perlstein's blog that Wisconsin hero Robert Kasten has joined Rudy's campaign team. He is racking up quite a crew of miscreants, isn't he?

Bourbon Bob in action:

Relates Badger State blogger Bill Christofferson, author of a biography of Gaylord Nelson, the great liberal senator and Earth Day founder Kasten knocked off on Reagan's coattails in 1980: "Kasten reportedly celebrated his victory over Nelson so hard that he was barely able to speak an intelligible word - or stand up - when it finally became clear he had won. He went on to distinguish himself as a drunk driver and, after losing to Russ Feingold in 1992, reportedly found work as an arms dealer."

Truth and Responsibility

2007-07-10T16:45:00.000-05:00

"Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based on the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone."

These are the handwritten words of Dwight Eisenhower, to be read to the world in case the D-Day invasion failed. As the Iraq war drags interminably on, it becomes clearer and clearer that victory, always a vaguely sketched concept with the Bush administration, is not to be. Our army is stretched thin, leaving us vulnerable; the costs are mounting, well beyond what we were first told; sectarian civil war has long since thrown the country into chaos; none of the goals of the latest surge have been met. No democracy. No stability. No WMDs. Al Qaeda in Iraq, where before the invasion they were not a presence, despite some high profile claims to the contrary. This brief sketch can't do justice to the damage done. With our military withering, we simply can't stay there forever. Our continued presence hurts both Iraq and the US, and sets us up for potential intractable conflicts of a different kind down the road. And the prospects for withdrawal look no less grim. Civil war will almost certainly intensify. Iran could become a hegemonic power in the region. Al Qaeda will claim victory. Instability will reign, for a potentially long time. It's not that I think withdrawal will bring rainbows and unicorns to Iraq. It's just that I think that we have no choice (and I am especially disinterested in any claims of "victory" Al Qaeda might make). A full withdrawal is going to have to happen, sooner rather than later. The longer we stay, the worse our position becomes.

In this entire fiasco, I think it is important to remember that the Bush administration and the Republican party have had no serious opposition to any of their Iraq policies at any point. Even after the 2006 elections, the victorious Democrats capitulated on war funding. Before that, Congress was a rubber stamp for whatever the Bush administration wanted to do. The Republicans beat the drums for this war, with the help of the press; they planned it, every step of the way; they executed it in every regard; there was, at no time, a constituency that diverted their plans in any way whatsoever. Every result of this war, and the GWOT generally, is their responsibility alone. Every decision, every one up to this point, has been theirs. This is their war. So, as it becomes clear that their war is the most egregious fiasco since Vietnam, who do conservatives blame?

The Defeatocrats! Of course.

Which brings me back to Eisenhower's letter. Eisenhower was well aware of the risks involved in the D-Day invasion. He considered it his decision to invade, and thus considered it his responsibility if it failed. I'll quote the last two lines again:

"...The troops, the air and the Navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone."

The consequences of failure would have altered world history for the worse (worst), yet he considered it his duty to shoulder the blame in that event, because he made the decision to do it. Try, try to imagine anyone in the Bush administration, at any level, taking on that kind of responsibility for their decision to launch this imperial war we have now. I can't do it.

I'm not a pacifist. I know America will have to fight wars in the future. We'll face threats, and we'll have to deal with them. I get that. But in the future, if some fool wants to puff up his chest and rattle sabers about how we have to go to war in some far off place (that he will probably never see), he had better be brutally honest about the consequences of potential defeat. And he had better be ready to shoulder the blame, unconditionally and completely, if we are defeated. If he (or she) is not willing to meet that standard, or talks of cakewalks and shows of power, then I simply will not support that war at all, immediately, because I will know that beneath all of the puffery and tough talk lies the heart of a coward.

140,000 Troops

2007-07-10T09:08:00.000-05:00

I hestitated yesterday to jump on with a post about this:

140,000 Turkish Troops on Iraq Border

(BAGHDAD) — Turkey has massed 140,000 soldiers on its border with northern Iraq, Iraq's foreign minister said Monday, calling the neighboring country's fears of Kurdish rebels based there "legitimate" but better resolved through negotiation.

Largely because when read the first reports it seemed implausible. And the sources seem dubious:

In Washington, a Pentagon official disputed the claim by Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, a Kurd from northern Iraq, and said satellite photos indicated no such troop buildup.

It was unclear where Zebari got the figures. If accurate, Turkey would have nearly as many soldiers along its border with Iraq as the 155,000 troops which the U.S. has in the country...

...But in Washington, a Pentagon official disputed Zebari's assertion that troops were massing, saying no such movement has been picked up by U.S. satellites gathering intelligence there. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not allowed to speak on the record about the subject.

140,000 troops would nearly match our own. I would think that would be worrisome, to say the least, if it were true, even to the Bush administration. I suppose it could be true-after all, I am not there to see any of this, so I only know what I can read-but that would cause a pretty major reaction in Washington, as Turkish troops might come into conflict with our own. Seeing no such reaction, I just don't believe the claims.

Fantasy Debate

2007-07-09T22:49:00.000-05:00

This comes as no particular surprise:

Official: Report will say none of Iraq’s goals met

WASHINGTON - A progress report on Iraq will conclude that the U.S.-backed government in Baghdad has not met any of its targets for political, economic and other reform, speeding up the Bush administration's reckoning on what to do next, a U.S. official said Monday.

This was, of course, utterly predictable, as is the next paragraph:

One likely result of the report will be a vastly accelerated debate among President Bush's top aides on withdrawing troops and scaling back the U.S. presence in Iraq.

Oh yes. Of course, there will be blistering debate about what to do next. The decision to draw down is just around the corner. Just like all of the other times before.

So the myth that "debate" over what to do in Iraq continues, even at this late hour. When a change in direction actually occurs, I'll believe it. Until then, I assume things stay the same because 1) the Bush administration is so tied to this war politically and "historically" they will never change course unless forced at gunpoint and 2) they know if they can simply limp to the end of this term, they can blame the failure on "Defeatocrats" and the press. Much easier to point fingers after they are gone than to admit that the single most important political decision of our time was a failure based on lies. So, despite the press' latest attempt to portray the Bush administration as though they are regular human beings, I loudly predict that this will change nothing, and that the war will drag on unless Congress can force the issue.

UPDATE: Of course, the context of "debate" in that paragraph could be between Bush and Democrats in Congress. If that is what the paragraph meant, then great. Although I am not sure that will lead to anything more concrete than the last Congressional challenge to Bush's war. In terms of internal debate within the Bush White House, that would all be for show, of course.

Friday Cat Blogging

2007-07-06T22:10:00.001-05:00

Diego. Being a cat means daily humiliations like this.

Jackson makes love to the camera.

A Dim Argument

2007-07-06T21:10:00.000-05:00

I don't want to be simple-minded about the subject of global warming, but I do wonder if global-warming "skeptics" who prattle on in the winter how it can't be happening, since there are parts of the country that are experiencing record cold, will reverse their opinion when parts of the country are experiencing record heat?

God, I feel stupid writing that. I can't believe people actually try to make arguments like that stick.

Bobo, Professional Idiot.

2007-07-06T14:25:00.000-05:00

I could rant some more about the commutation of "fallen soldier" Scooter Libby (and I have!) but this does it much better. It also has a good run-down of the facts surrounding the case, in the event you have the misfortune of talking with a Bobo-Lite in your workplace and need some easily found ammo.

Reading Brooks without the retorts is depressing. Honestly, I don't know how people do it.

The Story They Won't Let Die, at All Costs

2007-07-06T07:52:00.000-05:00

Can we drop the fucking haircut stories? Why do people get paid to write this shit?

I know the supposed narrative-how can Mr. Two Americas really care about the common man if he gets a $400 HAIRCUT? Whatever. After living through the 2000 campaign hearing about the Andover Cowboy's regular-guy bona fides-despite the fact that he was a rich boy from an East Coast WASP family of long standing and power-I realized that the media's interest in this subject matter was selective. You could point to any successful candidate, Republican, Democrat, or other, and find an example of artifice or vanity, if you really looked-perhaps, renting a red pickup truck and having one of your operatives drive it for you on the campaign trail, so that you look like a real southern man. None of them wants to suffer the Nixon 1960 fate, Republican or Democrat. So, they make themselves up for the camera and try to portray themselves as positively as possible. But for the media, this only matters when it is a Democrat, as we see regularly.

How about this: this story line is vacuous bullshit, as it applies to Republicans and Democrats both. Edwards' haircuts and Fred's truck fakery, in the end, mean nothing to me, and affect the state of the country not at all. Bush's cowboy posturing was not a positive for the country in the least. If Edward's became President, he wouldn't run up a deficit buying hair care products, and no Republican President will solve the problems of the world arm-wrestling or ripping off their shirts and flexing their (mythical) brawn WWE style. These aren't stories. They're piffle. It's the policies, what these people plan to do as President, that matter, because those are what will affect me and millions of other people, every day.

UPDATE: Contrast the storybook-tough guy imagery so favored by the media and the Republicans with the reality of what they actually DO, here.

More Fun with Kurds and Turks

2007-07-05T18:35:00.000-05:00

Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is agitating for some kind of crackdown on PKK rebels as elections near:

ANKARA, Turkey: Turkey's prime minister on Wednesday again called on allies to act on a promise to tackle separatist Kurdish rebels who have been staging attacks from bases in northern Iraq.
Turkey has long complained of U.S. inaction against the rebels of the Kurdistan Workers' Party or PKK, and Turkish officials are debating whether to stage a military incursion into Iraq to hit the guerrillas who have escalated attacks on Turkey.

Erdogan said Turks no longer wanted to hear words of support against the PKK and expected action instead.

"We want them to move from words into action," Erdogan said at a speech to a meeting of trade chambers from more than 100 countries. "Turkey has joined the struggle against world terrorism. That's what we expect from those who appear to be our friends. That is our most natural right."

This is a problem that is not going away. While the recent flare-up has died down somewhat since the recent cease-fire in June, it clearly retains the potential to explode at any time-the political pressure to do something drastic is mounting, and the U.S. and Iraqi governments show little willingness to intervene, despite the administration's tough talk opposing terrorism of all kinds. The inconsistency of the Bush administration regarding the GWOT is apparently frustrating the Turks, especially Erdogan, who is in the difficult position of having to satisfy both an increasingly belligerent, invasion-minded military in his own country and the U.S., who desperately need to avoid this confrontation at all costs to avoid further disaster.

The presence of the PKK in northern Iraq is known of and understood by the administration. I hate to link to this article, as it is from National Review online and written by AEI operative Michael Rubin, which doesn't exactly recommend it to me. But, after wading through the dumb, there is some relevant, and revealing, information going back to 2004:

As war in Iraq approached, Turkish diplomats and generals both raised concern about the presence of the PKK. They have continued to do so since. American officials respond that Washington takes seriously Turkey's concerns. But, a gap remains between U.S. rhetoric and actions, severely straining Washington's credibility. "You guys simply don't understand how seriously we take this," a long-time Turkish diplomatic acquaintance told me at an Ankara teahouse last month.

According to both Turkish and U.S. sources, CENTCOM has promised to share with Turkey plans which address the PKK, but consistently fails to deliver. There may be legitimate reasons for planning delays, but CENTCOM leaves the impression that it is filibustering. "I can understand their concerns," said a Turkish general, acknowledging that rooting PKK out of inhospitable terrain is difficult, "But I can't understand why they won't be honest with us."

CENTCOM also suffers a credibility gap at home. Even as I was stopped by PKK fighters, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Joint Staff continued to claim ignorance of the PKK's exact location. This was dishonest or disingenuous. As we continued on from the de facto PKK checkpoint, we could see from the roadside a well-tended PKK graveyard and also a permanent PKK compound under camouflage, mesh netting. Twice rounding bends beneath high bluffs, we saw automatic weapon-toting PKK fighters over looking the road.

The Joint Staff's claims are more troubling given rumors that, last autumn, apparently without interagency authorization, some members of the 101st Airborne met with PKK representatives in Mosul, thereby legitimizing the terrorist group in direct contravention to the policy of the commander-in-chief...

...While I lived in Iraq, every few months I would visit Sidikan, a mountainous district northeast of Diana, sometimes spending the night on a floor of a mud brick farmhouse so as to not have to rush back to the CPA's hotel in Erbil. Local farmers would complain about the PKK, which extorts taxes and seizes land and property. "All of us know where the PKK is. Any of us could point out where they are, if the U.S. army asked," one old farmer said. It was a sentiment that was expressed by various elders in different villages. Karim Khan Bradosti, the tribal leader in the area, has repeatedly offered assistance and cooperation to American forces in the fight against the PKK.

Again, AEI...make of that what you will. Nonetheless, I see no reason to doubt the basic facts of the story. So the administration, despite hardline rhetoric they would like to apply to, say, Iran, is looking the other way when the terrorists in question are allied with our only friends in Iraq. And if the NRO article is any indication, those terrorists are not exactly good to the residents of the area.

I can understand the desire for a Kurdish homeland. They were promised one in the aftermath of World War I, in the Treaty of Sevres. Since that was scuttled in the Treaty of Lausanne, they have grown into the world's largest ethnic group without a homeland. This status ensures that they will agitate for some kind of independence for as long as they feel they have a chance to get it. So again, even if it cools down now, the Kurd problem isn't going away. These are the true fruits of military intervention where we should not have gone. While the Bush administration used simplistic rhetoric and clash-of-culture ideology to paint terrorists as a monolithic threat because they all "hate freedom," the fact is that the different ethnicities, sects and nations all have their own idiosyncratic aspirations and desires, which we will become involved in by our physical presence in the region. The neocon desire to control the region for their purposes, as if they can press certain buttons and get desired results through the mighty "show of strength," is a pure fantasy and always was.

The Mighty Rule of Law

2007-07-02T19:49:00.000-05:00

Just like with the subpoenas, this comes as a total shock. Remember, they were not just going to do what was legal, but what was right.

UPDATE: Lucky for ol' Scoots he has Presidential pull in light of this, isn't it?

The Republican party is shameless.

UPDATE THE SECOND: In case an idiotic right-wing commentator tries to tell you differently.

Friday Cat Blogging

2007-06-29T21:30:00.001-05:00

Diego crashes after a night of debauchery in various opium dens by the lakefront.

Jackson looks smug. He has just returned from a liaison with his prostitute girlfriend and is well satisfied.

But it has long since gone away. Hooray.

2007-06-28T09:45:00.000-05:00

People I work with are prattling on, still, about Paris Hilton. Meanwhile, through Atrios feeding through Campaign for America's Future, I find out about this:

In September 2006, a group of African American high school students in Jena, Louisiana, asked the school for permission to sit beneath a "whites only" shade tree. There was an unwritten rule that blacks couldn't sit beneath the tree. The school said they didn't care where students sat. The next day, students arrived at school to see three nooses (in school colors) hanging from the tree.

The boys who hung the nooses were suspended from school for a few days. The school administration chalked it up as a harmless prank, but Jena's black population didn't take it so lightly. Fights and unrest started breaking out at school. The District Attorney, Reed Walters, was called in to directly address black students at the school and told them all he could "end their life with a stroke of the pen."

Black students were assaulted at white parties. A white man drew a loaded rifle on three black teens at a local convenience store. (They wrestled it from him and ran away.) Someone tried to burn down the school, and on December 4th, a fight broke out that led to six black students being charged with attempted murder. To his word, the D.A. pushed for maximum charges, which carry sentences of eighty years. Four of the six are being tried as adults (ages 17 & 18) and two are juveniles.

Much like the ongoing domestic, Christian-based terrorism aimed at abortion clinics, the existence of ugly, practical day-to-day racism is almost totally absent from our media or national discussion. Racism is a problem that has been solved, so how could there be any meaningful discussion of it? Meanwhile, voter fraud "reform" advocates try mightily to target minorities. War supporters and other assorted wingnuts cower in fear over the inevitable brown takeover of the world.

Racism helps to feed what is left of the odious Republican "base." The people who hang nooses from trees aimed at black students at a high school are the same people who enable the corrupt modern Republican party. They must be so very proud.

ADDENDUM: Let us not forget the lovely imagery conjured up by immigration "reform" advocates. Clearly, racism is dead.

It's like living in the '70s all over again

2007-06-28T09:01:00.000-05:00

Here is a surprise...the White House is refusing to answer subpoenas.

Not much to say about it. I think everyone had to know this was coming. I can only hope that the real reasons for these investigations aren't lost in the constitutional fights to come. Otherwise the effects of the US Attorney purge and the attempt to gin up voter fraud therein will continue, regardless of the outcome of the upcoming confrontation.

A Figure of Fun

2007-06-28T07:16:00.000-05:00

In one of my first posts, I mentioned the tiresome task of having to read tiresome "intellectuals" like the tiresome Jonah Goldberg. I think I may have to rescind that statement-his upcoming book looks like it will be brilliant comedy Iif in fact it is ever finished, or indeed, even started).

My favorite part of yesterday's blogospheric Jonah-kicking was his detailed, careful response to the fact that John Mackey is in fact a Libertarian:

He doesn't really seem to know what he's talking about (oh, and it's not like it's news to me that the owner of Whole Foods is a self-described libertarian but maybe the German obsession with organic food and environmentalism, for two examples, is news to Plumer). But that's okay, it's what I expected. To be continued, when the book comes out.

Breathtaking. A tortured, inane connection between German environmentalists, liberals and facism. I assume he is talking about 19th century German romanticism and its connection to the Nazis. Or something. In any case, now that this iron-clad connection has been made, I know that liberals like myself have been subconciously preparing for a supermarket Putsch. I can hardly wait.

The longer this book festers without being finished or published, the better it will have to be to avoid total ridicule. So many people are going to pick this thing clean that less talented writers like myself are going to have trouble getting in on the feeding frenzy.

I am a really lame blogger

2007-06-27T22:25:00.000-05:00

I haven't had content in days. I will rectify this situation tomorrow, with more inane commentary on subjects I have no expertise in. I bet all none of my readers can hardly wait.

Stealthy Christianists

2007-06-23T10:50:00.000-05:00

The other day I linked to this article in a post, from the New York Times:

Justice Dept. Reshapes Its Civil Rights Mission

WASHINGTON, June 13 — In recent years, the Bush administration has recast the federal government’s role in civil rights by aggressively pursuing religion-oriented cases while significantly diminishing its involvement in the traditional area of race.

Paralleling concerns of many conservative groups, the Justice Department has successfully argued in a number of cases that government agencies, employers or private organizations have improperly suppressed religious expression in situations canthat the Constitution’s drafters did not mean to restrict.

The shift at the Justice Department has significantly altered the government’s civil rights mission, said Brian K. Landsberg, a law professor at the University of the Pacific and a former Justice Department lawyer under both Republican and Democratic administrations.

“Not until recently has anyone in the department considered religious discrimination such a high priority,” Professor Landsberg said. “No one had ever considered it to be of the same magnitude as race or national origin.”

Cynthia Magnuson, a spokeswoman for the Justice Department, said in a statement that the agency had “worked diligently to enforce the federal laws that prohibit discrimination based on religion.”

It was really this part that got me in a snit:

The changes are evident in a variety of actions:

¶Intervening in federal court cases on behalf of religion-based groups like the Salvation Army that assert they have the right to discriminate in hiring in favor of people who share their beliefs even though they are running charitable programs with federal money.

¶Supporting groups that want to send home religious literature with schoolchildren; in one case, the government helped win the right of a group in Massachusetts to distribute candy canes as part of a religious message that the red stripes represented the blood of Christ.

¶Vigorously enforcing a law enacted by Congress in 2000 that allows churches and other places of worship to be free of some local zoning restrictions. The division has brought more than two dozen lawsuits on behalf of churches, synagogues and mosques...

Earlier, I had posted about the way the Republican Party uses the AIDS issue to reward it's most important political supporting group, the religious right. There are the more obvious ways they attempt to do this, like nominating Supreme Court Justices who will chip away at Roe v. Wade, anti-gay-marriage constitutional amendments, ID in public schools, etc. These are the public faces of theocracy in America. Liberals in the past have made the mistake of deeming these bones to be thrown to the religious right, not to be taken seriously in any real sense. The chipping away at Roe by the Supreme Court proves this is baldly wrong, of course, but it is in these less-publicized sneak attacks that the most damaging Christianist inroads are being made, because it puts Christianists in positions of authority, where they can decide just exactly how to interepret whose civil rights to protect, and in what manner. The effects of this will last long after the administration that put them in power is gone

Friday Cat Blogging

2007-06-22T14:41:00.000-05:00

Diego.Here, he whores for food. To make it more effective, he has turned the position of the photo around to give it a more "avant garde" feel.

Jackson.
He collapses after a monster workout, trying to get into shape for his afore-mentioned prostitute girlfriend.

If they're fashionable...

2007-06-21T18:06:00.000-05:00

...do they have swinging parties? Are the chicks hot?

I am glad to see I wasn't the only one whom this article irritated. I didn't really know that there was a fashionable, intellectual left anymore. Maybe there is, and I'm just left out as always.

Anyway, the reaction of the right to Rushdie's knighthood is about what I would expect-a quick "congratulations" followed by a tirade about the Muslim reaction, blather about the left's wussified conciliatory attitude and it's supposed hypocrisy for supposedly not supporting Rushdie who fights the good fight against bigoted repression (just like those brave right wing constitutional heroes!) blah blah blah blah

Much is made of this quote by Ejaz-Ul-Haq-“The West is accusing Muslims of extremism and terrorism. If someone exploded a bomb on his body, he would be right to do so unless the British government apologizes and withdraws the ’sir’ title,” Mr. ul-Haq said.

It's a stupid comment, of course, and his little attempt at a save afterward doesn't cut it. The expected Muslim howling, riots, etc. will rightly be deplored. But expressions of violence like that are no stupider than, say, a multi-day celebration of a religious assassination in Milwaukee, for example . And, of course, they're only too happy to support denigration of Islam with a call to arms to protect civil liberties, freedom of speech, or whatever, but to do the same thing for someone insulting to Christians...not so much.

I was an atheistic teenager when Iran announced the Fatwa on Rushdie. Outraged by this kind of religious repression, I bought a copy of the book and immediately read it (take that, Iran! I'm sure the mullahs shake in fear knowing this). I still loathe this kind of mindless religious repression, and I support Rushdie's knighthood, even though I'm not a big fan of his actual writing. But it wasn't more than a year or two before this that I had to push through a Christian picket line to see "The Last Temptation of Christ," a movie that offended Christians, and they were no more open-minded about speech freedom than any Muslim fundamentalist. It wasn't long after that that abortion clinic bombings and threats entered my consciousness, and the news. Right-wing threats to all-powerful-activist-liberal-judges-who-try-to-ban-Christmas are greeted with a yawn by the right. The only reason that Christian Fundamentalist leaders haven't ordered Christian Fatwas, as far as I can see, is that they don't think they can get away it, not because they don't want to (oh, but wait, one DID kind of try).

This Christian Right-Wing outrage over the Islamic Fundamentalist Right-Wing outrage over the outrageous knighting of a mediocre writer is a bad-faith argument in the extreme. If I need my rights as an individual protected, I going to think twice before I turn to the political wing that brought us Gitmo, Abu Ghraib, Black Sites, the torture memo, trumped up charges of voter fraud as a means to fix elections, Constitutionally dubious signing statements, the stripping away of Habeas Corpus, illegal wiretapping, and a Justice Department that reshapes its mission so organizations can "discriminate in hiring in favor of people who share their beliefs even though they are running charitable programs with federal money." I'm sorry, but this just isn't the group of people that I would trust to protect my rights, or those of anyone else, and no amount of pontificating about the repressive Muslims is going to change that.

UPDATE: I finally get a commenter, and it's because I acted like a knob. I linked to In The Name Of Towelie to prove my Very Important Point, insinuating they were right wing Christians and the like, and it turns out they are nothing of the sort. Apparently reading the clearly written explanation as to who they are and what they do there was beyond my limited skills.

Maybe I should just go back to lurking.

Fun with Ottomans Volume III

2007-06-20T14:43:00.000-05:00

It seems the Turkish military pressure to invade Iraq and take out the PKK Kurds is mounting:

Turkey flirts with the Iraq quagmire
By Hilmi Toros

ISTANBUL - Turkey is beefing up military preparedness against Iraq-based Kurdish rebels as a prelude to a possible cross-border incursion that is opposed by the United States, the European Union and the Iraqi government.

Three Turkish provinces bordering Iraq have already been declared "special security" zones, limiting civilian access in the wake of an increase in bomb blasts in urban areas, including the capital Ankara and Istanbul, and attacks on the military. Although no one has claimed responsibility, official and public condemnation goes
to Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) insurgents slipping in from Iraq.
In addition, troops and military hardware are being amassed in Turkey's rugged and impoverished southeast, in the country's Kurdish-populated areas.

The daily newspaper Milliyet reported on Saturday that Turkish troops were already shelling PKK rebels in frontier areas within Iraq.

So far, despite public outcry for a decisive move against an estimated 3,000 secessionist PKK rebels holed up in Iraq, there has been no major incursion. But it has not been ruled out. And if it happens, it may have serious consequences for Turkey, Iraq and beyond.

Such an incursion is described as a "nightmare" scenario for the U.S. in Iraq:

The risk, analysts said, is that Turkey might become drawn into a wider conflict with Iraqi Kurds even if it initially sought to conduct a small-scale operation, and that other countries, including Iran, might also feel emboldened.

"It could open a Pandora's box for the quagmire -- the fiasco -- in Iraq to turn into a regional quagmire, with regional countries starting to fight wars on Iraqi territory," said Brookings Institution analyst Omer Taspinar.

Jon Alterman, director of the Middle East program at the CSIS think tank in Washington, said, "A complete mess in the North of Iraq creates problems for everything we are trying to do in Iraq. It creates problems for our deep defense relationship with Turkey and it creates an even more chaotic situation in a part of the world where we are desperate for less chaos."

Not only would it put America at odds either with Turkey or Iraqi Kurds or both, it might spread into a couple of other potential sensitive areas:

While the current focus is on the PKK (listed by Turkey, the US and the EU as a terrorist organization), there exists a larger "Kurdish problem". Turkey, Syria and Iran also have sizable Kurdish minorities and have experienced occasional flare-ups of ethnic tensions.

The Laciner report also says that if any Turkish military action goes beyond flushing out PKK rebels to involve fighting with Iraqi Kurds, it may lead to pan-Kurdish solidarity that could spell trouble for Turkey, Syria and Iran, as well as Iraq. The main Turkish concern is that a strong Kurdish entity in northern Iraq, including an independent one in case of an Iraqi meltdown, could embolden its own Kurds to seek similar status.

So the whole situation could open up, in essence, another front in the Iraq war, one potentially more wide ranging and no less intractable.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is, for his part, in no hurry to send in the army. He faces opposition from NATO and America, and Turkey stands to lose economically in the event of an invasion. But the military in Turkey has a very strong hand, seeing itself as the guardian of the secular republic against Islamist or separatist threats. Their military has a long history, dating back to the Ottoman Empire days, of making its own political decisions and walking over (or killing) any political opposition. With an increase in Kurdish terrorist acts and a weak, vacillating, moderate Islamist government at the helm, they are already bolstering their position. Meanwhile, public support for them increases at the expense of the government:

ANKARA: Funerals for three soldiers killed in a roadside bombing set up by Kurdish rebels turned into anti-government protests Monday as thousands of mourners called on Turkey's leaders to resign over their failure to rein in the violence.

Many Turks are becoming increasingly angry over the mounting military death toll from attacks by Kurdish rebels, some of whom are believed to be entering the country from northern Iraq.

The three soldiers were killed Saturday in Sirnak, a southeastern province, and were buried in separate funerals in Istanbul, Ankara and Manisa. Thousands attended the ceremonies, carrying Turkish flags, shouting anti-government slogans and booing ministers and other government officials who were present. Military officials were greeted with applause.

In Ankara, about 10,000 people gathered at the city's largest mosque, shouting "Government resign!" as Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul and other officials arrived.

In Manisa, protesters booed the speaker of Parliament, Bulent Arinc, and denounced the United States and Kurdish separatists

Obviously, the situation is in and of itself bad. The surge has hardly clamped down on violence in Iraq as it is, and this is with the Kurdish areas relatively calm and violence free. The Turkish military's defiant position in the face of international and UN opposition to an incursion sounds, to my ears, strikingly familiar. The difference between the Turks and the U.S. in this equation is that while we could merely claim (wrongly) that we had evidence of WMD and that Iraq under Saddam was an imminent threat, the Turks can actually claim a real and current threat, right over their border. Bushco. can huff and puff about the wider consequences of a military incursion all they want, but that won't hold a lot of water with average Turks. The specter of terrorist attacks is no less frightening for Turkish citizens than it is for American citizens, and it is far more immediate. With every attack, it is going to be harder and harder for the already flaccid Turkish government to hold back.

In a wider sense, this is the very predictable consequence of attempting to build an empire. As anyone who has had the misfortune of reading through the PNAC website could tell you, the neoncons wanted to take over Iraq and establish a permanent American "footprint" long before 9/11. This is long established fact. When I put on my little tinfoil hat, I see a direct pipeline from PNAC to the "sea of oil" in Iraq. But even if you take their prattlings at face value and believe their quasi-Wilsonian nonsense about spreading democracy (without all of that wussy League-of-Nations stuff, however) it amounts to the same thing-they are going to impose their will on other sovereign nations for what they see as America's (or really, their) interests.

The problem is that other nations in the region, or anywhere, are going to have interests of their own-interests that probably will not coincide with Americas. In fact, they may be at cross purposes. Furthermore, the citizens of an invaded country will almost ALWAYS be at cross purposes with their occupiers, which makes surrounding countries even jumpier, since there will almost surely be some runoff into their borders. The presence of an outside, interloping military force planting itself permanently in the region is almost guaranteed to invoke hostility all of its own accord.

In the face of hostile natives and hostile nations surrounding our forces, we, or any occupying force, would of course have to make deals with anyone who will do so. But this means that as soon as we do, someone else might see this as being against THEIR interests. In this way, we become entangled with competing allies or allies who are aligned with our enemies. And ultimately, it could be no other way-despite all of the right-wing chest beating and shouting, we simply cannot control people through the force of our will or our military. The days of that kind of physical dominance are over, unless we would like to drop fistfulls of atomic weaponry (I know some on the right would gladly do so), which brings up its own set of problems.

This is ultimately an untenable situation, making our security far worse than even I, a terrible pessimist, could ever have foreseen. And yet, in many ways it was pretty damn predictable-in fact, many people did predict it, and were called traitors for the effort. Many of the self-proclaimed Real Americans who brought us to this point are still in charge. I hope they can find a way to pull us back from a further escalating disaster, but I doubt they even really wish to try. It's not an edifying thought that in this case, for a sane resolution, I have to depend on Islamist Tayyip Erdogan and the PKK to find a way to a ceasefire, but there it is.

Christian Charity

2007-06-18T17:30:00.000-05:00

I am back from a week's absence, due to a ripping bad sore throat/fever thing I got from that petrie dish of an office that I work in. I tried to get up and blog a few times that week, between thrashing around in my bed in a pool of acrid sweat, with visions of nude Condoleeza Rice can-can lines dancing maniacally through my head. But I just didn't have the strength. Does that make me the world's lamest blogger? (I would contend that it is my weak, incoherent content, but this couldn't have helped).

Anyway, I am going to ease back into things here...

This, from Talk to Action:

The stacks of information about those worthy of consideration for Theocrat of the Week -- can get very high. But this week Our Distinguished Panel of Judges did not get far down the pile when they recognized the winners and stopped the competition.

Our winners this week plan to reenact the the actions of theocratic martyr Paul Hill next month in Milwaukee. On July 29, 1994 Paul Hill, who sought to set a good example for Christian theocratic revolutionaries, assasinated abortion provider Dr. John Britton and James Barrett one of his escorts, and seriously wounding another, June Barrett, outside an abortion clinic in Pensacola, Florida.

George L. Wilson of Children Need Heroes and Drew Heiss of Street Preach are planning to honor Paul Hill in a series of events called "Paul Hill Days" in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, July 26th - 29th -- "to honor him as God's man and our hero."
Why Milwaukee? Why not? There are people here who recognize Paul Hill as a hero, and we would love to welcome others from around the country who share our belief. Hopefully, in the future, others will host events in their cities.

Planned events include:

Activities at our two remaining killing centers

Literature distribution

Ministry at the Federal Courthouse

Reenactment of 7-29-1994

Paul Hill March

Ministry at other public forums

It should be noted that George L. Wilson, the proprietor of Children Needs Heroes, recognizes two other heroes he believes America's children should learn about: Shelly Shannon, who was convicted of the attempted assasination of Dr. George Tiller of Wichita, Kansas, among other serious crimes, including a series of arsons; and of course, James Kopp, who was convicted in the sniper assasination of Dr. Barnett Slepian in Amherst, New York. Kopp is also the chief suspect in several other shootings.

All three are recognized as Heroes of the Faith by the Army of God, members of which are likely to be on hand for the festivities.

This is jaw-dropping. There is going to be a celebration of home-grown terrorism, with a wonderful Christian bent. From the culture of life. This inspires awe in me. it really, really does. This naked disregard for life is nothing new, of course, and the hypocrisy of this kind of violence-celebrating hate-mongering is well noted in the blogosphere (if not the MSM, who assiduously avoid ever equating terrorists with good Christians). This kind of self-righteous posturing and celebrating of violence is part and parcel of the Christianists, and their benefactors look on with approval. It was exactly this kind of Christian hypocrisy that started my political awakening and pushed me to the left, back in the Reagan 80s, when they were just beginning to flex their muscles.

But this is more than just academic to me. I live in Milwaukee. This is personal, as I see it, an affront to the liberal traditions that long guided it's history. And even if you don't see that part of Milwaukee as valuable, the idea that this sleazy happening is coming here, and that they chose here to make this stand on behalf of domestic terrorism, is still appalling. Apparently, they think Milwaukee is filled with yokels slack-jawed enough to celebrate this kind of guns-n-Jesus idiocy (I especially love the "re-enactment." Perhaps Milwaukee can host re-enactments of other religiously-motivated killings for appreciative audiences-July 6, 1415 comes to mind.) At a time when our self-appointed daddy-leaders are foaming at the mouth to kill as many barbaric Muslims as they can have others bomb, the idea that this is mainstream Christianity is sickening.

I haven't heard of any kinds of counter-demonstration to this point. Obviously, in deference to the 1st Amendment the show can't be stopped, and that wouldn't help anyway, it would just add to their never-ending persecution complex. If anyone reads this, is there any place to potentially organize a counter rally or some such thing?

Hard Hitting Reporting is Awesome

2007-06-11T17:46:00.000-05:00

Jamison Foser wrote well about Carl Bernstein's book A Woman in Charge, exposing the idiocy behind the "authenticity" storyline that so fascinates the MSM/punditocracy to the detriment of our society. I can't add much to that; I won't read the book. When it comes to coverage of the Clintons, brains shrivel up and die like a slug in the sun. I just don't have enough time in my life to waste with that, so thank God someone does.

I do have to highlight, for my own piece of mind, one bit, from an interview on O'Reilly:

O'REILLY: Did she break the law?

BERNSTEIN: Yes.

O'REILLY: OK. Good, I like this. How did she break the law?

BERNSTEIN: She broke the law if, indeed, she perjured herself.

O'REILLY: Well, you just said she did break the law.

BERNSTEIN: No. The special prosecutor determined that she did not. So he did not file the charge.

O'REILLY: So you think she did. But the special prosecutor, Ken Starr, said no.

BERNSTEIN: That is co -- you know what? Let me be really straightforward. I don't think she broke the law. I think there was a time that she did not tell the truth.

O'REILLY: Under oath?

BERNSTEIN: You know, I wasn't in the room.

What? What is that incoherent crap? "I think she broke the law. If she did. Which the special prosecutor said she didn't. But I think she did sometime. But I really don't know, because I wasn't there."

The MSMs coverage of Hillary Clinton, in a nutshell.

More Fun with Ottomans

2007-06-08T14:47:00.000-05:00

There was a PKK attack on Monday that left 7 dead. The Turkish army responded by sending some of their army into northern Iraq in pursuit of PKK terrorists and set up a "security zone" in preparation for a potential major incursion. On Thursday, we get this:

Turkish soldiers killed near Iraq

Three Turkish soldiers were killed in a road side bomb near Iraq's border where Turkey's military started a campaign against Kurdish separatists.

The attack on Thursday evening occurred in one of several temporary security zones that the military had just declared along the Iraq border.

Six other soldiers were injured during the bombing, AP reported.

And this certainly looks promising:

The declaration was followed by reports of hundreds of Turkish soldiers crossing the border in to Iraq to pursue the guerrillas, though Turkey's Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul denied all such reports.

Turkey, as a strong ally of US in the region, has for some time threatened it would strike Kurdish bases in northern Iraq but US officials have argued against it, fearing that it might drag its Iraqi Kurdish allies into the conflict.

There are two things that come to mind as this begins to grow as a crisis. The first is the surge (escalation). Most coverage of the surge deals with Iraq as if it exists in a vacuum. We'll surge, clear and hold in the country and then the Iraqi parliament can take over. Obviously, this is not so. All of the countries that border Iraq-and all of the countries in the region generally-have some kind of stake, from their perspective, in the outcome of the war. For any kind of stability to foment in Iraq, these other countries would have to cooperate. Iran has already shown how troublesome that can be. But a fight between two sets of American allies in the region could usher in a whole new kind of disaster. The idea that we can stabilize Iraq, and thus stabilize the whole region, is a fiction. It depends too much on factors outside it's borders. The Kurd-Turk situation will at some point have to be worked out for a stable Iraq, or else the surge, or any other operation, will end in failure.

The other thing that comes to mind regards the warbloggers. I have already addressed their desire to portray Muslims as one monolithic group with the desire only to destroy the West. This situation brings reality to a head: we are aligned with two different Muslim groups whose support and cooperation are integral to the war. One is the only group of people truly supportive of the American presence, but they are probably harboring terrorists. The other is a NATO ally and one of the only Muslim-based democracies in the world, but they are being attacked by a terrorist group supported and aided by our only friends in Iraq. If you don't understand the potential dangers this situation poses and it's importance, you have no clue about what is happening there. Complete ignorance of these kinds of subtleties might be ok when you're blathering about indoctrinating our schoolchildren into becoming warmongers or yammering about building 10 Gitmos, but it does nothing to deal with the problems as they are.

Republicans are awesome

2007-06-08T12:33:00.001-05:00

Or, in any case, conservatives are. As this proves. What absolute tripe.

Whatever anyone's beliefs about the Iraq war, making the comparison of Libby to a fallen soldier is repugnant. There are actual soldiers facing actual bullets, losing actual limbs and actually dying, everyday. Scooter Libby, by contrast, is a political hack, working in an office in America. He didn't bravely face down a horde of marauding Janissaries. He lied to a prosecutor to keep his bosses from looking bad. If his life is "ruined," well, he had other choices. In any case, the "hardships" poor Scooter will face in minimum-security prison will still be vastly safer than even the safest parts of Baghdad. And I'm sure that there will be plenty of well-paid opportunities in the private sector upon his release. Conservative plutocrats all over the nation will welcome such a faithful operative with open arms, methinks. Whereas the soldiers Ajami compares him to will have far harder roads to travel when they get home, what with their missing limbs, or PTSD, etc.

I shudder to think what the caterwauling and howling would be like if all of this swirled around a Democratic President. But now that the rule of law conservatives say they love so much is being applied one of their own, conservatives like Ajami are doing cartwheels to portray this two-bit monkeyshines courtier as a ruddy-faced, brawny-chested warrior who was merely doing his duty as a patriot and is being brought down by petty jealous rivals (and incidentally, I just love the little sad-face picture of Scooter, it really makes it for me). I know that for some reason conservatives believe that this "fallen soldier" needs to be pardoned. Just to reiterate what others have stated before, the American public is not following you down that road. The attempt to attach Libby to true casualties of war would be laughable, if it weren't so crude. Conservatives are becoming more and more deranged. I'm sorry that I am simply ranting, but, really crap like this is just flat-out crazy.

Friday Cat Blogging

2007-06-08T07:28:00.000-05:00

Diego tries out his new litterbox. We tired of always having to clean it, so we had his anus removed. Now we don't even need to fill it with litter.

Jackson. He has attacked a box and feasted on its bloody entrails, like all good hunting cats.

Fun with Ottomans

2007-06-06T18:25:00.001-05:00

I am tired from racing last night, so I have mercifully little to say (for me).

I would think this to be a major developing storyline:

PKK attacks military outpost; 7 soldiers killed

ANKARA - Associated Press

The outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party fired rockets and grenades at a Turkish military outpost, killing 7 soldiers in a bold attack that heightened tension at a time when Ankara has threatened military action against Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq.

The army sent helicopter gunships and reinforcements to Tunceli province in southeastern Turkey after two PKK members rammed a vehicle into the military post on Monday, throwing hand grenades and opening fire with automatic weapons, the governor's office announced.

Soldiers returned fire, killing one of them - who had explosives strapped to his body, the governor's office said. Local media said the second attacker escaped injured.

Several other PKK members simultaneously opened fire on the outpost from a nearby forest, the governor's office said. The attack left seven soldiers dead and seven others injured. One of the injured was in critical condition, authorities said.

The attack came as Foreign Minister Abdullah Gül told European Union officials visiting Ankara that "we have every right to take measures against terrorist activities directed at us from northern Iraq."

Turkey's political and military leaders have been debating whether to stage an incursion into northern Iraq to try to root out the PKK bases there.

...and this too:

Turkey says no army operation in N.Iraq just now

ANKARA, June 6 (Reuters) - Turkey said on Wednesday it had no plans at present to send troops into northern Iraq to crush Kurdish rebels there, but it indicated this remained an option in the future.

Media speculation is high of a possible cross-border operation against rebels of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which uses mainly Kurdish northern Iraq as a base from which to launch attacks in Turkey.

Parliament, now in recess ahead of July 22 elections, would have to reconvene to authorise any military operation beyond Turkey's borders.

Asked if the Foreign Ministry was readying documents for such a move, spokesman Levent Bilman told a news conference: "At this time there is no work on such an authorisation, but Turkey is ready for anything at any time."

I especially liked this at the end of the Reuters story:

Turkey is furious with U.S. and Iraqi authorities for failing to crack down on the estimated 4,000 PKK rebels in northern Iraq.

Ankara blames the PKK for the deaths of more than 30,000 people in Turkey since the group launched its armed campaign for an ethnic homeland in the impoverished southeast region in 1984.

What a great situation. A NATO ally massing troops near the border of Iraq to pursue terrorists associated with the most supportive group in the country we invaded.

This brings up numerous points. The PKK is a terrorist group, based on the most basic definition. If you believe the insurgents in Iraq are terrorists, then the PKK would be as well. Kurds in Iraq may be harboring these terrorists. If Turkey were to follow the Bushian philosophy, they would be within their rights to just go right in and invade. After all, we did just that on far flimsier premises. I have to assume this would be unacceptable to Bush and gang, which means they will have to go out of their way to defuse the situation peacefully. They couldn't just let Turkey go in guns a'blazin' because this would presumably piss off the one real ally we have in the country. They might strike a deal wherein the Kurds give up PKK terrorists. I see this as unlikely, for much the same reason as above. So, here we are. If Turkey invades and we do nothing, this will be bad. If we oppose such an incursion, militarily or otherwise, we basically shelter terrorists, which would also have to be considered bad. Finding some way to weed out PKK members hiding out with Iraqi Kurds and handing them over to Turkish authorities is less bad, but not that great. The Bushies haven't shown themselves to be particularly willing to engage in tender diplomacy, nor do they show any real aptitude for it. Mostly, we have to hope that the Turks will decide not to get aggressive (they have some good reasons not to) and that Kurds will cooperate with us in the meantime to root out terrorist elements in the meantime (I'm not betting on this).

Not to pretend that this growing situation was one of the reasons I didn't support invading Iraq in the first place-Kurds were hardly on my radar at the time-but this is exactly the kind of unintended consequence that you would hope really smart war-planners who want to transform the military and establish a beyond-challenge hegemony super-ultra-massive-power might want to consider before launching a war.

Or, apparently, not.

Innovative Conservative Thinkers

2007-06-05T11:39:00.000-05:00

Dick Armey. Great.

This is one of those examples of "thoughtful" conservatism based on supposedly "Jeffersonian" principles that makes all kinds of ludicrous assumptions. Particlarly the assumption that

Government can only expand its scope of power and authority at the expense of the citizen.

This is based on the either-or assumption that if government does anything at all, it is automatically at the expense of the freedoms of the American citizen. Thus, any and all government programs or laws or whatever are automatically tyrannical. Any government program, no matter how high-minded, is thus a violation of the principles of the founding fathers, true conservatism which is the natural state of being, blah blah blah blah blah, and thus needs to be curtailed altogether.

Whatever. That is a way of looking at it, I suppose. Not a good way, but a way. Another way of looking at it is that the American government and the American people fashion an agreement as to whether the government will expand or contract, based on whatever conglomeration of interests can tolerate one another enough to get along and cooperate. The way we decide such things as a nation is based on voting. If we want the governemnt to do more things in various ways, we vote for candidates who say they will. When we decide otherwise, we vote accordingly. It's not a perfect system, but for the most part, it works amazingly well. Unless, of course, you believe in theories of, say, a unitary executive who can do whatever he wants without answering to written laws , and who can then, say, spy on American citizens without warrants even though most Americans don't believe he has this authority. Or unless you desire to clamp down on who can and cannot vote, through, maybe, trumped up charges of voter fraud as seen by politicized agents of government institutions. If something like that were to happen, then certainly the expansion of the government would be at the expense of the people, because they could not effectively react to it excesses. Unfortunately for Mr. Armey, he happens to be a member in very good standing with the American political party who have tried exactly these things.

Armey's simplistic "Governement equals Red Tyranny" version of freedom versus government comes up short when he applies it to health care, his chosen example with this post. Simply put, health care isn't a choice. I need it. And since I need it, I have to pay for it somehow. This is only a "choice" in the Libertarian, anarcho-capitalism, "true-conservative" meaning of the word, wherein I can "choose" to be fired from a job and lose my insurance; or "choose" not to have enough money to pay for insurance on my own; or "choose" to curl up in a ball and die. By any rational measure, these aren't really "choices" at all. Since it's accepted economic practice to raise interest rates as a mean of increasing unemployment to control inflation, which of course might leave me and many others out of work and thus out of insurance, in many ways I am already not free to choose the manner of my health care coverage. Given all of this, I might actually welcome government "interference" of some kind to foot the bill for health care. This doesn't threaten my freedoms at all. At worst, it is freedom-neutral-it doesn't affect my freedoms any more or less negatively or positively than the current system; and it could actually increase my choices in other ways.

If this is one of the leading voices of the conservative "movement," then the Republican party is even more vacuous and listless than I thought.

Not-scared America

2007-06-04T16:22:00.000-05:00

I have to agree with almost all of this by Fareed Zakaria.

I especially liked this section:

The presidential campaign could have provided the opportunity for a national discussion of the new world we live in. So far, on the Republican side, it has turned into an exercise in chest-thumping. Whipping up hysteria requires magnifying the foe. The enemy is vast, global and relentless. Giuliani casually lumps together Iran and Al Qaeda. Mitt Romney goes further, banding together all the supposed bad guys. "This is about Shia and Sunni. This is about Hizbullah and Hamas and Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood," he recently declared.

But Iran is a Shiite power and actually helped the United States topple the Qaeda-backed Taliban regime in Afghanistan. Qaeda-affiliated radical Sunnis are currently slaughtering Shiites in Iraq, and Iranian-backed Shiite militias are responding by executing and displacing Iraq's Sunnis. We are repeating one of the central errors of the early cold war—putting together all our potential adversaries rather than dividing them. Mao and Stalin were both nasty. But they were nasties who disliked one another, a fact that could be exploited to the great benefit of the free world. To miss this is not strength. It's stupidity.

...largely because it makes a point (better) that I was trying to make here. (Man, linking to myself is just such a wonderfully pompous experience. I would apologize to my readers, if I had any).

Of course, his worldview validates my own worldview, so of course I like what he wrote and I am less likely to look for counter examples. But the he brings up a primary theme that is difficult to refute-America's open, democratic society is a strength, not a weakness. Given that we live in a time when, say, writers at respected, right-wing magazines can call for military coups to save our nation, this cannot be stressed enough.

Friday Cat Blogging

2007-06-01T18:23:00.001-05:00

Diego. As you can see, he loves playing airplane.

Jackson. His ear has grown back. He looks pretty mad about the bow. Justifiably, I might add.

It seems so obvious to me....

2007-06-01T07:23:00.000-05:00

...but then I'm just some guy in a call center.

I just read this:

Baghdad’s Sunni residents battle insurgents
Locals join fight against al-Qaeda in Iraq; mayor hopes U.S. stays away

BAGHDAD - Sunni residents of a west Baghdad neighborhood used assault rifles and a roadside bomb to battle the Sunni insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq this week, leaving at least 28 people dead and six injured, residents said Thursday.

The mayor of the Amiriyah neighborhood, Mohammed Abdul Khaliq, said in a telephone interview that residents were rising up to try to expel al-Qaeda in Iraq, which has alienated other Sunnis with its indiscriminate violence and attacks on members of its own sect.

Though the Republicans like to paint all Muslims with one broad brush, I have always privately thought that the goals of the native insurgents and Al Quaeda in Iraq were different enough that they might turn on one another. In fact, I am not particularly convinced that Al Quaeda, with it's rigid fundamentalism, is particularly popular amongst Muslims in Iraq, or anywhere. I suspected that Iraqis found them useful, and that if they stopped being useful, they would see them as foreign interlopers and would want them to leave.

Some of the quotes in this story bear this out:

Problems arose on Tuesday when the Islamic Army, a powerful Sunni insurgent group, posted a statement at a local mosque criticizing al-Qaeda in Iraq for killing dozens of other Sunnis in Fallujah and Baghdad "on suspicion only," without sufficient evidence that they had done something wrong, according to a copy sent to The Washington Post. The message warned al-Qaeda in Iraq to stop the practice, which it said could lead to clashes between them.

Late Wednesday afternoon, according to residents reached by phone who would not be quoted by name for security reasons, an armed group scrawled graffiti on a school wall reading: "Down with al-Qaeda, long live the honest resistance." When al-Qaeda in Iraq members came to wipe away the writing, a roadside bomb exploded nearby, killing three of them, residents said.

Al-Qaeda in Iraq then attacked a mosque associated with the Islamic Army, killing the group's leader, Razi al-Zobai, and four other fighters, complaining in a statement that the Islamic Army had become involved in the political process in Iraq, residents said. In retaliation, the Islamic Army attacked a mosque associated with al-Qaeda in Iraq, killing one of the group's leaders, known as Sheik Hamid, and four other members, including Waleed Saber Tikriti, a doctor who treated al-Qaeda in Iraq's wounded, residents said

I don't think this necessarily means we have turned any corners, however. Iraqi insurgents are fighting for control of Iraq. If they see us as a threat to that-and I think it is obvious they do-and Al Quaeda in Iraq seems useful to them, they would almost assuredly strike up their alliance again:

Abdul Khaliq said he hoped U.S. forces would stay out of the fight. "But if the Americans interfere, it will blow up, because they are the enemy of us both, and we will unite against them and stop fighting each other," he said

I won't make the mistake of taking all of this at face value. Loyalties will shift constantly in a paramilitary-led war. Rhetoric is one thing, action is another. It's not like I have some direct connection to work with here-I am a blogger, writing in my spare time, working off of second-hand information from a confusing war zone.

I do think that Al-Quaeda is less popular in a real sense than it might actually seem. There could be many reasons-political, economic, social-that might motivate someone to become a terrorist or insurgent, and a religious believer might make a connection between political and religious domination without believing in rigid fundamentalist doctrine (think Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland). These people might find Al-Quaeda's ability to send zealous soldiers into buildings with bombs strapped to their bodies a usefull tool. It's almost like they're using Al-Quaeda as some sort of proxy army. But this does not mean that all potential Muslim terrorists share the same overall goals as Al-Quaeda's nuttiness, any more than the U.S. did when it funnelled support to the Mujahideen in the '80s.

I think that Al-Quaeda, while definitely not to be underestimated, is a stoppable force. But the Bush administration's constant saber-rattling about regime change plays into their hands in a way that is almost certain to make them more and more powerful no matter how many setbacks like this they might suffer.

AIDS: A Building Block for Power

2007-05-31T16:05:00.000-05:00

At Hullabaloo, Tristero is justifiably suspicious of the motivations behind this initiative:

Bush Requests $30 Billion to Fight AIDS

WASHINGTON, May 30 — President Bush called Wednesday for Congress to spend $30 billion to fight global AIDS over the next five years, a near doubling of financing that is part of a White House effort to burnish Mr. Bush’s humanitarian credentials before he meets leaders of the Group of 8 industrialized nations next week
The initiative, if approved, would build on a program that grew out of the president’s 2003 State of the Union address, when he asked for $15 billion over five years for prevention, treatment and care of AIDS patients in developing countries. Congress approved more than $18 billion, but the program is set to expire next year.

Mr. Bush’s announcement, delivered in the White House Rose Garden, adds to what has become an unexpectedly high priority for the White House. AIDS was not a signature issue for Mr. Bush when he ran for office in 2000. But it has become one in part because the Christian conservatives who make up his political base have embraced it, and in part because Mr. Bush wants to build a legacy for the United States and a more compassionate image abroad to counter international criticism of American policies in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Specifically, Tristero sees this largely as a means of feeding the access-capitalist beast the Bush administration is so fond of (and so much a part of). And this is, of course, true.

But I think we can expand upon this. Crony capitalism and spoils-system government in a democracy is hardly new. The scope of it is unprecedented, but it is more than simple cronyism at a whole new level. The Bush administration had been attempting to establish total and permanent control of outcomes for itself, and was hoping to use powerful conservative groups as a means of doing so. Anyone looking at the Republican party should view their actions through the prism of control. This desire for control of outcomes drives all of their decision making, moving them to: install people of total incompetence or ignorance into important government positions; enact truly idiotic, fact-free policy, regardless of effectiveness; and use noise and unscientific, discredited studies and reports from ideological think tanks to give their ideas intellectual sheen. Christianists and plutocrats make perfect cogs for such a machinee. In this way, the AIDS epidemic in Africa is not only a potential cash cow for Republican aligned business interests-I'm looking at you, pharma lords-it also melds these interests perfectly with Christianist's desire for political and social control.

In fact, they may be the driving force in this issue. Christianists have been instrumental in Bush administration'sthe growing interest in the AIDS epidemic. As the Times article states

AIDS was not a signature issue for Mr. Bush when he ran for office in 2000. But it has become one in part because the Christian conservatives who make up his political base have embraced it...

And, yes, they certainly have been very active. This is of a piece with Bush's "compassionate conservative" posturing in the 2000 campaign, and his blather about his Christian beliefs.

Unfortunately, the Christian influence hasn't exactly been a boon. This is because of their love of the "Abstinence Only" programs they crow so magnificently about. Christian leaders, who obsess about the sex lives of others on a near-constant basis, seem to feel that, say, advocating correct condom use as a method of preventing AIDS will lead to wanton, uncontrolled sex; and that clean-needle exchanges will encourage intravenous drug use, immediately. Thus, any program that does not push abstinence-only programs should get no money from America at all:

Some leading Christian conservatives are calling on Congress to reduce U.S. funding allocations to the Global Fund To Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, saying that the Global Fund does not allocate adequate resources to faith-based programs and that it promotes condom use, the Boston Globe reports. According to the Globe, the Global Fund is not "popular" among U.S. Christian conservatives, some of whom object to the Global Fund's policies, which include supporting needle-exchange programs for injection drug users. In addition, some Christian conservatives are "furious that just 6%" of the Global Fund's program grants go toward faith-based groups, the Globe reports. Peter Brandt, senior director of government and public policy at the Christian group Focus on the Family, said he wants the U.S. to stop financing all of the Global Fund's HIV/AIDS programs because the group does not provide sufficient money to faith-based groups and has given little support to abstinence messages.

There is only one problem: there is no evidence that abstinence programs work:

There is no good scientific evidence that teaching abstinence to teenagers will by itself prevent unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases, say the authors of a recent study. Yet they found that comprehensive sex education is declining and that more youngsters are being taught nothing more than abstinence...

...Kirby compared California and Texas, two states he said were similarly populous and were home to many Hispanics, a group whose teen pregnancy rates are high.
"California took a very progressive approach," he said. "Texas pushed abstinence and made it a little more difficult for teens to receive contraceptives. Pregnancy did go down between 1991 and 2004, but Texas had the second-lowest decline of all states, 19 percent. California had the second-greatest decrease, 46 percent.
"What's really sad is that Bush is trying to take some of the policies that didn't work in Texas and implement them nationwide."

Furthermore, the "Content of Federally-Funded Abstinence-Only Programs" study done by the House of Representatives found that such programs "Contain False and Misleading
Information about the Effectiveness of Contraceptives..."

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), “Latex
condoms, when used consistently and correctly, are highly effective in preventing
the transmission of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.”26 Contrary to this scientific
consensus, multiple curricula provide false information about condoms and HIV
transmission.

Several curricula cite an erroneous 1993 study of condom effectiveness that has
been discredited by federal health officials. The 1993 study, by Dr. Susan Weller,
looked at a variety of condom effectiveness studies and concluded that condoms
reduce HIV transmission by 69%.27 Dr. Weller’s conclusions were rejected by
the Department of Health and Human Services, which issued a statement in 1997
informing the public that “FDA and CDC believe this analysis was flawed.”28
The Department cited numerous methodological problems, including the mixing
of data on consistent condom use with data on inconsistent condom use, and
found that Dr. Weller’s calculation of a 69% effectiveness rate was based on
“serious error.” In fact, CDC noted that “[o]ther studies of discordant couples
— more recent and larger than the ones Weller reviewed, and conducted over several years — have demonstrated that consistent condom use is highly effective
at preventing HIV infection.”30

Despite these findings, several curricula refer approvingly to the Weller study.
One curriculum teaches: “A meticulous review of condom effectiveness was
reported by Dr. Susan Weller in 1993. She found that condoms were even less
likely to protect people from HIV infection. Condoms appear to reduce the risk
of heterosexual HIV infection by only 69%.”31 Another curriculum that cites Dr.
Weller’s data claims: “In heterosexual sex, condoms fail to prevent HIV
approximately 31% of the time.”32

Other abstinence-only curricula contest CDC’s finding that “latex condoms
provide an essentially impermeable barrier to particles the size of STD
pathogens.”33 These curricula rely on the false idea that HIV and other pathogens
can “pass through” condoms. One curriculum instructs students to:
Think on a microscopic level. Sperm cells, STI organisms, and HIV
cannot be seen with the naked eye — you need a microscope. Any
imperfections in the contraceptive not visible to the eye, could allow
sperm, STI, or HIV to pass through. . . . The size difference between a
sperm cell and the HIV virus can be roughly related to the difference
between the size of a football field and a football.34
The same curriculum states, “The actual ability of condoms to prevent the
transmission of HIV/AIDS even if the product is intact, is not definitively
known.”35 This distorts CDC’s finding and scientific consensus.

Apparently, it isn't enough to spread Texas' failed system throughout the U.S. Bushco wants that kind of success all through Africa as well.

Of course, there isn't any reason sex-only-with-your-married partner should apply to, say, Bush operatives in charge of such programs.

This is typical of the controlling religious right. They will help you...with conditions. And those conditions are that you live in a manner that they get to choose for you (even if they do not live up to those standards themselves). The rewards for helping people with these conditions attached are obvious. They have used these occasions for bringing people in dire need into their fold, which helps to maintain their numbers and political power. This makes them invaluable to the Republican party, and this value puts them in positions of power, where they can reinforce that power all over again through programs like these. An ugly loop.

This deeply cynical symbiotic relationship has nothing at all to do with AIDS prevention or helping poverty-stricken countries dealing with a horrible epidemic. Any truly intelligent or generous approach would use what works without attaching dogmatic religious conditions. But the administration and the Christian right see AIDS as an opportunity, mutually beneficial for themselves and their agendas even as it leaves real people with real needs in the lurch. And it builds the ideological foundation that will allow for the plutocratic hog-wallow that almost certainly will follow.

Republicans

2007-05-30T07:28:00.001-05:00

They are just awesome.

What with his general incompetence, lack of substantive policy ideas, whiff of corruption and "liberals are all gay tree-hugging taxers" rhetoric, it's a surprise he's not considered Presidential material.

You can't shake the devil's hand and say you're only kidding

2007-05-27T09:50:00.000-05:00

Sigh. Proof that getting Democrats to do anything as a group is still like herding cats:

For Democrats, Debate on Fox Reveals Divide

WASHINGTON, May 26 — Four years ago, the leaders of the Congressional Black Caucus began looking for a television outlet to co-sponsor and broadcast a presidential debate to address the concerns of minority voters.

Only one news channel made an acceptable proposal, and an unlikely channel at that: Fox News, in what some Democrats viewed as an effort to associate itself with a group that could help it make good on its claim of presenting “fair and balanced” news coverage.

But now that relationship is being shaken by the decision of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, and former Senator John Edwards of North Carolina to shun the debate, a move that has exposed fault lines among two major constituencies of the Democratic Party. While the withdrawal by the candidates frustrated members of the black caucus, it mollified liberals who had objected to the involvement of Fox News, whose programming includes some of the most conservative and pro-Republican commentary on the air.

I have to admit that I can understand why the Congressional Black Caucus would think this might be a good deal. Any political group of any kind faces a kind of dual loyalty: they need to represent the group of people they speak for, but they also need to represent themselves, in order to get enough power and influence to make a difference. As the story points out, there were few networks jumping up and down to take the debates on (although it is interesting to me that Fox beat BET for the debates).

Nonetheless, they might wish to ask themselves where this is taking them. Fox's ratings have slipped recently. Their Republican-friendly, right-leaning tendencies are well documented in places like Media Matters for America. And it isn't simply Fox News. The whole Rupert Murdoch empire is largely a right-wing mouthpiece, which he is looking to add to in a major way.

This same news organization plays up to the Republican "base's" fear of brown people all the time. To wit:

On the March 29 edition of Hannity & Colmes, Fox News' Sean Hannity stated that the actions of protestors -- including "[p]eople holding the Mexican flag up" -- "seemed to be, in many, many ways, outrageous." Hannity subsequently asked a former adviser to Mexican President Vicente Fox to "condemn some of" the protestors' actions, but did not specify which actions

n the March 30 edition of Hannity & Colmes, Fox News analyst and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA) stated that "the American people, frankly, when they see a huge crowd in a city carrying flags other than the U.S., I think they're pretty unimpressed, and frankly, a little bit irritated by the idea of people who are here illegally telling us they're going to blackmail our politicians into passing bad laws."

• On the April 2 edition of Fox News Co.'s Fox News Sunday, Fox News anchor Brit Hume stated that the sight of "tens of thousands of people demonstrating, waving foreign flags, on behalf of illegal immigration and against the idea that America should enforce its own laws" was a "repellent spectacle." Hume added that as a result, "reasonable Americans are probably having a difficult time finding anybody to root for in this debate."

All from MMfA (I know, I'm relying on them a lot here, but they do good work.)

While Fox is not the only news station spouting race-based nonsense by any means, their record on the issue is wider and longer, and with more purpose. Their alignment with the same political party that brought America the racist "Southern Strategy" is well established, despite their protests to the contrary. While I don't have any time for ideological purity, which I think is undesirable and impractical, and I certainly don't think that Democratic groups should march in any kind of mindless lockstep with one another, I do think it is reasonable to ask any Democratic Party oriented group what the long-term gain would be aligning themselves with a news organization so hostile to interests that are even vaguely liberal or Democratic.

Withdrawing from Reality

2007-05-26T12:35:00.000-05:00

From the New York Times today:

WASHINGTON, May 25 — The Bush administration is developing what are described as concepts for reducing American combat forces in Iraq by as much as half next year, according to senior administration officials in the midst of the internal debate.

The Washington insiders talk, the press dutifully "reports." If this seems familiar, it's because it is.

The idea that there is any really serious consideration of a troop decrease or anything resembling a withdrawal is clearly piffle:

So far, the concepts are entirely a creation of Washington and have been developed without the involvement of the top commanders in Iraq, Gen. David H. Petraeus and Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, both of whom have been enthusiastic supporters of the troop increase.

Those generals and other commanders have made it clear that they are operating on a significantly slower clock than officials in Washington, who are eager for significant withdrawals before the president leaves office in January 2009.

In an interview in Baghdad on Thursday, General Odierno, the senior United States ground commander, said any withdrawal of American troops was not advisable until December, “at a minimum.”

There is no "debate" about troop sizes or withdrawals. They will remain as they are, or get higher, just as they have each time before when the administration "debated" the future of the war. Bush and gang have repeatedly claimed that withdrawal is a sign of weakness that would be disastrous for Americans, leading to an Army of Janissaries at the gates of Washington, or Hustisford, or wherever. Their opposition to all things Democrat is predicated on the idea that they are surrender monkeys that cannot be trusted. Each and every one of the Republican Presidential candidates (save one) are falling all over themselves to prove that THEY will be roughinest, toughinest, torturingest, biggest-cock-wieldingest Real-'Merican on the block. They have already committed themselves to more troops under the requests of more time. In essence, they have dug themselves in, on purpose, and there is simply no way they can reverse this position in any real sense, no matter what posturing might filter through the media.

This is part of a game. The Democrats caved on the funding battle. This will allow two things: The Republicans can pretend to talk about troop withdrawals now, in order to take at least partial credit for the inevitable troop cuts in the future; and it also buys them time, time they need to keep it going until they can wheeze to the finish line, where they will be able to blame the Democrats for losing after they are gone. And, just like the post-Vietnam era, they will play this up for all it's worth.

Especially with returning veterans. Spencer Ackerman's article, here, details a problem facing Democrats in the future: Veterans feelings about "losing" the war. As someone who feels the war was unnecessary and futile from the start, I see the policy makers, not the soldiers, marines, etc. as being at fault. But veterans will not see it this way. Being pulled (as they will see it) prematurely will most likely leave many of them feeling bitter. And the lowest and most manipulative of Republicans will be there to welcome them with open arms.

Friday Cat Blogging

2007-05-24T22:09:00.000-05:00

Jackson Dewayne. All 22 lbs. of him. He has cut off his ear to give to a prostitute out of love.

Diego Manuel.

Republicans start a new meme

2007-05-24T12:41:00.000-05:00

It seem like such a small thing now, but I'm sure nonesense like this:

There not only is no evidence of wrongdoing, but there is no allegation of any wrongdoing on your part."--Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), to former Justice staffer Monica Goodling at yesterday's hearing

...will only become more common, like the constant Republican refrain that Scooter Libby broke no laws.

Unfortunately, there is this.

This is, in fact, an admission of wrongdoing.

Republicans primary defense against politicizing various organs of the government is to claim this is overblown, no real crimes were committed, this is how it is usually done, nothing to see here, move along...though I don't think it will have much of an impact in the short term, it lays the foundation for claims in later years that this misuse of the DOJ was in fact nothing particularly egregious. Look for this to be amplified over and over again by right wing noisemakers. It would be sad if 2-3 years from now the Republicans were able to re-write history to downplay the importance of this mess.

Matrimonial Bliss

2007-05-23T19:09:00.001-05:00

I just couldn't pass this up.

Being so new, I don't do much for amplification, but any opportunity to expose right-wing "Christian" family values as hypocritical piffle I will gladly take, ineffectual or no.

Just to make this clear, I could really care less about the marriage and divorce habits of political figures. I don't consider it my business. If Rudy, Newt, Tommy and Johnny want to plaster their clammy, doughy, pallid bodies onto consenting, nubile Young Republican starlets, or fill their empty husks with new, improved trophy wives, well, that's their own affair. They're hardly alone in that.

But, no one should ever forget the unbelievable waste of time, money and energy that was the Clinton impeachment and the Republicans' relentless pursuit of the wayward penis. It would be nice if the "liberal" media would hold Republican leaders' feet to the fire over the way they so easily cast off inconvenient spouses with the same kind of zeal they covered the Clenis. In fact, you would think that might have come up more, considering how generally well known this information is. But, not really.

I, for one, am more interested in seeing how Christian conservatives vote in these elections, considering there is no one even remotely on the same page with their worldview religiously. Will they stay home? Or will they exercise their famous proclivity for compartmentalized thinking and vote for someone in large numbers? Given the way they equate conflict in the Middle East with the End Times, chest-beating big-dickery and clash-of-cultures puffery may trump all.

Blogging is new to me

2007-05-23T18:33:00.000-05:00

I have just made this blog public. I'm not exactly expecting waves of readers looking for my brilliant political commentary, for I am neither learned nor particularly brilliant. In fact, I have no qualifications for this at all, aside from the rudimentary computer skills necessary to log in to blogger. And, of course, I can type. If you do come across my blog, well, welcome. I can hardly imagine what brought you here, but if I can come up with blog posts of a higher quality than, say, Ace of Spades, well, then it won't be a total loss.

Christianist Love

2007-05-23T16:43:00.000-05:00

I thought this was an interesting story:

Bomb Plot Thwarted at Falwell's Funeral

Even in death, the Rev. Jerry Falwell rouses the most volatile of emotions.

A small group of protesters gathered near the funeral services to criticize the man who mobilized Christian evangelicals and made them a major force in American politics -- often by playing on social prejudice

A group of students from Falwell's Liberty University staged a counterprotest.

And Campbell County authorities arrested a Liberty University student for having several homemade bombs in his car.

The student, 19-year-old Mark D. Uhl of Amissville, Va., reportedly told authorities that he was making the bombs to stop protesters from disrupting the funeral service. The devices were made of a combination of gasoline and detergent, a law enforcement official told ABC News' Pierre Thomas. They were "slow burn," according to the official, and would not have been very destructive.

This harkens back to my post of last week about Christian-based terror. And a fine demonstration of Christian hypocrisy it is.

To listen to Christian fundamentalists, Muslims as a group are predisposed to violence due to their religion's belief system, specifically regarding jihad. Christianity, of course, never specifically preaches any kind of violence. Jesus, when it is convenient, was a man of peace, which makes the Christian fundamentalist a man of peace as well, at least in their heads. A poll of Fundamentalist leaders taken in 2002 by Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics at the University of Akron found that 70% believed that Islam is a "religion of violence." There is nothing particularly surprising in findings like this; fundamentalists always think their religion is the one true religion and thus right, and others are of course inherently wrong.

However, it is impossible to miss the cognitive dissonance. Christians are, in fact, attempting and sometimes succeeding in terrorist acts. Their leaders are calling for the assasinations of leaders they don't care for, publicly, like any Mullah might. Their belief in the End Times is behind political support of Israel in the hopes of the Second Coming/Rapture mythology, support that is helping to kill thousands of people a year. Whether or not the Bible actually says to kill in so many words, it is the primary inspiration for these beliefs, a fact you'll never hear them deny.

Religion and spirituality may inspire, but people act. People's actions are a reflection of who they are, not what their religion is. The way they interpret how their religion is supposed to interact with the material world is entirely on their shoulders, whether they are Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Sikh, etc. To decry a religion as inherently violent while supporting and even encouraging acts of violence in the name of your own is little more than an argument of convenience.

My first substantial post! And its bad!

2007-05-15T07:21:00.000-05:00

Since I am now beginning a blog, the form as a vibrant part of political discourse must be coming to an end, as I am always the last to hop on to a trend. But, here it is.

One of the harder things about doing this is that I will now have to read all manner of idiocy on the web and elsewhere, the better to have something to pontificate about. Thus, after avoiding much of the right-wing opinion mill, I now have to wade through such "intellectuals" as Jonah Goldberg, or...whoever qualifies for intellectual status over there...well, anyway, I'll have to read some very silly stuff.

I have mostly avoided partisan writing on the whole, unless I already agreed with it, leaving the work of actually checking other people's work to the mainstream media and liberal writers, and crossed my fingers that they were doing a good job while I largely wanked off reading various texts and history and hoping to hide away as an academic some time in the future. Though I had been political in my mind since I was but a pup, I had been a big wuss when it came to adding my own perspective. I didn't really involve myself at any level. I was weak, flaccid, pale, clammy. So, coming to this late, after three decades of not really doing much of anything, with no real expertise on issues beyond what I've read and an unused journalism degree, after so many others have done so much with the blogosphere, and after assiduously avoiding even reading opinions that do not jibe with my own, I would say that jumping into the fray now is intimidating. But then, that's ok, since the idea anyone will read this piffle is outrageous anyway.

To make it easy on myself, I thought I would start by insulting Instapundit. That always seems like a good tactic. Unfortunately, the post I wanted to rip fucked me up because he made my point for me-but no matter, because there is always this response from Bryan Preston:

But he’s wrong that “fundamentalist Christians” are going to take this as a cue to start up their own terrorism to get what they want. And he’s wrong because he starts with an error on the basics: Namely, that Christianity and Islam aren’t the same thing, don’t believe the same things and don’t teach the same things. The foundational texts of the two faiths are very different, and the differences make all the difference in the world.

Certainly! Because no Christians have ever turned to violence to advance their causes. Not like this , for example, or this , just to name two.

He continues:

It’s a pity that five years into this war, or nearly 30 if you’re dating its beginning to the Islamic Revolution in Iran, so few people actually understand this. Most of our political leaders in both parties don’t understand it, secular humanists constantly conflate Pat Robertson with the Taliban thereby demonstrating that they don’t get it, and most of our pundits and most of our major bloggers obviously don’t understand it either.

Right. Why would anyone equate Christian fundamentalist leaders with the Taliban or hate-spouting, violence-inducing imams?

As usual we get the claim that Islam is inherently a religion of violence while Christianity is not:

Bin Laden and Zawahiri and Nasrallah and Ahmadinejad constantly quote the Koran to justify their global jihad, itself a dual Islamic concept that includes both internal and external warfare. Saladin’s jihad followed Muhammad’s example. Christianity has no such concept and Christ provided no similar warlike example.

This might make for a very nice religious debate point. As a long time atheist who is only recently converted to religion, I can say it is also semantic horseshit. The long, long history of violence done in God's name has needed no Biblical marching orders-it's been a feature since the beginning. Fundamentalists of all stripes desire control, and religion is their tool. They interpret their guiding works as they see fit to justify telling everyone how they will be forced to live. It matters not at all whether the words are explicit, as in the Koran, or implicit, as in the Bible-or, the Bible as interpreted by Christian fundamentalists. These same Christian fundamentalists feel no guilt at all trying to foment war in the Middle East to bring on the End Times, regardless of who it kills. These aren't acts of God or religion, these are acts of people, people who have specific motivations for doing these things and believing these things quite apart from righteousness. Trying to make the claim that Muslims are drooling, knuckle-dragging barbarians bent on killing good, clean, squeaky Christian angels because the Koran tells them to might get the guns-n-jesus crowd all riled up, but it makes for really dim discourse.

Linking-I am, unfortunately, not so good...

2007-05-14T19:01:00.000-05:00

...but I try again.

UPDATE: I am retarded.

Trying to link

2007-05-14T18:30:00.000-05:00

I am trying to link to something, like a kitten or a unicorn. I hope this actually works.

Update: it did. But it was a clumsy operation indeed.

I have a blog! I have a blog! Just what the world needs...

2007-05-11T19:47:00.000-05:00

...another freaking liberal with a blog.