Yes. We. Can.

Fair & Balanced

When 32 students are shot to death at Virginia Tech, the media drapes over the school, the families of the victims, and the survivors with round-the-clock coverage in which every eyebrow flicker of emotion of everyone involved is lovingly recorded for posterity. We hear who said what to whom, who sang what when, who hugged whom and a second-by-second account of the incident.

When the same horrific event happens approximately every 6 hours in Iraq, America relegates it to a footnote in the ongoing narcissistic degradation of this nation.

But I'm not bitter.

The Total Destruction of George W. Bush

Well, that's it then. Daddy's won the Oedipal contest.

Connecting the Hydrogen Dots

Three articles in the November issue of Popular Mechanics caught my eye recently, and I've been connecting the dots for Reductio and whoever else would listen for a couple of weeks now.

The issue's cover story "The Truth About Hydrogen" was generally pessimistic in tone regarding the prospects of switching the United States to a primarily hydrogen-powered economy, citing as one hurdle the difficulty in assembling a carbon-neutral or carbon-negative hydrogen production process (after all, we're trying to make sure the planet doesn't become an EZ-Bake oven around us).

However, I was struck by the article's concluding chart, which summarizes the financial costs and CO2 fallout of various hydrogen production methods with the stated goal of replacing all fossil fuels used in American passenger cars by 2040. My attention was captured by the fifth column, "Biomass":

• Cost: $600 billion


• Carbon: Neutral, due to CO2 consumption by fuel crops


• Fuel: Peanut shells at first, then dedicated crops

Keep in mind that peanut-shell fuel. We'll come back to it.
Now, $600 billion may seem like a lot of money. It is, in fact, about 1/4 of the annual $2.5 trillion Federal budget. But the cost of the pointless Iraq war as of this moment is $341 billion.

Is it unrealistic to imagine an annual Federal budget item of $60 billion over a decade to replace all gasoline used in passenger cars in the United States? Is it impossible to imagine a gasoline tax to pay for that transformation?

Naturally, there's a whole universe of costs not accounted for here, like the cost of replacing or refitting every passenger car in the United States with a hydrogen-fueled vehicle, but that's a transformation that could happen over an even longer period.

Remember how I said remember the peanut shells? As you might not know, peanuts are a major source of protein for about 500 million people worldwide. China leads the world in peanut production, followed by India, followed by the United States.

In the same issue of Popular Mechanics, Jock Brandis was awarded a 2006 Breakthrough Award (scroll down) for inventing a $75 machine for hand-cranked peanut shelling, and he's distributing the devices in Mali, Ghana, Zambia and the Philippines.

Imagine third-world countries fueling hydrogen power plants with peanut shells. Imagine them exporting their excess peanut shells to other countries with the same type of power plants.

The third article is another 2006 Breakthrough Award for GE, entitled "Cheap Hydrogen". GE has come up with a novel use for a plastic they invented, dropping the projected cost of splitting hydrogen out of water from $6 to $8 per gallon-of-gas-equivalent-energy to a mere $3 for the same unit. We've already seen that price at the pump this year, and will again, now that the election has concluded.

Connect the dots. We've got most of the pieces for a hydrogen economy sitting right here on the workbench. All we need is the political will to begin.

Next: Ethanol

A New Direction

Now that the BushCo asskicking has commenced in the rest of America, I've been giving some thought as to the direction of this blog. There's many fine blogs on these Internets whose tubes will deliver you all the snark and vitriol, and, let us say it, BushCo asskicking that you might require. I list some of these blogs on this page.

Rather than remain a pile-on blog duplicating those efforts (unless I think of something particularly amusing to write), for some months I've been thinking of focusing on the single most important challenge facing our species:

Energy.

In a planet awash in energy we're still burning the liquified corpses of extinct animals and plants to fuel our civilization. And you and I know that the USA keeps meddling in the Middle East because of the petroleum buried under it. Without the black gold, the Middle East would be as parts of Africa: unstable, bloody, ruled by kleptocracies, and not terribly relevant to the politics of the industrialized world.

Like any junkie, America's judgment and priorities are distorted by its addiction to oil. Sure, the country can still go to work, eat, sleep, and have sex (for now), but there's always that monkey on its back, whispering "Where's that next fix coming from?"

I'ts time to throw off that monkey and stomp the brains out of the little motherfucker, because he's getting mighty heavy back there and it's difficult for America to think straight when we're rolfing down 26% of the world's energy to support 5% of the world's population.

So, while reserving the right to snark occasionally and point out the worst of political injustices that come to my attention, I'm going to start writing about the challenge of this generation of Americans: Energy Independence.

We can get there. Brazil is energy independent, and you can't tell me that the people who went to the moon and have torn a chunk of a comet from the heavens can't manage to wrest a living from this abundant earth without making it uninhabitable in the process.

The discussion of energy touches on many issues, legal, societal, scientific, and economic, and I'll be exploring those matters as well, because what we're really talking about, under this most urgent of issues, is the proper management of the planet's resources for the survival of the species.

We're sharing one planet. Nothing's going to change that, and humans are now altering this world in fundamental ways that will be irreversible for many generations to come, and may be making the planet unfit for life as we know it. It's time to face that problem squarely, and fix it, because if we continue down the path we're on, it'll be the dinosaurs who were the most successful animals the planet has ever produced.

Afterglow

Now...

...can we repeal the torture?
Not for nothing, I'm just saying.

Oh Lookee Here:

That's the wave washing away the filth and crushing evil. (thanks to georgia10 for the image).

Welcome back, America. God, how I've missed you.

Man On Dog

So long, Ricky. Maybe you can run in Virginia, where you actually live.
Don't slam the state on your way out.

Rick Santorum, ladies and gentlemen, late of the Republican Senate seat in Pennsylvania, got his head handed to him by Bob Casey Jr.

Repudiate Evil

Today, go the polls and tell the children of darkness you've had enough.

North Korea and USA in High-Level Fashion Talks

Dick Cheney and Kim Jong Il met today, issuing a joint statement which read, in part:

"Our similar fashion sense is a foundation upon which we can build a relationship of mutual respect. That and the nukes we have aimed at one another."

Tip o' the blog to The Good Doctor.

655,000

That's the number of Iraqi dead due to the illegal invasion by the United States, according to this study.

However, as the "president" explains to us, that level of carnage only goes to show you how much the Iraqis love democracy:

I do know that a lot of innocent people have died and it troubles me and grieves me. And I applaud the Iraqis for their courage in the face of violence. I am, you know, amazed that this is a society which so wants to be free that they’re willing to — you know, that there’s a level of violence that they tolerate.

Mr. "President": My Frist Diagnost-o-tron tells me you are a sick fuck. There is not enough water in the world to wash away the blood on your hands.

Boom

Say what you will about 'Lil Kim Jong, the man has always known how to make an entrance.

You see, Mr. "President" when you:

1. list a few countries as belonging to the "axis of evil" and then,


2. when you're deciding which one to invade based on the phases of the moon, the spilled entrails of goats, or however you arrive at these catastrophes you call "decisions", and then,


3. based on the smoking entrails, you pick Iraq, the one that DOESN'T have the nuclear weapons, well, that sends a message.

And that message is:

"Hey, tinpot dictators! Get some nukes or I'll huff, and I'll puff, and I'll blow your regime in!"

Since most tinpot dictators get to be tinpot dictators not because they're "madmen" but because they're smart and ruthless, they tend to pay attention to signals like that.

North Korea to Moron in the White House: "Message received."

Love the Fetus, Hate the Child

Republicans will do whatever it takes to protect you as a fetus, including allowing your mother to die to ensure your birth, but after that kid, here's what you have to look forward to:

Republicans will try to starve you to death.
Republicans will see you dead through medical neglect.
Republicans will destroy your life with sexual predation.
Republicans will send you to an unnecessary war with no armor, and let terrorists finish the job.

Republicans: Eating Your Children

The Picture of George W. Bush

In Oscar Wilde's novel, "The Picture of Dorian Gray", a young man's moral degeneration manifests in his hidden portrait while he remains beautiful. George W. Bush has had his hidden portrait in the secret behaviors of his Republican Party. Republicans, with their financial corruption, their predatory sexual proclivities, their incessant fearmongering and their sadistic obsession with torture, are the very endgame in moral degeneration, a collection of the worst human traits that mirrors the inner life of their leader, George W. Bush.

How long before a horse assumes a Senate seat?
How long until headlines scream:
"GOP MIRED IN CANABALISM SCANDAL"?

These disgusting, cowardly, and corrupt sadists must be plucked from their positions of power. They have turned this nation into a playground for their ugly indulgences, and a sewer for the bloody consequences of their games.

Send Republicans back under their rocks.
This nation must stop wallowing in Republican excrement.

Foley

So, Republicans are drunken predatory sexual perverts preying on teenagers and then covering up their sordid crimes.

This surprises you?

China Lite

That's all she wrote, folks. Once Senate Democrats are finished posing, the Senate will pass a bill that allows the President to imprison and torture anyone in the world for as long as he likes under the color of law.

Time to shut the doors and turn out the lights. There's no America at home in the United States anymore. All that remains is China Lite.

We have become our enemies.

Shoot Me Now

Heaven forbid we force feed fucking geese instead of people.

The Immortal vs. The Undead

Given the reports in 2002 (just before the last election) that Osama bin Laden had died in the USA's attack on Afghanistan, and yesterday's report that bin Laden may be dead again, this time from typhoid, when Bill Clinton says in his interview with Fox "News"...

But at least I tried [to kill Osama bin Laden]. That’s the difference in me and some, including all the right wingers who are attacking me now. They ridiculed me for trying. They had eight months to try and they didn’t…I tried. So I tried and failed.

... the former president may be selling himself short. Clearly, he DID kill bin Laden, perhaps more than once, but the wiley chieftan of Al Qaeda can rise from the grave, fueled by the redirected power of American voting machines.

The contest between bin Laden's ability to resurrect himself and Dick Cheney's unnatural immortality will come down to a terrible war of attrition. Can Dick Cheney's dead and shriveled heart, swollen on the blood sacrifice of thousands of American soldiers and tens of thousands of Iraqi men, women and children, keep the staggering Vice Presidential animated corpse from crumbling to dust before bin Laden is killed in a year BETWEEN American elections?

Only if a new source of blood is found.

Bill Clinton Stuffs the Smirk Down Fox's Throat...

...and twirls it for flavor. Read the transcript before Fox cuts the video to ribbons:

All of President Bush’s neocons claimed that I was too obsessed with finding Bin Laden when they didn’t have a single meeting about Bin Laden for the nine months after I left office. All the right wingers who now say that I didn’t do enough said that I did too much. Same people.

That's Bill being gentle. Read the rest.

Pray for Rain

The end of the world may be coming not from the Devil in the White House, but from Brazil:

The vast Amazon rainforest is on the brink of being turned into desert, with catastrophic consequences for the world's climate, alarming research suggests. And the process, which would be irreversible, could begin as early as next year.

Studies by the blue-chip Woods Hole Research Centre, carried out in Amazonia, have concluded that the forest cannot withstand more than two consecutive years of drought without breaking down.

Scientists say that this would spread drought into the northern hemisphere, including Britain, and could massively accelerate global warming with incalculable consequences, spinning out of control, a process that might end in the world becoming uninhabitable.

Funny how this didn't make the headlines.

Torture 'R' Us

Digby and Glenn Greenwald together get this awful week surrounded.

Time Lapse Saddam Hussein

He took 30 years, we've done it in 3:

Torture in Iraq is reportedly worse now than it was under deposed president Saddam Hussein, the United Nations' chief anti-torture expert said Thursday.

Manfred Nowak described a situation where militias, insurgent groups, government forces and others disregard rules on the humane treatment of prisoners.

"What most people tell you is that the situation as far as torture is concerned now in Iraq is totally out of hand," said Nowak, the global body's special investigator on torture.

"The situation is so bad many people say it is worse than it has been in the times of Saddam Hussein."

Dear Democrats

Fuck you.

While St. McCain was working out his "compromise" to allow the "President" to imprison and torture whoever he wants for however long he wants, you said:

Nothing.

Nothing at all.

I hope the torturers come for you next when the "President" decides that imprisoning "opposition" lawmakers doesn't constitute a "grave" breach of the Geneva Conventions. It's kinder treatment than you deserve for letting this country drain down the totalitarian toilet.

Fuck you and fuck your "triangulation" and your goddamned polls and fuck you for being spineless weaklings and proving everything the Republicans ever said about you. Defend the country against attack? You can't even defend the country from a stupid, lying sack of shit who stole two elections and laughed at your feeble whining about it.

Go home. We don't need you. I'd rather kick this gang of thugs in the balls without your pathetic fig leaf in my way.

The next time I see your face, I'll step on it.

Pathetic

5 years later, instead of a soaring symbol of hope and unbowed determination, we still have a gaping cauterized wound in lower Manhattan, fitted with two kiddie pools.

What a joke.

9/11

New York City is my home.
I've been away for more than twenty years, but this summer I returned for personal reasons to live in Queens, about two miles from where I grew up.
Many others have managed to capture in words and pictures the devastation I felt that day, as my home suffered what felt like a mortal blow. When I heard through the grapevine at my office in Albany about a radio report of a plane hitting the first tower, I remember looking at one of my co-workers and saying, "Look at the weather. We're under attack."

After the second tower had fallen, I also said, "Well, I can see where missile defense would have protected us today."

A lot of people have forgotten that the Bush administration's major defense initiative prior to 9/11/2001 was missile defense. Still fighting the Cold War that we'd already won, the cabal surrounding George W. Bush was determined to ignore the recommendations of the outgoing Clinton administration and focus on stopping an enemy that had either evaporated or didn't yet exist.

They ignored the warnings, including a memo entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Within U.S.", preferring not to interrupt a bout of vigorous Crawford brush clearing, and nearly 3000 Americans paid the ultimate price for their incompetence, leaving behind a gaping wound in the earth, in the skyline, and in the hearts of every New Yorker, as we learned that our government wasn't capable of protecting the nation from attack.

I grew up during the end of the Cold War, and I avidly studied the time gap between the warning and the arrival of a hypothetical brace of Soviet missiles. Warnings would come in 17 minutes after detection. The missiles would arrive 14 minutes after detection. Throughout my teenage years, I knew that at any moment, I could vanish without warning into the heart of a pocket sun. All of us knew that New York City was on the short list of strategic targets for any enemy of the United States of America.

Did 9/11 change everything?
Not for me, not really. I had always known I'd grown up in a target. When the Cold War ended, I felt a wave of relief, thinking my home was finally safe. Then I found out I was wrong.

Worse yet, within days I knoew that the Bush administration would never bring the architects of the attack to justice. The moment Bush substituted "The War on Terror" for what should have been "The War on Al Qaeda", I knew the USA was in for the downbound roller coaster we have been riding straight to hell for five years.

Rather than give so many innocent deaths meaning, the Bush administration has piled on more innocent deaths without pause, and to what purpose? Osama bin Laden is still free. Afghanistan is in the control of warlords that, together with a resurgent Taliban, have produced a record poppy crop. Iraq is embroiled in an undeclared civil war. North Korea has gone from having no nuclear weapons to having anywhere from 8 to 10, and Pakistan has signed a treaty with people protecting bin Laden within their borders.

Meanwhile, a few American plutocrats have grown fat on our tax dollars, siphoned from the various misguided war efforts and quietly deposited in their greasy pockets.

There has been much controversy over a memorial for the victims of 9/11, but any monumnet is so much empty steel and stone if we do not build the better world demanded of us. That is the memorial we should be erecting on this day. And we should cast out the evil, stupid men who would memorialize this dark day by forever multiplying the world's pain to their private profit.

They Hate Freedom

Osama bin Laden seems to like freedom just fine.
Five years.
Still free.

A Clarification

By now you've heard about the rolling public relations disaster for ABC and Disney known as "The Path to 9/11", a two-night commercial-free "event" that purports to show anti-terrorist bungling by the Clinton Administration, but which is, in fact, a pack of lies.

Defenders of the film state that some incidents were "conflated" for dramatic effect, including the bit where Sandy Berger tells a CIA team to not kill Osama bin Laden. Now, "conflation" would imply that Sandy Berger received a series of phone calls from the CIA that went something like this:

Call 1:

CIA Operative:
"Sandy, this is Black Hawk. I have Osama bin Laden in my gunsight. Should I take him out?"

Sandy Berger:
"No."

Call 2:

CIA Operative:
"Sandy, this is Burning Eagle. Osama's standing right in front of me eating falafel. How about I make him choke to death on it?"

Sandy Berger:
"No."

Call 3:

CIA Operative:
"Sandy, this is Desert Rat. I'm taking a bath with Osama. How about I hold him under until he drowns?"

Sandy Berger:
"No"

Given all these phone calls, you'd be forgiven if, as a dramatic filmmaker, you chose to conflate all those phone calls into a single scene such as:

Call:

CIA Operative:
"Sandy, this is Mistral Wind. I've got Osama tied up and I'm holding a baseball bat. Should I hit him with it until he dies?"

Sandy Berger:
"No"

On the other hand, if none of these phone calls, or anything like them, ever happened, then you are not "conflating". You are, in fact, making shit up, and you are a liar.

And in case there's any confusion about who let Osama bin Laden slip through his fingers...

Neville Rumsfeld

DHS vs. Children

While the FBI is chasing down terrorist lead # 3415 this week as furnished by the Department of Hysterical Security, the NY Times has a report on the methods and the madness of the 21st Century pedophile.

Perhaps all those pointless leads the DHS furnishes the FBI were originally intended to distract the Feds from the hobby of a certain senior official of the agency.

Groucho Marx vs. The Virgin Mary

Groucho Marx once said, "I'd never want to belong to a club that would have me as a member," which goes some distance to explain my abandonment of Catholicism, but when I see "news" items like this, I wonder how people can ask me why I'm an atheist.

School of Quick Retort

If you're a blogger of Left Blogistan, a lefty, or even a person with common sense facing down your friendly neighborhood deranged pundit or relative with his head in bag, and they get around to intimating that you're a traitor for not supporting Our Leader or US actions in the Iraquagmire, say this:

Way to divide America in wartime, traitor! Don't let me stop you from calling up your handlers at Al Qaeda to tell them "Mission Accomplished!"

It makes no sense, but it sure feels good.

And yeah, by demand of Rex Saxi, I'm back to help the rest of reality kick a little BushCo ass.

Miss me?

Katrina & Iraq & Iran

Following up on the previous post, have you ever noticed that just as commodity traders and oil executives get ready to calculate their year-end bonuses and do some Christmas shopping, someone predicts a "worse than normal" winter in the northeast United States and oil prices go up through the holidays?

That's not enough anymore. Now you've got to get the US government to rattle its useless sabre at Iran to make sure those first quarter profits stay high as well.

Black gold. The universal motive.

Katrina & Iraq

A couple of puzzles in Bushco's behavior yield to the same key:

1) Why did Bushco have no post-war plan for Iraq, beyond Bring. It. On. ?
2) Why was the response to the catastrophe of Hurricane Katrina so laughably, criminally inadequate?

If you remember that Our Leaders were formerly oil men, the answer to both questions is easy. There was never a post-war plan for Iraq because a coherent strategy might have led to a stable country that could have exported oil quickly to help pay for its reconstruction and improvement post-war.

Exporting oil quickly from the world's second-largest known reserve would have driven oil prices downward. Possibly by a few dollars, possibly by as much as twenty dollars a barrel, negatively affecting the profits of oil companies. That idea was never going to fly within the Bush administration.

How much better to throw the world's second-largest oil reserve into chaos, permanently raising the price while there's still enough to ensure strong profits for some time to come. The longer Iraq remains in chaos, the better the oil profits for every oil company in the world. That's why the United States, in outspending the entire world in aggregate on "defense", can't subdue a single third world nation in 3 years, even though the same country and its allies could end a world war in 4 years. There's no incentive to "win" for the people in charge, when the perpetual war is so much more profiable for everyone concerned.

As for Katrina, it's easy to imagine this conversation in the Oval office last autumn:

Michael Brown:
Mr. President, a large hurricane is about to obliterate New Orleans and a substantial portion of the Gulf Coast.

Bush: Huh. Will that make energy prices rise?

Cheney: Yes it will, Mr. President

Bush: Okay, great. Thanks for dropping by, Brownie. What's next on the agenda?

Nuclear Non-Proliferation is for Morons

Paying attention now?

Looks like the Bushco's getting all hot and bothered, panties-in-a-bunch, over Iran breaking the seals on a couple of IAEA nuclear research sites and is starting the drumbeat whose unmistakeable message is: "...Vote for us. We'll protect you. Vote for us. We'll protect you..." With Our Rulers looking unpopular going in to the 2006 mid-term election cycle, clearly it's time for a little fear- and war-mongering to get the rubes lined up to pretend the voting machines aren't gamed and to keep the charade of democracy going long enough to consolidate their permanent hold on power.

And this time, Europe's on board with this Iran's-going-to-destroy-us-all nonsense. You'd think the EU would have taken a lesson from that other country next door to the Satan-of-the-week.

Face it, folks, the whole idea of nuclear non-proliferation was idiotic from the outset. Maybe we could have had some success if we'd gunned down Oppenheimer, all his colleagues, their friends, their families, all the Nazis working on heavy-water experiments and then expunged the memory of Einstein and his work from all records around the world and outlawed the study of nuclear physics everywhere, but once you've got E=MC2, you know that matter is energy and the conversion from one to the other is going to make a pretty big bang.

It's amazing that the nuclear club has been kept so small for so long, mostly thanks to the Cold War and alignment of everyone in the world with one nuclear arsenal or another, but the idea of nuclear non-proliferation implicitly asserts that you're going to keep the means, methods and materials necessary to the production of nuclear weapons locked away forever.

Forever's a long time.
Take all the time you've waited in the offices of physicians and bureaucrats, bus stations, for your significant other to show up, for your tax refund, and multiply that by the number of atoms in everyone who has ever lived on this planet, and you're not even close to taking a fingernails pairing off forever. It's long, and it's beyond the scope of anyone to imagine, and it's no time scale for planning to keep a secret.

Lots and lots of people know how to make nuclear weapons. It isn't easy, and isn't terribly cheap, and you need a good industrial base and some exotic materials, but if Pakistan can manage it, I'm guessing a whole lot of other countries could manage it as well.

If they wanted to.

As the Bard said, "There's the rub." Hoping your enemy doesn't get the weapons you have is a short-term strategy for wartime, when you're about to obliterate your enemy forever (see above). Unless the USA and Europe are willing to begin bankrupting and pointless genocidal wars of conquest around the world to prevent nuclear proliferation, the only sane long-term strategy is to figure out why someone might want to attack you and change their minds.

Unless, of course, it's because they hate freedom.

Scooter on a Crutch

Reuters published this photo of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby with crutch, supposedly after breaking a bone in his foot. However, sources close to the administration are leaking like drunk sailors in alleyways, and they passed on this transcript of a conversation recorded in Karl Rove's office:

ROVE:
Scooter, you're going down. Someone's got to take the fall for the Wilson job and you're "elected".

LIBBY:
Oh yeah, Fat Brain? Well, If I'm going down, you're coming with me, and I'll be peddling you for cigarettes to guys named "Bubba".

ROVE:
Joey, show Scooter what I mean when I say he's going down.

JOEY:
We can do this the easy way or the hard way, Mr. Libby.

LIBBY:
No, wait, Karl, we can talk... YEEEEEEEEARGH!

ROVE:
You've got only two choice now Scooter. You can go down with one broken bone, or you can go down broken in a lot more places. Tomorrow you'll tell Patty that I was duped in your crazy obsession to "get" Joe Wilson. Do you "get" me? Say 'Yes Mr. Rove.'

LIBBY:


ROVE:
Joey, help Scooter up.

Tortured Logic

In another forum, Reductio had this to say about the pro-torture language that Dick Cheney is urging a Congressional conference committee to include in a bill for a Congressional vote:

I realize the combination of dropping a supreme court nominee and the potential indictment of senior administration officials for high crimes and misdemeanors is somewhat distracting, but I think recent developments in the area of the Bush administration's support for torture as a component of its policy are worthy of mention.

Congress attaches an amendment to the military appropriations bill to make clear that under US law, torture and related prisoner abuse is always and everywhere illegal for Americans. Now admittedly, just about all right thinking people can see that the current state of the law is also pretty clear on this matter, but apparently there are a few folk (which would obviously include the [Attorney General] and other administration members up to and including Bush) for whom the current law is insufficiently explicit, and therefore believe that there are situations where torture is legal (under US law). So the world's most august deliberative and legislative body takes action to make the law more explicit, in order to clear up that confusion.

What is the administration's reaction? First to threaten a veto outright, scuttling the entire bill to preserve the loophole in
current law, that only they believe exists, and which they maintain makes it legal for them to engage in torture.

Then, they come up with a proposed legislative compromise; they are OK with US military being always and everywhere prohibited from torture, and with everyone being prohibited from torturing IN AMERICA, but want the president to be legally able to order (or in the case of this administration, keep ordering) torture abroad, as long as it is not done by the military.

Now, in the past, when I've indicated my position that one could (and IMO should) well infer from the existing evidence that the administration supports torture and prisoner abuse as part of its policy, I have been accused of engaging in hyperbole. Further it's been suggested that my view is that of an anti-Bush ideologue, rather than a gimlet eyed assessor of the facts (which is how I see myself).

So, I guess my question ... is this: Now that the administration has made clear its support for the president's right
(and I use that word loosely) to order torture, and even threatened to bust out the veto to preserve that right, and further has outlined legislation to codify and enshrine that presidential prerogative, is there now sufficient evidence for me to infer that the administration supports torture and abuse as policy options without being derided as a hyperbolic Bush-hater...?

Naturally I expect to continue to be mocked as a hyperbolic anti-Bush ideologue for other matters, I am just inquiring about this particular `support for torture and abuse' inference.

Now let's be clear: Torture isn't one of those many government policies which one can choose to disagree with, and yet support its advocates in other matters. Advocating laws to permit government operatives to enagage in torture, in defiance of intenational treaties, common decency and rock-bottom morality, should permanently disqualify you from government service in the United States of America. There is no wiggle room on this question for a moral nation. Those who advocate such laws are traitors to America, pure and simple, and should be tarred, feathered, and exiled forthwith as black stains on the proud heritage of this country. There is no excuse for torture. None. It is the most egregious form of barbarism, and has absolutely no place in civilized society. Just as its advocates have no place in a civilized society.

Surrender your thirst for blood. It is degrading.

Thanks to Rex Saxi for the New York Times link.

The Game of Life

Amid all the inkthirsty slavering over Plamegate, (and yes, I thirst, I thirst) I thought to take a step back and consider a more fundamental matter upon which both the seemingly inexhaustible radiation of scandals and criminality emanating from the business and political spheres and the current debate over the inclusion of the theories of evolution and intelligent design in education touch: what is the basis of morality?

When partisans of the teaching speak publicly about Intelligent Design, postulating a supernatural guiding force as the author of biological constructs, it isn't the Unknowable that forces them to fill the gaps in scientific knowledge with God. Were that the case, quantum physics, with its unfathomable action-at-a-distance and fluidity of material and energetic states offers plenty of cracks in reality into which to press the mortar of Deity. No, the prime justification for the hypothesis of an active, living, meddling Creator appears to be the primal fear of an amoral void at the heart of existence.

Consider this quote from an NPR interview with Senator Santorum, (R-PA):

"[Intelligent Design] has huge consequences for society, and it's where we come from. Does man have a purpose? Is there a purpose for our lives? Or are we just simply, you know, the result of chance? If we're the result of chance, if we're simply a mistake of nature, then that puts a different moral demand on us. In fact, it doesn't put a moral demand on us."

Or this quote from a Salon interview with Richard Thompson, an advocate for the teaching of Intelligent Design in public schools:

"If you are nothing but an accident of nature, then nothing you do is dependent on objective truth," he says. "You can set your own rules. There is no life after death. There are no set moral codes. If you go to bed, and if you die its OK, you're just another piece of matter bouncing around and you'll change into something else. That's why, even if 100 million scientists say we are unplanned, that we're just purposeless beings in this universe, the general population won't buy it. And neither will I."

Setting aside the notion of investing in scientific theory by popular vote, what seems to me the critical idea underpinning these remarks is the absence of morality coupled with the absence of God.

Prior to a single, moral deity governing existence, humans had acquaintance with a variety of supernatural beings whose morality was, at best, questionable, and yet somehow human society in a bewildering spectrum of forms, managed to survive and prosper, which, I'm going to go out on a limb and hypothesize would have been impossible absent some meaure of moral code that prevented a bloody, unwinnable, "war of all against all".

Which leads me back to our crime-ridden political and business spheres in the United States. consider the Prisoner's Dilemma:

Partners in crime are held in separate cells, and the prosecutor offers each one a deal. If you rat on your partner and he stays mum, you go free and he gets ten years. If you both stay mum, you both get six months. If you both rat, you both get five years. The partners cannot communicate, and neither knows what the other will do. Each one thinks: If my partner rats and I stay mum, I'll do ten years; if he rats and I rat, too, I'll do five years. If he stays mum and I stay mum, I'll do six months; if he stays mum and I rat, I'll go free. Regardless of what he does, then, I'm better off betraying him. Each is compelled to turn in his partner, and they both serve five years-far worse than if each had trusted the other. But neither could take the chance because of the punishment he would incur if the other didn't. Social psychologists, mathematicians, economists, moral philosophers, and nuclear strategists have fretted over the paradox for decades.

There is no solution for a single trial. But, repeated trials allow players - partners in crime - to observe and study each other's behavior and develop a better paying strategy. Dawkins describes two competitions organized by Robert Axelrod that showed superiority of a simple strategy Tit for Tat: start mum, then do what your opponent did on the previous trial. In general, strategies were divided into two classes: nice and nasty. An adherent of a nice strategy never rats first, a nasty fellow does. It so happened that, on the whole, nice strategies outperformed the nasty ones.

The fear that without God there is no moral code, I submit, is groundless. Morality arises from necessity. While short-term advantage may be gleaned by individuals through amoral or immoral behavior, the odds are against long term success, even for the individual. Consider the current political climate, and what a strange mirror-image it presents of the decline of the Nixon adminstration. It appears that immoral behavior, as manifested by the Republican party during the last twenty years, as manifested personally by President Clinton, and as mainfested by businessmen such as Bernie Ebbers of Worldcom and Ken Lay of Enron is not a long-term strategy for overall success, or, presumably, survival. Some individuals will certainly prosper, but the odds appear to be against them.

Game theory and statistics trend towards rewarding cooperative, alturistic behavior as a survival strategy over selfish, destructive behavior. Personal gains can be made through immoral behavior, but that true immorality requires society seems to provide an inherent check on the behavior. Nice guys may not finish first all the time, but large groups of nice guys tend to finish first more often than their nasty fellows.

Absent direct evidence to the contrary, a belief in a moral deity appears to be a manifestation of an intuitive grasp of survival odds, a shorthand back-justification and explanation for moral behavior that must occur if a species with volitional behaviors is to prosper. Whether it's bilking investors or the voting public, immoral behaviors have their success stories to tell, but in the end, the more likely outcomes are prison, poverty, or a bloody, corrupting moral quagmire half a world away.

Schadenfreude

The German word for "joy at other's misfortune" has been thrown around a lot lately in Left Blogistan as the Republican Party sinks deeper and deeper into its numerous quagmires of corruption, malfeasance, obstruction of justice, money laundering and the slaughter of innocents, but the word doesn't fit what's happening now.

Misfortune is lightning setting fire to your house, or your new car breaking down far from home, or your considered investments taking a turn for the worse due to unforeseen circumstances beyond your control.

We need another word for watching as the organized crime oligarchy ruling this nation comes apart and starts turning state's evidence, and their oh-so-carefully constructed machine gets dialed all the way up to "every chrony for himself."

Is there a word for "joy at Justice"? Because it's not misfortune, it's the operation of justice that's beginning, where evil is rendered impotent, if not outright punished.

Less than a year into Bush's second term, the administration's political fangs are pulled. From the social security debacle to the meatgrinder-without-end in Iraq to the most recent Supreme Court nominee (Harriet Quagmiers), everything this administration touches is turning into garbage.

There's a man who's been appointed to take out that garbage, and his name is Patrick Fitzgerald. Perhaps Bush in his fevered dreams imagined himself as the instrument of the Almighty, as so many have assured him he is. But those dreams are ringing more and more hollow as the quiet work of a man dedicated to the rule of law comes to fruition.

Indictments issued or not, Patrick Fitzgerald has reminded the unjustly mighty that America might still exist. An America of laws, a nation of Justice.

To conclude, a shout out to the Rude Pundit, who saw fit to print a letter from one of our Boring contributors, and link back to this tedious repository of Boredom.

A Little Brighter

The sun shines brighter today, with the indictment of Tom DeLay.

Don't-hurt-me-crats: Here's your slogan for the next two elections:

Incompetent and Corruptible or Competent and Incorruptible?
Your choice, America.

Cold Comfort

From the AP:

Bush: Government Well-Prepared for Rita

By DEB RIECHMANN Associated Press Writer

September 24,2005 | COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. -- President Bush, projecting a take-charge role on Hurricane Rita, toured the high-tech hub of federal response efforts and said Saturday he was pleased by the government's preparations.

Since President Bush is congenitally incapable of taking charge of anything more complex than a bottle of beer (witness his past trouble with the accompanying pretzels) he offers something almost as good: a projection of a taking-charge role.

Nearly six hours after Rita made landfall, Bush tracked the hurricane's assault on the Texas-Louisiana border from the situation room at the U.S. Northern Command headquarters in the Rocky Mountain foothills, more than 1,000 miles away.

God forbid Dear Leader's feet should get moist with anything but flop sweat or the dampness of quivering fear.

Surrounded by plasma screens and slide projections, Bush got a detailed briefing on the federal plan to deal with the possibility of heavy flooding in eastern Texas and western Louisiana, additional spills from levees in and around New Orleans, and disruptions to U.S. energy supplies.

Which did so much good as Katrina approached during the Royal August Retreat. Brief a coldhearted moron all you like. He isn't going to get any smarter or kinder.

"We're in good shape," Navy Capt. Brad Johanson, director of Northern Command's joint operations center, told Bush after outlining the military personnel and equipment hurrying in to help.

"All it took was losing a major American city to abject incompetence to prod us from our stupor and remember that we're supposed to protect the United States, not just a few neighborhoods of Baghdad."

Following the hourlong briefing, the president said: "It comforts me knowing that our federal government is well-organized and well-prepared to deal with Rita."

"Because it's all about me."

Bush planned stops later Saturday in Austin, Texas, to visit the state's emergency operations center, and in San Antonio,

and knock back a few cold ones

where many federal supplies and personnel were being staged. His schedule was not immediately disclosed.

But is certain to include stops on devastated streets whose power will be returned for the duration of the Royal Peregrination.

The scurrying to set up photo opportunities for the president showed the White House in crisis-management mode.

Political crisis mode, of course, there being no other sort of crisis worthy of attention.

With his approval ratings lower than ever, Bush has suffered from the perception

Reality.

that both he and his administration responded too slowly to Hurricane Katrina. That storm devastated the Mississippi coast and southeastern Louisiana nearly a month ago.
Bush waited until two days after Katrina to cut short his vacation and return to Washington from his Texas ranch.

As he awaited the ripening of the political crisis.

The public saw images of thousands of people in horrible shelter conditions in New Orleans waiting for food, water, medicine and rescue. The administration was blamed by many for not doing more sooner.

"many" "all but 26 right wing morons", whatever.

Bush's aides were eager to avoid a repeat with Rita and try to restore the public's trust in government. But they also were aware of the risk of criticism if Bush's large entourage got in the way of storm response.

'Cause that never happens.

So they settled on Northern Command as the best place for the president in the first hours after Rita struck. The command was set up after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to direct the military's homeland security activities.

Bush arrived Friday evening for one briefing, then woke early Saturday and had a second.

Don't strain yourself, Mr. "President".

Bush stayed far from Washington,

where thousands of people would like to see him driven through the streets coated in tar and feathers

where opponents of the Iraq war held what they hoped would turn out to be the largest such rally in the capital since the war began. The protest was spurred in part by Cindy Sheehan, the California woman whose son was killed in Iraq last year and who drew thousands of demonstrators to her 26-day vigil outside Bush's Texas ranch in August.

Bush's presence in a briefing room hundreds of miles from the White House and the storm recalled the surreal quality of Tuesday's update on Rita aboard USS Iwo Jima. Then, he flew from Washington to the ship, docked in New Orleans, to be briefed on Rita's approach via videoconference by two officials back in Washington.

The president also devoted his weekly radio address on Saturday to hurricane response, as he has now for weeks, and detailed the government's efforts.

Even as the focus turns to Rita, Bush pledged not to forget the massive job of recovering from Katrina.

"We'll do our duty," he said, while urging local and state governments, the private sector and ordinary people to do so, too.

How about doing your fucking job, idiot?

At Northern Command, Bush pleaded with the millions of people who evacuated ahead of Ritay to obey local authorities' instructions before deciding to return back home.

"It's going to take awhile for the authorities on the ground to fully understand the impact of the flooding. People who are safe now ought to remain in safe conditions," Bush said.

"So I'll know where to find them to finish the job."

Snarkfest concluded. We now return you to your collapsing nation.

Let Free Markets Prevail!

As long as you don't mind a few "special" Chinese ingredients in your beauty products:

The beauty products from the skin of executed Chinese prisoners

· Cosmetics firm targets UK market ·
Lack of regulation puts users at risk

Ian Cobain and Adam Luck
Tuesday September 13, 2005
The Guardian

A Chinese cosmetics company is using skin harvested from the corpses of executed convicts to develop beauty products for sale in Europe, an investigation by the Guardian has discovered.
Agents for the firm have told would-be customers it is developing collagen for lip and wrinkle treatments from skin taken from prisoners after they have been shot. The agents say some of the company's products have been exported to the UK, and that the use of skin from condemned convicts is "traditional" and nothing to "make such a big fuss about".

Why fuss about anything, after all?

Checklist

Courtesy of Digby:

Dr. Lawrence Britt has examined the fascist regimes of Hitler (Germany), Mussolini (Italy), Franco (Spain), Suharto (Indonesia) and several Latin American regimes. Britt found 14 defining characteristics common to each:

1. Powerful and Continuing Nationalism - Fascist regimes tend to make constant use of patriotic mottos, slogans, symbols, songs, and other paraphernalia. Flags are seen everywhere, as are flag symbols on clothing and in public displays.

2. Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights - Because of fear of enemies and the need for security, the people in fascist regimes are persuaded that human rights can be ignored in certain cases because of "need." The people tend to look the other way or even approve of torture, summary executions, assassinations, long incarcerations of prisoners, etc.

3. Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause - The people are rallied into a unifying patriotic frenzy over the need to eliminate a perceived common threat or foe: racial, ethnic or religious minorities; liberals; communists; socialists, terrorists, etc.

4. Supremacy of the Military - Even when there are widespread domestic problems, the military is given a disproportionate amount of government funding, and the domestic agenda is neglected. Soldiers and military service are glamorized.

5. Rampant Sexism - The governments of fascist nations tend to be almost exclusively male-dominated. Under fascist regimes, traditional gender roles are made more rigid. Divorce, abortion and homosexuality are suppressed and the state is represented as the ultimate guardian of the family institution.

6. Controlled Mass Media - Sometimes the media is directly controlled by the government, but in other cases, the media is indirectly controlled by government regulation, or sympathetic media spokespeople and executives. Censorship, especially in war time, is very common.

7. Obsession with National Security - Fear is used as a motivational tool by the government over the masses.

8. Religion and Government are intertwined - Governments in fascist nations tend to use the most common religion in the nation as a tool to manipulate public opinion. Religious rhetoric and terminology is common from government leaders, even when the major tenets of the religion are diametrically opposed to the government's policies or actions.

9. Corporate Power is protected - The industrial and business aristocracy of a fascist nation often are the ones who put the government leaders into power, creating a mutually beneficial business/government relationship and power elite.

10. Labor Power is suppressed - Because the organizing power of labor is the only real threat to a fascist government, labor unions are either eliminated entirely, or are severely suppressed.

11. Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts - Fascist nations tend to promote and tolerate open hostility to higher education, and academia. It is not uncommon for professors and other academics to be censored or even arrested. Free expression in the arts and letters is openly attacked.

12. Obsession with Crime and Punishment - Under fascist regimes, the police are given almost limitless power to enforce laws. The people are often willing to overlook police abuses and even forego civil liberties in the name of patriotism. There is often a national police force with virtually unlimited power in fascist nations.

13. Rampant Cronyism and Corruption - Fascist regimes almost always are governed by groups of friends and associates who appoint each other to government positions and use governmental power and authority to protect their friends from accountability. It is not uncommon in fascist regimes for national resources and even treasures to be appropriated or even outright stolen by government leaders.

14. Fraudulent Elections - Sometimes elections in fascist nations are a complete sham. Other times elections are manipulated by smear campaigns against or even assassination of opposition candidates, use of legislation to control voting numbers or political district boundaries, and manipulation of the media. Fascist nations also typically use their judiciaries to manipulate or control elections.

(Source: The Fourteen Defining Characteristics of Fascism, Dr. Lawrence Britt, Spring 2003, Free Inquiry)

Enough?

For four years now I've been saying it to everyone who wouldn't listen:

THE REPUBLICANS CAN"T PROTECT YOU. They're too stupid, venal, and obsessed with making the wealthiest 1% of Americans not just richer, but unfathomably richer beyond the dreams of Croesus to bother with pesky details like, say, PREPARING FOR A MAJOR DISASTER IN AN AMERICAN CITY.

The only difference between the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans and a signifcant terrorist attack (dirty bomb, biological bomb, tactical nuclear weapon) is that the idiots running this sorry excuse for a federal government had AN ENTIRE WEEK TO PREPARE.

AND THEY STILL FUCKED IT UP.

And I'm being kind, since in January 2001, FEMA warned of three likely American disasters in the near future. Care to guess?

1) Terrorist attack in New York City.
2) Category 4+ hurricane devastating New Orleans
3) A major San Francisco earthquake.

Maybe Bush and his gang of contemptible bottom-feeders will get lucky and hit the trifecta.

Is this enough yet America? Your sons and daughters are dying halfway around the world in the service of evil men who hold this country hostage to their insatiable appetite for wealth and power, grinding up the bones of your fellow citizens to make their bread and bleeding those citizens white so their close personal friends will not suffer a moment's inconvenient thought that there might be other people on the planet. Your sons are dying, purposeless, in Iraq, instead of helping at home, here, where they're really needed. You say the left is undermining the morale of the troops? How is a National Guardsman from New Orleans supposed to concentrate on his job if he's wondering whether his grandmother back home is that dead woman in a wheelchair outside the New Orleans convention center?

These evil, sick, twisted, stupid, abominably stupid men and women must be removed from power and locked away before they cause the deaths of thousands more people around the world and here at home. President Bush, Vice President Richard Cheney, and every member of this incompetent, criminal administration must be impeached and removed from office for their gross stupidity and bottomless venality.

They're not protecting you. They're exploiting you. Do you understand yet, America?

Enough. Enough. Enough.

More Metphors

Belacqua Jones has a new letter to W earily reminiscent of my previous "Reality Bites" post:

Keep the faith, George. Those of us who are the stoned and the broken and the dreamers stand behind you, our determination growing with each car bomb. Every dead child is a charcoal briquette firing our BBQ of resolve. Let no brown-skinned bastard underestimate our obsessive stubbornness. We will never abandon the sinking ship, even as the waters lap around our ankles.

Or even when they fill our nostrils with our own filth. God bless you, George. Landlubbers everywhere salute you.

Reality Bites

* poomf * * poomf * "Testing... testing... is this thing on? Okay."

Welcome back to Boring Diatribe, which has been, well, downright dull for six weeks while other responsibilities beckoned. And what a month-and-a-half it was, eh? In a tiny march of days, the Bush administration has gone from invincible peddlers of impervious propoganda to a gang of scared little boys who just realized they've set fire to the house and Dad's coming home any minute.

Honestly, I haven't been so sanguine about the future of this nation in four years. For a time, I wondered if Bush's brain weren't right in assuming that propoganda really did trump reality, and my faith in even the laws of physics began to wobble. But, sure enough, after being slapped around for a while Reality went out and got a billy club and has begun reminding our heroes in the White House what a grade-A ass whoopin' feels like.

As Bush and cronies freefall in the polls, I'm having a little trouble imagining what they're going to do to turn around public opinion in the face of an Iraqi insurgency of growing sophistication and effectiveness, leading to the heartbreaking parade of flagged coffins and prosthetic limbs returning to the heartland of the good ol' US of A, all so we can fill up our tanks for $2.35 a gallon.

Sure, I know China and India's demand for energy has everything to do with the price of gasoline, but the spectacle of your son in a wheelchair while the USA can't do anything with the second largest oil reserve in the world except go hat-in-hand to those Saudi sons of bitches has got to be driving a wedge deep into America's nearly fatal bout of cognitive dissonance.

The power brokers in the White House have counted on the gnatlike attention span of the media to keep them safe from historical scrutiny, and that strategy has worked pretty well until now, until the flip side of that malaise manifested:

America Can't Remember Why We're In Iraq.

That's why Bush has to go on television and pathetically urge Americans to FLY THE FLAG ON INDEPENDENCE DAY. Not, say, volunteer for the armed forces, which are suffering record recruitment shortfalls at the moment. Nope, like flying to Disneyworld after 9/11, we're going to help the troops by doing what we were going to do anyway, and so we're allowed to mumble and roll over in our sleep, except that goddamn stump hurts so much...

I'm expecting a "Peace with Honor" speech within the next 12 months, and the utter evisceration of Bush's remaining domestic "agenda" in the meantime. Sure, there's going to be a lot of damage to clean up, and many precious lives lost forever, but the neocons and their ideology are becalmed and taking on water at an alarming clip. That's reality flooding in, boys, and its bigger than your little propoganda bucket will bail. At least your buddies became stinkingly, obscenely wealthy while the wind was at your backs.

As I've tiresomely, even Boringly, observed in the past, stick a fork in our ass because we are so done in Iraq. Like Lyndon Johnson before him, Bush has found his Waterloo on the other side of the world, and the only question now is how many more good people are going to die for his mistake.

Welcome to the dustbin of history, Chimpy. Your face just appeared next to the definition of "What were we thinking?"

More Bill

Can't get enough of that Bill Moyers:

Apparently there was apoplexy in the right-wing aerie when I closed the broadcast one Friday night by putting an American flag in my lapel and said -- well, here's exactly what I said.

"I wore my flag tonight. First time. Until now I haven't thought it necessary to display a little metallic icon of patriotism for everyone to see. It was enough to vote, pay my taxes, perform my civic duties, speak my mind, and do my best to raise our kids to be good Americans.

"Sometimes I would offer a small prayer of gratitude that I had been born in a country whose institutions sustained me, whose armed forces protected me, and whose ideals inspired me; I offered my heart's affections in return. It no more occurred to me to flaunt the flag on my chest than it did to pin my mother's picture on my lapel to prove her son's love. Mother knew where I stood; so does my country. I even tuck a valentine in my tax returns on April 15.

"So what's this doing here? Well, I put it on to take it back. The flag's been hijacked and turned into a logo -- the trademark of a monopoly on patriotism. On those Sunday morning talk shows, official chests appear adorned with the flag as if it is the good housekeeping seal of approval. During the State of the Union, did you notice Bush and Cheney wearing the flag? How come? No administration's patriotism is ever in doubt, only its policies. And the flag bestows no immunity from error. When I see flags sprouting on official lapels, I think of the time in China when I saw Mao's little red book on every official's desk, omnipresent and unread.

"But more galling than anything are all those moralistic ideologues in Washington sporting the flag in their lapels while writing books and running Web sites and publishing magazines attacking dissenters as un-American. They are people whose ardor for war grows disproportionately to their distance from the fighting. They're in the same league as those swarms of corporate lobbyists wearing flags and prowling Capitol Hill for tax breaks even as they call for more spending on war.

"So I put this on as a modest riposte to men with flags in their lapels who shoot missiles from the safety of Washington think tanks, or argue that sacrifice is good as long as they don't have to make it, or approve of bribing governments to join the coalition of the willing (after they first stash the cash.) I put it on to remind myself that not every patriot thinks we should do to the people of Baghdad what bin Laden did to us. The flag belongs to the country, not to the government. And it reminds me that it's not un-American to think that war -- except in self-defense -- is a failure of moral imagination, political nerve, and diplomacy. Come to think of it, standing up to your government can mean standing up for your country."

Amen, brother.

You Know Who You Are

Bill Moyers brings it on:

Who are they? I mean the people obsessed with control, using the government to threaten and intimidate. I mean the people who are hollowing out middle class security even as they enlist the sons and daughters of the working class in a war to make sure Ahmed Chalabi winds up controlling Iraq’s oil. I mean the people who turn faith based initiatives into a slush fund and who encourage the pious to look heavenward and pray so as not to see the long arm of privilege and power picking their pockets. I mean the people who squelch free speech in an effort to obliterate dissent and consolidate their orthodoxy into the official view of reality from which any deviation becomes unpatriotic heresy.

That’s who I mean. And if that’s editorializing, so be it. A free press is one where it’s okay to state the conclusion you’re led to by the evidence.

What's Wrong With The Wacky Health Care System in the USA?

In another, private forum, Reductio had this to say:

Broadly stated, the problem appears to be that compared to other industrialized nations, we spend more and get less.

In round numbers (a few years old I think, and from my memory so take with a grain of salt please), the USA spends around $6-7 grand annually per capita on health care, Canada $4.5 grand or so, and Britain around $3 grand and change in US dollars. As I understand it, Britain and Canada (and just about every other industrialized non-US nation) have socialized medicine, with Britain's socialized version being widely regarded as dramatically underfunded, (making it hard to get a dentist). Britain also has a non-socialized private sector that cares for those who can pay, so not all of that very low spending level even goes to the government program.

Teeth pulling and extended MRI delays aside, Canada and Britain, and substantially every industrialized nation, have lower infant mortality rates and longer life expectancies than we do in the USA, while spending less than we do on health care, funding their expenditures primarily through taxation.

To the extent that we are not confident that the US government could successfully administer such a program, that belief just reflects an underlying distrust of our form of government. If every other governmental system in industrialized nations can successfully run such a program, but the USA can't, it can only mean that our system of government is somehow deficient - which I find disquieting, and would prefer not to believe.

I think part of the problem is the fanatical misguided belief in the USA that private markets are always efficient and that government programs are always wasteful. There are areas where well regulated private markets can perform nicely. But markets are almost never effective at broadly delivering a common good; it is simply not what they are designed for.

As to the causes of the current situation:
Private health insurance companies paying their employees (including CEOs) to add no value to the health care delivery process, but rather to deny care whenever possible, and refuse payment after the fact when care cannot be denied
outright. Also, they are paid to identify those who are likely to need care, and strip them of coverage. Like I say, the private sector is not so efficient at delivering broad common good; it does reward insiders (CEOs) and extract value from the process to deliver it to insiders and owners though. That is what markets are good at.

Drug companies also figure into the mix. In the USA we pay dramatically more for drugs than anyone else, and the recent transfer of collective wealth to the drug industry (also euphemistically known as the Bush Medicare prescription benefits plan) is just a particularly bad example. But more globally, the whole misguided free market thing comes into play here too. By not having a central negotiator for drug purchases that can enjoy monopsonic (or often legal price fixing) power, nor a list of independently tested and approved covered drugs ranked by cost and effectiveness, and a national protocol for administering them as part of a treatment regimen, we leave what should be sound medical decisions to the whims of the market. This is why the drug industry spends something like 40% of its operating expenses on MARKETING in the US. Yes, there is a tiny fraction spent on R&D, but almost half of the cost of the drug industry in the USA is due to marketing. Further, since only the most expensive drugs are marketed (even if better cheaper alternatives exist) and they are often marketed directly to consumers, generating uninformed end user demand, the cost of drugs in this country are further driven up, while the efficacy of treatment is driven down.

General care, which dramatically increases the common good, is considered commodity-like and undervalued by the market, while specialist care, which is really valuable when you need it, but adds less to the common good, is overvalued. So the market misallocates medical resources from a medical perspective, but allocates them appropriately from an economic return perspective. Which is what markets do.

So, is socialized medicine the answer? I don't know. Looking at our model vs. socialized medicine, ours seems to be ubstantially lacking. Of the models out there in the world, socialized medicine has a better performance. So I think it is worth considering, assuming we want our system of medicine to cost effectively deliver low infant mortality rates
and long life expectancies. If we want it instead to deliver large drug company profits and advances in cosmetic procedures and advertising strategies, we should stick with exactly what we have.

There may also be some better third way, but I have not seen it in operation anywhere.

I have occasionally wondered if a Government Sponsored Enterprise (GSE) in the health insurance industry might help, like Fannie MAE in the mortgage industry. If it is big enough to wield disproportionate market power, it can essentially set rates and protocols (like Fannie does) forcing the markets to move in the desired direction, without nationalizing the industry. If you make it big by putting all government employees on its plan, plus all Medicare and Medicaid, then create tiered plans say option zero, establishing a minimum coverage for all otherwise uncovered Americans (paid for by taxes), then different tiers for Medicare, Medicaid and government employees (with premiums paid for by the government). Then also offer those
plans to employers in the market. Some costs can be controlled by no need for marketing, exerting monopsonic and legislative powers to compel lower drug prices and require all practitioners to accept the payment schedule etc. Maybe a partnership approach to the higher tiers, where the basic plan is wrapped by a private provider, so the GSE can concentrate on basic cost-effective service provision. In fact a requirement for offering any insurance plan could be to wrap a GSE plan so that private insurers cannot simply poach the healthiest among us, but instead must offer a real benefit on top of the GSE plan in order to attract profitable business. Which gets us most of the way toward socialized medicine anyway.

Just a thought. It might be quicker and easier to just socialize.

Idle Hands

Good news on severed goat heads: Satan not involved

VANCOUVER, British Columbia (Reuters) - A lazy worker, not a satanic cult, was responsible for severed goat heads that caused a scare at a Vancouver-area school, Canadian police said on Monday.

Police were called in after goat heads were twice found on a bench outside a school in nearby Chilliwack, British Columbia, prompting fears in the suburban community that it had been targeted by a satanic animal killing.

A 19-year-old worker at a local slaughterhouse has admitted he took the two heads with the intention of having them mounted, but then changed his mind and left them at the school in hopes a janitor would dispose of them.

"(Police) want to reassure the community that there were no satanic intentions in relation to these incidents," the Royal Canadian Mounted Police said, adding that the man "should have known better."

So should we all.

Another tip o' the blog to Red.

Well, That's A Relief

Schwarzenegger not mad at moon

By Steve Gorman

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger does not want to destroy the moon.

A U.S. political commentator has admitted he failed to check his facts when he erroneously reported on the MSNBC cable news network last month that Schwarzenegger had jokingly advocated doing away with the moon.

In one of the stranger mea culpas from a major U.S. news outlet in recent years, the commentator, Joe Scarborough, a former congressman, acknowledged on Friday that the governor's purported lunar outburst on the nationally syndicated radio show of Howard Stern was actually a spoof.

Citing a British newspaper, Scarborough had quoted Schwarzenegger on the air as saying: "If we get rid of the moon, women, those menstrual cycles are governed by the moon, will not get (pre-menstrual syndrome). They will stop bitching and whining."

Scarborough chided Schwarzenegger for insensitivity, saying: "Hey, governor, way to make 50 percent of California's voting population turn frigid toward you.

"I don't know how it works in Austria, but let me tell you something, friend. Jokes about such matters, (are) not laughing subjects to women in America."

It turned out the remarks Scarborough attributed to the Austrian-born governor were actually made by a Schwarzenegger impersonator who regularly appears on Stern's show as part of a running call-in gag.

Eleven days later, Scarborough admitted on the air that he had been duped and apologized to viewers and Schwarzenegger "for my terrible mistake."

"By quoting erroneous information from that (newspaper) article, without checking it out ourselves, we, too, got pulled into that hoax," Scarborough said.

"We".
That would be you, Joe.

Thanks to Red for the link to the full article under the post title.

3rd In Command

Maybe not.
The high-profile bust of Al Qaeda's supposed 3rd in command is maybe not so much:

Dubai, 9 May (AKI) - Abu al-Faraj al-Libbi, the alleged al-Qaeda leader arrested in Pakistan last week, is not the terror network's N. 3, according to European secret service sources, quoted by the pan-Arab daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat. After he was captured in Mardan by Pakistani security forces, al-Libbi was presented by Pakistani officials and later by the Bush administration, as the third most powerful figure within the al-Qaeda hierarchy.

An unidentified "senior" European intelligence source told Al-Sharq al-Awsat that there had been a case of mistaken identitiy - he argued that the real N. 3 was Abu Anas al-Libbi, not Abu al-Faraj al-Libbi. This theory first appeared last week in Pakistani newspapers close to extremist groups but it is disputed by Pakistani officials who maintain that Abu Anas, is yet another name used by Abu al-Faraj.

I'm sure a little torture will uncover the truth here.

See No Evil

John Tierney's column today is such a target-rich environment I can't help but reprint it and snark along the way.

Bombs Bursting on Air

By JOHN TIERNEY
Published: May 10, 2005

If a man-bites-dog story is news and dog-bites-man isn't, why are journalists still so interested in man-blows-up-self stories?

I admit, the occasion may appear to be repetitious, but all the victims are actually DIFFERENT dead people than the previous bombing. They all are, in fact, unique individuals who had hopes and dreams before some whack-job decided to make a quick argument with a large quantity of explosives. How about we honor their memory by giving them two minutes of our attention? I guess that's too much to ask from a busy, important Times columnist.

I realize that we have a duty to report suicide bombings in the Middle East, especially when there's a spate as bad as in recent weeks. And I know the old rule of television news: if it bleeds, it leads. But I'm still puzzled by our zeal in frantically competing to get gruesome pictures and details for broadcasts and front pages.

Wouldn't want the American people to see the extended consequences of their invasion, would ya? Must be why we don't get to see the flag-draped coffin parade of our dead soldiers coming back. Out of sight, out of mind, that's how we like our wars.

During the past decade I've seen hundreds, maybe thousands, of articles on suicide bombings,

But so few on the antics of puppies and kittens!

...but I read to the end of just three of them, and that was only because I wrote them.

And NOT because I'm hopelessly self-absorbed or have the gnatlike attention span of my fellow Times columnist, David Brooks.

Those bombings occurred in Baghdad and Kurdistan during the summer of 2003, when they were still a novel phenomenon in Iraq, but even then there was really nothing new to say.

Good point. I mean, why report on the President's press conferences or legislative proposals, when they could be summarized by the sentences "Lying again." and "Let them eat cake."?

As I intruded on grieving relatives...

(unable to suppress my own insatiable appetite for gruesome details)

...at the scene and wounded survivors in hospitals, I didn't see what good I was doing for anyone except the planners of the attack.

Since it wasn't as if I was showing compassion or sympathy or anything, or even fetching a victim a glass of water. Dispassionate observer, people!

It was a horrifying story, but it was same story as every other suicide bombing, from the descriptions of the carnage and the mayhem to the quotes from eyewitnesses and the authorities.

I mean, the ragheads are pretty much interchangeable, aren't they? Seen one haji with a couple of limbs blown off or a burkha-wearing grieving mother, you've pretty much seen them all.

When the other reporters and I finished filling our notebooks, we wondered morosely if we could have done a service to everyone - victims, mourners, readers - by reducing the story to a box score.

Interesting idea. Could work for our GIs, too, and to think of all that wasted Times newsprint on the pictures and biographies of 9/11 victims! What were we thinking?

We all knew the template: number of victims, size of the crater, distance debris had been hurled, height of smoke plume, range at which explosion was heard.

Statistics are my passion. I love baseball. Just like George Will.

There was no larger lesson except that...

I can't give a damn about dead brown people with no money.

...some insurgents were willing and able to kill civilians, which was not news. We were dutifully presenting as accurate an image as we could of one atrocity, but we knew we were contributing to a distorted picture of life for Iraqis.

Which pretty much has been chocolates and roses since the Americans showed up. Remember the parades? The Iraqis putting palm fronds down in the path of our troops? The cheers, the joyous weeping? The bulldozing of the prison at Abu Ghraib? Remember?

The standard advice to newly arrived journalists at that time was: "Relax. It's not nearly as bad here as it looks on TV."

"We only get here AFTER the bomb goes off."

Correspondents complained that they'd essentially become cop reporters, and that the suicide bombings took so much of their time that they couldn't report on the rest of the country.

Chocolates and roses, people.

They were more interested in other stories, but as long as the rest of the press corps kept covering the bombing du jour, that was where their editors and producers expected them to be, too.

And we wouldn't want to confound the expectations of people removed from the situation by thousands of miles and layers of distraction.

You could argue that their bosses were simply responding to their audiences' visceral urges.

Which is our job.

Everyone rubbernecks at car accidents; cable news ratings soar when there's a natural disaster or a heinous murder. But how much shock value or mystery is there anymore to suicide bombings?

I'm bored already.

How intrigued are people by murders when the motive, the weapon and the murderer's fate are never in doubt?

Apparently, editors and producers aren't "people" in the conventional sense, since they continue to find these stories intriguing. Or at least they have certain "expectations" in this regard.

I suspect the public would welcome a respite from gore,

and Lieberman, for cryin' out loud

...like the one that New Yorkers got when

Saint

Rudolph Giuliani became mayor. He realized that even though crime was declining in the city, people's fears were being stoked by the relentless tabloid and television coverage of the day's most grisly crime. No matter how much the felony rate dropped, in a city of seven million there would always be at least one crime scene for a live shot at the top of the 11 o'clock news.

Mr. Giuliani told the police to stop giving out details of daily crime in time for reporters' deadlines, a policy that prompted outrage from the press but not many complaints from the public. With the lessening of the daily media barrage, New Yorkers began to be less scared and more realistic about the risks on their streets.

You think John's seen local NYC television news?

I'm not advocating official censorship,

even though that would probably be an excellent idea, so we can get back to convering the puppies and the kittens

...but there's no reason the news media can't reconsider their own fondness for covering suicide bombings. A little restraint would give the public a more realistic view of the world's dangers.

Chocolates. Roses.

Just as New Yorkers came to be guided by crime statistics instead of the mayhem on the evening news, people might begin to believe the statistics showing that their odds of being killed by a terrorist are minuscule in Iraq or anywhere else.

Not that those odds are gradually climbing, or anything.

Terrorists know the numbers are against them and realize that daily bombings will not win the war.

Not like we're "winning" in Iraq, anyway.

All along, their hope has been to inspire recruits and spread general fear with another tactic, the bombing as photo opportunity. For some reason, their media strategy still works.

Chocolate. Roses. Puppies. Kittens.

Supply Side

Those who endured pre-Iraq war verbal Boring Diatribes may remember that with a GDP of $30 billion, I proposed that the United States hire every single person in Iraq to like us. With what we've spent so far ($300 billion) the United States could have had 10 years of friendly Iraqis extolling the virtues of the United States to the entire Arab world. And hey, maybe they'd export some oil, too.

That's as far as my idea went, but Darksyde over at Kos has nailed down the mechanics:

They say money can't buy love, but if we throw out sacks of money to the Iraqi people it will be Valentine's Day 365 days a year in Baghdad. The best part is the Iraqis would start loving us right away. My God the Iraqi's will be naming their kids after us! They'll be shouting the virtues of America from the rooftops. They'll build statues of us. And the economy, well I mean talk about Supply Side Economics! This is not a fiscal stimulus, this is a fiscal orgasm. It's like an anti-tax. Reagan could come back to life from this kind of thing. It would explode into almost instant prosperity taking away even more terrorist ammunition and giving them a shot at a real self sufficient modern nation. The money would stream to outlying provinces and work it's way into the local economies throughout the region. And although the Iraqi's would be free to choose whom they wish to help rebuild the infrastructure and get the oil a'flowin, I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if American firms, from the country who is showering the populace with currency, were given special consideration.

Between Darksyde's plan and the Haliburton Protection Act (give Haliburton $6 billion dollars instead of going to war) we've got a solid plan here to protect the folks at home and get some of that good foreign policy mojo working.

And cheaper.
And your sons and daughters don't walk around on robot limbs that can't feel anything.

What's not to like?

Unbeliever

At the risk of offending my religious friends (which constitutes just about all of them) I'm compelled by recent news events to point out that there's as much evidence that the universe in all its complexity was excreted by a gigantic gopher twenty minutes ago as there is that some vast, omnipotent, omniscient, benevolent being made out of love existing outside of time decided to create a universe of 10 billion galaxies with 100 billion stars each, most of which may have planets of one form or another, just so I could trudge into a large building once a week and recite some inferior prose and poetry some tiny fraction of my species has been mouthing for the last few decades.

Religion is a collection of fairy tales. Slipshod, illogical stories and obvious aphorisms assembled by primitive peoples in hopeless circumstances. Sure, stories have power. Certainly, they affect behavior and therefore help shape the world by shaping humanity, but so does any Big Lie. That doesn't make them true.

I could construct a religion tomorrow based on the notion that people born in Milwaukee are God's Chosen, and it would have exactly the objective, verifiable value of any other set of fanciful notions hallucinated by starving lunatics in the wilderness and elaborated to Byzantine convolusion by generations of thinkers with nothing better to do (cure diseases, measure the earth, rescue the endangered) than to write story after story after story, all made up, about how some Infinite Being gives a tinker's cuss what happens on a tiny, insignificant speck of dust spinning in a backwater galaxy in one corner of infinite emptiness.

We care about us, and that only just.

Fairy tales are for children. They comfort and they teach, and sometimes they inspire some of the the greatest works of art and literature and sacrifice the world has witnessed, but they're a crutch. If you need religion to have some love for your species, or to treat your fellow humans with kindness and empathy, you're a child, and you need to grow up, because there's too many of you now, and you're using your stories to hurt one another too much, and the world can't always coddle you and protect you while it waits for you to start using your senses and your brain instead of your glands.

That big sound in the sky isn't a bigger gorilla beating on a bigger tree than you've ever seen. That's thunder. It happens when electrical charges between the atmosphere and the earth equalize and disturb the atmosphere. All that "guidance" and "destiny" you're noticing? That's coincidence. It happens. Get used to it. Your brain has evolved to optimize pattern recognition, and every now and again you're going to come up with a false positive. See something in the Rorschach blot? That's an inkstain on a piece of carboard.

Wake up. Grow up. See the world for what it is. Your fairy tales are killing us.

Just A Thought

There's an Old Testament book called "Judges".
Oddly, there isn't one called "Congress".

Think the Almighty was telegraphing a message about relative authority there?

John Paul II

Still dead.

Don DeLay

When you're involved in the rackets, no one eats alone. Try it, and you'll find the cops stopping by frequently, or maybe just a couple of gentlemen with a desire to explain how things work around here. Unless you're crazy, or have a serious expectation that you can carve off your own territory from a bunch of hungry, entrenched criminals bent on killing the competition, you instead come to an arrangement.

Every week, you pay the vig. Depending on the size of the book you're making, or the number of whores you're pimping for, the vig will be small, or the vig will be large, but you've got to pay the vig, or you're not going to be in business, in town, or possibly above ground for very long.

Which brings us to Tom DeLay:

DeLay's lobby operation is more complicated but equally important to Republican Party hegemony. As described by American Enterprise Institute scholar Norman Ornstein, the K Street Project by which DeLay domesticated the corporate lobby is a "Tammany Hall operation" that ensures only Republicans are hired for big lobbying jobs that pay as much as $1 million a year. Once hired, "everyone is expected to contribute some of that money back into Republican campaigns," Ornstein told me when I was working on a book on DeLay last year. According to Ornstein, DeLay and the K Street project have even locked up the entry-level lobby positions that pay from $150,000 to $250,000 a year -- with the understanding that anyone who gets a job "maxes out" in contributions to Republican candidates and campaigns.

In the mob that the Republican party has become, no one eats alone. Fortunately, there's a law targeted right for them, RICO:

Section 1962(b) makes it unlawful for a person to acquire or maintain an interest in an enterprise through a pattern of racketeering activity. Section 1962(b) is perhaps the most difficult RICO claim to express in practical terms. A stereotypical violation of section 1962(b) occurs when a victim business owner cannot make payments to a loan shark; upon default, the loan shark says: "you're either going to die or you're going to give me your business." Given the threat to this life, the victim transfers control of his business to the loan shark. Usually, the victim business owner remains the owner on paper but the loan shark controls the business and receives all income from the business. Thus, the loan shark has acquired and maintained interest or control over an enterprise (i.e. the business) through a pattern of racketeering (i.e., loan sharking and extortion).

Section 1962(d) makes it unlawful for a person to conspire to violate subsections (a), (b) or (c) of the RICO Act.

By far the most useful and common civil RICO claim is found under section 1962(c), which makes it unlawful for a person to manipulate an enterprise for purposes of engaging in, concealing, or benefiting from a pattern of racketeering activity. Given its broad utility, the general elements of a RICO claim will be discussed in the context of a section 1962(c) claim. Distinctions will then be made between section 1962(c) claims and claims under 1962(a), (b) and (d).

It's time to take down Don DeLay, head of one of the most feared, dangerous and well-financed mobs in American history: the Republican Party.

Bush Causes Panic: American Economy Collapses

The President really is an idiot. I think one of his handlers forgot to tell him that the dollar's no longer backed by gold, and that the full faith and credit of the United States is the only thing standing between us and financial collapse:

"A lot of people in America think there is a trust -- that we take your money in payroll taxes and then we hold it for you and then when you retire, we give it back to you," Bush said later in a speech at the University of West Virginia at Parkersburg. "But that's not the way it works. There is no trust fund, just IOUs that I saw firsthand," Bush said. Democrats charged that the president's remarks were misleading, as well as dangerously close to implying that the federal government won't stand behind trillions of dollars in debt held by creditors around the globe

"If the 'full faith and credit' of the United States means 'just IOUs' then our entire financial system will come tumbling down," said Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., the senior Democrat on the House Ways and Means Committee

In a letter to Bush, House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi of California and Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada said the president's statements about the trust fund "could raise needless doubts among American and foreign investors about the United States' willingness to meet its fiscal obligations. This has potentially broad ranging and damaging implications for our economy." At issue are the special-issue Treasury bonds - now totaling around $1.7 trillion - that make up the trust fund. Paper facsimiles of the bonds, which like most modern-day securities are issued in electronic form, are held in a file cabinet at the Office of Public Debt Accounting. That's what Bush visited earlier in the day.

Whether through stupidity or by design, like Ronald W. Reagan before him (see: Selling Weapons to Sworn Enemies) George W. Bush is a traitor, and its time to impeach the bastard before he utterly destroys this once-proud nation.

Death Watch

I've heard it said that celebrity deaths, like plane crashes, always come in threes. So, with Terri Sciavo dead, and John Paul II still dead, despite the round-the-clock vigilance of the media's PopeCorpseCam, who's the third celebrity set to shuffle off this mortal coil?

Could it be Tom DeLay?

I'm not suggesting the poster child for Tammany Hall rehab will actually die in the near future, but for a man like DeLay, political death is a kind of death.

If you haven't been following the story, after racking up three rebukes from the House Ethics committee before its fangs were pulled by DeLay and his cronies in the U. S. House of Representatives, the scandals have just been piling on the House Majority Leader like dogs on top of Bugs Bunny. For a while, I assumed that DeLay was so entwined in eldritch evil that he would even survive the scorn of an entire nation and the defection of numerous allies to miraculously appear on top of the dog pile, triumphant and smirking, ready to obliterate his persecutors with rabid legislation aimed at each one individually, under Congress's new policy of not allowing the fall of single sparrow to go unnoticed.

Now, I'm not so sure.

Dark Lord of Sith Dick Cheney last week distanced himself from the Bugkiller's remarks against the judiciary, and the drumbeat calling for DeLay's head just gets louder and louder, with a quick one-two punch from the NY Times and the Washington Post today.

Tom DeLay is a criminal. Available evidence suggests he's violated campaign laws in Texas, numerous ethics rules of the House, and chances are he's managed to defy a few Commandments into the bargain. Satan has a trick or two to learn from this sleazebag on how to consolidate his rule on Earth, for which DeLay has helped lay the foundations.

However, even fellow Republican politicians, steeped in evil and knowledgable of its ways, are backing away from the stench and corrosive effects of their suddenly very publicly vulnerable leader. When DeLay finally detonates, everyone wants to be out of the blast zone and well clear of the fallout, and they're all hoping the explosion happens soon, so that the echo will fade well before November 2006.

It's no accident that DeLay had become the public face of the Republican Party, incarnating as he does the party's avarice, contempt for the law, preening venality, and hypocritical mouthing of virtues he does not share.

I've seen some in the blogosphere fret that DeLay's untimely demise might limit his blast zone, leaving other rich targets unscathed. To them I say, Rejoice, brothers and sisters, in the unraveling of evil, in whatever form it takes.

To Tom DeLay, I say, Live. Live to once more crawl into the stinking underbellies of our houses, seeking to exterminate the outward manifestation of your blackened soul. Let DeLay be returned to his proper station.

This Just In...

Pope John Paul II is still dead.
Is anything else happening in the world today?

Superpower

Charlie Reese has a good take on the real distribution of world power:

Mr. Bush has gotten Teddy Roosevelt's dictum exactly upside down. He shouts loudly and carries a small stick.

Let me put into perspective just how small a stick he carries. The European Union, in all but military power, is itself a superpower. It has more people than we do, and it has a larger gross domestic product. Its currency, the Euro, is very strong, and our currency, the dollar, is very weak.

Russia remains a military superpower, and its economy is growing faster than ours. It has recently undertaken an effort to modernize its nuclear strategic forces and even today has more than enough to blow us away. Furthermore, it recently signed a strategic defense agreement with China.

As to that part of the world, China and India, both with more than a billion people each, have rapidly growing economies (in part thanks to thousands of American jobs exported to their countries). China, in particular, has undertaken a military buildup, and, of course, all three – Russia, India and China – are nuclear powers. If Bush ever looked past his immediate political goals, he might foresee a future tripartite alliance that would mean big trouble for America.

In short, we are not the world's only remaining superpower, as the Washington cliché says, and if Bush could see past his ego, he would recognize that. Our economy is shaky. Federal, corporate and private debt is in the trillions, and Japan and China could wreck our economy just by dumping the debt paper they hold on the market.

One should remember what Osama bin Laden said. He did not say he would conquer us and convert us all to Islam. He said he would bankrupt us. If Bush gets us further mired in the Middle East by attacking Iran and Syria, as he seems likely to do, bin Laden might very well succeed. War is always a drain on the economy. War always produces death, destruction, debt and taxes. It hasn't been a profitable undertaking since the Mexican War, when as war booty we took most of what is today the American Southwest.

In short, real-world circumstances require careful, skillful and quiet diplomacy – not bombast. I fear, however, that we have put in place the wrong administration at the wrong time.

Ya think?

A Hard Act To Follow

I had a lot of differences with Pope John Paul II, but no one could accuse him of being inconsistent or not having the courage of his convictions. Smart, funny, erudite, polyglot, brave and caring, he's left his mark indelibly on the Catholic Church, elevating the office of the Catholic Papacy to the world stage in a manner consistent with the church's role as a spiritual advisor.

I think John Paul's converative Catholicism will never be fully reconciled with the American Catholic Church, which, arguably, is a different church from that Catholicism embraced by the nations of Africa, South and Central America. Offline, I've argued often that as much as Henry VIII saw a need to split his Anglicans away from Rome for personal reasons, there's as many compelling and personal reasons for American Catholics supporting abortion rights, the use of birth control, female priests, and a married priesthood to recognize that many of their beliefs cannot be squared with current Catholic Doctrine, which is unlikely to bend to the will of liberal Catholic Americans.

For those imagining that the next Pope will be more open to doctrinal revision toward a more liberal stance on certain social issues regarding sexuality, I have to bring you down to Earth, so to speak. The Church is not a democracy, but even so, the enormous weight of opinion of conservative Catholics in the southern hemisphere easily overbalances the liberal voices in United States and Europe.

In fact, just in case any Catholic Cardinals frequent this site, allow me to offer them the opinion that an African Pope would send an important message to begin the new century of Catholicism, and would raise the profile of a continent much in need of world attention.

Victor Simpson has a fine summary of the career and life of John Paul II.

Where Do I Take The Pledge?

Bill Maher has some thoughts on the efficacy of high-school abstinence pledges:

Is there any greater irony than the fact that the Christian Right actually got their precious little adolescent daughters to say to their freshly scrubbed boyfriends: "Please, I want to remain pure for my wedding night, so only in the ass. Then I'll blow you." Well, at least these kids are really thinking outside the box.

...so to speak.

Stability

Good thing we brought order to Baghdad, at least. And stuff:

What came next has become typical for Iraq as sectarian tension and violence rise. Khudair's family formed an armed group of more than 20 relatives and neighbors who are demanding Khudair's release and vowing to kill those responsible.

"If something happened to my brother, no Shiite would be safe," said Khudair's brother, Sameer, who's convinced that Shiite militia members are behind the kidnapping.

The political instability in Iraq and the ethnic divides behind it are pushing Iraqis toward gang-like violence that many worry could start a slide toward civil war.

For decades, Saddam Hussein, Iraq's former dictator from the Sunni minority, ruled the nation harshly, sometimes brutally suppressing the majority Shiite population. In January, Shiite leaders swept Iraq's national assembly election.

The recent unrest, though, rather than coming from the top leadership of political and religious parties, is springing largely from the grass-roots of Iraqi society. It involves neighborhood-based forces, with Sunnis and Shiites seeking to protect themselves from each other or to exact revenge, and it chips away at Iraq's national unity.

More than eight months after the interim Iraqi government announced that the nation's largest Shiite and Kurdish militias would disband, they're still functioning.

Heavily armed gangs with private agendas disdainful of the authorities? How could that be a problem?

Um, And We're Defending This Place...

...why?

Insurgents attack Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison
Assault on jail results in 18 U.S. casualties, officials tell NBC News
BREAKING NEWS
By Jim Miklaszewski
NBC News
Updated: 2:18 p.m. ET April 2, 2005

WASHINGTON - A group of 40 to 60 insurgents attacked the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq late Saturday in a well-coordinated assault that inflicted 18 American casualties, U.S. military officials told NBC News. 

The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, could not immediately provide a breakdown on the number of dead or wounded.

The officials said the insurgents attacked with two car or truck bombs, 40 mortars and an intense ground assault.

U.S. forces in Iraq house many suspected insurgents at the prison outside Baghdad, which is at the center of a prison abuse scandal.

Instead of Americans dying to preserve this chamber of horrors, couldn't we let the prisoners go, and prop up cardboard cutouts of mocking soldiers on the ramparts to taunt the insurgency into demolishing the hellhole for us?

Just an idea.

Market Education

A post by Morbo on the The Carpetbegger Report about one woman's experience with the Washington DC school voucher system got me thinking and commenting, reproduced with some edits here. Reductio may have to weigh in and correct or expand some of my thinking on economics, since I merely play an economist on this blog.

The problem with robotically declaring that the private sector is better at providing all services is that there are some services that society requires whose motivation should not be profit, either because a) it’s difficult to make a profit at the given service, or b) mixing in a profit motive degrades the mission.

Other examples besides eductaion leap to mind. National defense, whatever your opinion of its current incarnation and methods of expenditure, would degrade if motivated by a highest-bidder regional model of applied service. Likewise, the national highway system, critical to country’s commerce, will not be profitably maintained by a private entity, but does benefit society as a whole (even though a well-supported rail system might figure better into a bang-for-the-buck calculation).

The astounding level of waste and inefficiency in American medical care (imagine those thousands of private bureaucrats whose salaries and functions could be consolidated in a single-payer system) is directly attributable to the profit motive. Insurance companies aren’t interested in providing health care, they’re interested in turning a profit for investors. The less service offered for a given price, the higher the profit, a lesson taken to heart when one examines the poor standing of health care in the United States when compared to other nations with universal health care systems. The same incentives and pitfalls apply to educational services.

“Free markets” are not “unregulated markets”. Free markets require regulation to function, to restrain monopoly and monopsonic powers between unequal actors and to help amelioriate the effects of asymmetric information, the importance of the last aspect revealed potently in the Enron collapse. If a critical component of society’s infrastructure such as schools is to be privatized, the only manner in which a truly free market can be assured is to mandate minimal educational standards, probably including a shared curriculum and open admission, to make certain that all competitors start with the proverbial “even playing field”.

I’m not philosphically opposed to private education, even funded by taxpayer money, however, I am oppposed to such programs on the practical grounds that an uneven delivery of service is inevitable without the heavy regulation that would be required to make a truly “free” market, and the inherent inefficiency of delivering a service when part of the funding it receives will be diverted out of the mission and into investor’s pockets, ending up in other sectors of the economy. While the US Postal system is "semi-private", it is still required to place a Post Office or provide a minimal level of service throughout the nation, regardless of whether it is profitable to serve all areas (and it isn't). However, as a society, we believe that it is useful and helpful to other sectors of the economy to provide such a service, so we fund it collectively.

Education, like the postal system, is too vital to leave to whims of irrational investors or to the level-headed short-term calculations of rational marketplace actors. The private sector is brilliant at innovation, but it is wildly inefficient with its massively redundant infrastructures to deliver like services to identical market segments. Does anyone seriously believe that private investors will fund competing efforts to educate the children of poverty? The Washington Post column would indicate a contrary experience.

Neverland

Not only do the "moral" among us wish to stop progress in the sciences, they'd be much seeing the legislated moral codes of the past more rigorously enforced:

March 30, 2005 | WILMINGTON, N.C. (AP) -- A former sheriff's dispatcher who quit her job after her boss found out she lived with her boyfriend is challenging North Carolina's law against cohabitation.

Debora Hobbs said she was told to get married, move out, or find another job after her boss found out about her living situation. The legal arm of the American Civil Liberties Union of North Carolina filed the lawsuit Monday on her behalf.

The lawsuit seeks to abolish the nearly 200-year-old -- and rarely enforced -- law that prohibits unmarried, unrelated adults of the opposite sex from living together. North Carolina is one of seven states with such a law.

Convicted offenders face a fine and up to 60 days in jail.

"The government has no business meddling in the private relationships of consenting adults," said Jennifer Rudinger, executive director of the ACLU-NC Legal Foundation.

Silly Ms. Rudinger. In the view of Left Behind crowd, meddling in the private relationships of consenting adults is the ONLY purpose of government. From attempting to permit doctors to refuse care to homosexual patients in Michigan, to defending pharmacists from dispensing medications with whose "morality" they disagree, to invading the "sanctity" of marriage which they're otherwise so eagerly and constantly screeching about by parachuting into the Sciavo case, the sanctimonious creeps who'll be (o happy day!) sucked up to their reward during the Rapture see government as nothing less than the opportunity to force everyone to ostensibly live as they profess to, but have so much difficulty actually managing.

These people NEED government to protect them from their own ungoverned appetites. Refusing to become adults, they want a perpetual, deathless Daddy to lecture and hector them, and everyone else, to keep them on the straight and narrow which they are unable to find with both hands and a compass.

Is anyone else uncomfortable with a nation directed by sanctimonious, hypocritical children?

Red Alert

Politics, blah blah blah.
Here's the scary stuff:

The study contains what its authors call "a stark warning" for the entire world. The wetlands, forests, savannas, estuaries, coastal fisheries and other habitats that recycle air, water and nutrients for all living creatures are being irretrievably damaged. In effect, one species is now a hazard to the other 10 million or so on the planet -- and to itself.
...
# Because of human demand for food, fresh water, timber, fiber and fuel, more land has been claimed for agriculture in the last 60 years than in the 18th and 19th centuries combined.

# An estimated 24 percent of the Earth's land surface is now cultivated.

# Water withdrawals from lakes and rivers have doubled in the last 40 years. Humans now use between 40 percent and 50 percent of all available freshwater running off the land.

# At least a quarter of all fish stocks are overharvested. In some areas, the catch is now less than a hundredth of that before industrial fishing.

# Since 1980, about 35 percent of mangroves have been lost, 20 percent of the world's coral reefs have been destroyed and another 20 percent badly degraded.

# Deforestation and other changes could increase the risks of malaria and cholera, and open the way for new and so far unknown diseases to emerge.

In a way, who cares if we sign on to the Kytoto Treaty? It appears too little, too late.

The world is in need of a comprehensive environmental treaty covering air, water and food quality and production. Within 500 years, I'm betting on species extinction unless humanity drastically changes its methods of exploiting world resources.

Listeners to my off-line diatribes are well aware that I believe the "overpopulation problem" to be one of the better and most persistent bits of misdirection is examining world problems. The problem is not too many people, the problem is the distribution of world resources being at the mercy of political constructs.

Since the United States is demonstrably a rogue nation at this juncture, it's far too much to expect any leadership on a world resource distribution summit to come from that quarter, but, and I want to make this perfectly clear, humanity is staring down the barrel of its ultimate destruction in a tiny march of generations.

If technological civilization collapses at any point in the future, it cannot be recreated in the same way. Mineral desposits extractable with primitive tools are exhausted. Remaining resources of this kind require a technological level that will not be sustained in the face of massive destruction of the basic necessities of food, water, and air. The conflicts arising from political competition from a shrinking resource pool will degrade the capacity of civilization to sustain itself.

It's long past time to quit kidding around about this issue. Processes altering the environmental fabric have a way of reaching tipping points at which a trend accelerates unstoppably. If the the biomass in the oceans collapses, we're all done, and for eternity.

Such an outcome may be welcome to the Left Behind crowd of apocalyptics, but for the reality-based community, the end of the human species is pretty much an unqualified catastrophe.

Without children, I don't have a close personal stake in the long-term future unless some clever folks come up with Immortality for Everyone (TM) before I kick, but for those of you who contemplate descendants, you might want to consider handing over a world where they won't be using up the last of their ammunition to defend five gallons of drinking water.

My Life As A Doorstop

Like many people, I've been put in mind by the sad case of Terri Sciavo of the necessity for making one's wishes clear about medical care desired in the event one is unable to communicate following an accident or other catastrophic event. Therefore, allow me to make my wishes clear in this public forum.

1) ALL extraordinary measures are to be taken in my care. Feeding tubes, resusitating paddles employed at 10-minute intervals, a bellows to blow air into my lungs, painkillers of dangerous intensity -- if human ingenuity has devised a means to extend life in whatever fashion and of whatever quality, I want that means involved in my care. Disconnect nothing. Not even if all my brain readings are flatter than than Dick Cheney's warm-up jokes, or if all my smiles, grunts, flailing gestures, and attempts at articulation are clearly the efforts of my brain stem to cling stubbornly to life. It's my life, and I want to hang on to it as long as modern medical capabilities can sustain it. Before I shuffle off into the Long Dark, I'd like to see where this coma thing takes me.

2) However, if close relatives or friends are considering selling of houses, cars, children, or body parts to finance this full-court-press of medical care, I'll take my chances with the Infinite. No one's impoverishing themselves on my account. If, on the other hand, Medicaid is footing the bill, imagine my mirth at continued life, partially financed by the Red states. In fact, if aforementioned relatives and friends can siphon off thousands of dollars from some dolorous right-wing collection of evangelists for my care, do your best to skim off a percentage for yourselves. Feel free to use my "plight" as a prop to line your own pockets and improve the quality of your lives, as long as you sustain mine. I'm in a coma, what the hell do I care if my picture's in the paper?

3) If I'm screaming non-stop, despite the application of painkillers, keep injecting MORE painkillers until I stop screaming, or I'm dead. There are worse ways to go.

4) Please have John Edward, the psychic, attempt to contact me. We'll settle this afterlife question when he and I go mano-a-mano on the astral plane.

5) You who know the secret identity of Antonius are enjoined to wave this document in the face of overtaxed, despairing medical personnel attempting to provide me with "mercy".

I hope this makes my wishes clear.

Absence

I feel as if I owe readers of this blog a short explanation for the 10 week hiatus (or so) of Boring Diatribe.

A few conversations with Reductio last year convinced me that:

a) Boring Diatribe was gradually undermining what little remained of my post-election sanity, and
b) These Diatribes weren't making any difference anyway.

I admit to the accuracy of both statements. On the other hand, I no longer care if following the "news" drives me completely around the bend, or if the readers of this blog are unpersuaded, or even offended, by the application of reason to world events and their coverage by the media, otherwise and hereinafter known as "the hyenas of crony capitalism".

Someone has to keep the flame of the enlightenment burning in this increasingly benighted nation, even if that flame demands the fuel of repetitious harangues against the corrupt and mendacious rulers to whom 59 million Americans have handed the increasingly flailing whip.

The country has survived Willian Taft and Japanese internment, race riots and the Vietnam war. I believe, somewhat against my better judgment, that America will survive the rapacious rule of the would-be oligarchs currently in possession of the federal government apparatus.

My belief arises, not out of some faith in the eventual good judgment of the American electorate (sorry, Reductio), but rather out of a certainty that actions which contradict the dictates of reason must eventually fail, because reality is the final judge of all endeavor, which the Bush administration has discovered again and again, to the sorrow of its believers and detractors.

So, in short, if not having vanquished despair, having come to the point where the emotion can be regarded with amused contempt, Boring Diatribe is back in business.

Power

Yes. A long absence. But I've had it. I'm coming back there.

Do you understand, yet?

While there may be a few Republicans who hold dear principles of conservativism, such as limited scope of government power, local control of public policy whenever practical, reluctance to involve the United States in foreign wars, and protection of the rights of the individual against the compelling interests of the state, clearly, none of those Republicans occupy leadership positions in the Republican party.

The grotesque circus surrounding the fate of Terri Sciavo has finally and irrevocably demonstrated for the world what these crass and evil men intend for the United States of America and for as much of the world as they can seize. They will impose their arbitrary, illogical beliefs and desires everywhere they can because they want to, on as many victims as they can, to feed their overweening pride and greed.

From the soiling of America by officially sanctioned torture, to an illegal invasion of a defanged nation in pursuit of a personal vendetta and the profit of other fiends, to the endless examples of corrupt funneling of public funds into the private pockets of cronies, to this crowning achievement of a two branches of the federal government seeking to interfere in the life and death decisions of a single family by conducting a trial through legistlation, the real, naked agenda is clear.

Republicans are not trying to restore some mythic period when a noble citizenry shaped their own lives in peace and comfort. They have a single goal:

Power.

Power for its own sake. Not power to accomplish noble ends, or even ignoble ends. Merely an increasingly naked pursuit to fill an insatiable, endless, bottomless hunger for control of their fellow human beings, who they delight in degrading and reducing to penury to extend their control that much deeper into every human soul.

I pity the Sciavo family. My personal opinion is that it is immoral to starve people to death, whatever their state of mind or lack of it, but unlike Republicans, I do not believe that my personal moral convictions should necessarily carry the weight of law. If I did, in the face of overwhelming consensus that my opinions are not shared, then I would be a megalomaniac, whose joy would derive from tyranny. Instead, I believe in the rights of the citizenry and those affected by them to seek redress of their grievances through the American judicial system. Both sides of the Sciavo case have offered their arguments, and repeated decisions have unanimously consented and approved the current action of removing the feeding tube from Terri Sciavo. I do not agree with the morality of the decision, but I believe in the rule of law, a belief clearly lacking in the Republican party.

Don't refer to these people as our government, because that is not how they see themselves. They consider themselves our rulers, holding in themselves as much power over the life and death of each citizen as any king or dictator, and as Judge Scalia recently revealed, they believe this power stems directly from God.

You cannot argue with men who believe their decisions derive from the will of God. They will go to any lengths to impose their own will in the guise of doing the Almighty's work. They will kill millions, and pilot planes into buildings, if it serves God's purposes as revealed in the impenetrable midnight of their twisted souls.

They were elected. But in their hearts, in the hearts of their followers, they were appointed by God.

Do you understand?

The News of the Not Fun

Guerilla News has a priceless commentary on the big vacuum where weapons of mass destruction were supposed to be in Iraq:

In the run-up to the war, every major daily and television network in the country parroted the White House’s asinine WMD claims for months on end, all but throwing their panties on stage the instant Colin Powell showed what appeared to be a grainy aerial picture of a pick-up truck to the U.N. Security Council.

Justice would seem to demand that a roughly equivalent amount of coverage be given to the truth, now that we know it (and we can officially call it the truth now, because even Bush admits it; previously the truth was just a gigantic, unendorsed pile of plainly obvious evidence). But that isn’t the way things work in America. We only cover things around the clock every day for four or five straight months when it’s fun.

O.J. was fun. Monica Lewinsky was fun. “America’s New War” was fun – there was a war at the end of that rainbow. But “We All Totally Fucked Up” is not fun. You can’t make a whole new set of TV graphics for “We All Totally Fucked Up.” There is no obvious location where Wolf Blitzer can do a somber, grimacing “We All Totally Fucked Up” live shot (above an “Operation We All Totally Fucked Up” bug in the corner of the screen). Hundreds of reporters cannot rush to stores to buy special khakis or rain slickers or Kevlar vests in preparation for “We All Totally Fucked Up.” They would have to wear their own clothes and stand, not in front of burning tanks or smashed Indonesian hovels, but in front of their own apartments.

The staff of Boring Diatribe are still here, standing in front of our houses, but our TV graphics say "We Told You So."

Destined for Gitmo

Really, these Knight-Ridder people are becoming quite intolerable:

Analysis: Iraqi insurgency growing larger, more effective

By Tom Lasseter and Jonathan S. Landay

Knight Ridder Newspapers

BAGHDAD, Iraq - The United States is steadily losing ground to the Iraqi insurgency, according to every key military yardstick.

A Knight Ridder analysis of U.S. government statistics shows that through all the major turning points that raised hopes of peace in Iraq, including the arrest of Saddam Hussein and the handover of sovereignty at the end of June, the insurgency, led mainly by Sunni Muslims, has become deadlier and more effective.

The analysis suggests that unless something dramatic changes - such as a newfound will by Iraqis to reject the insurgency or a large escalation of U.S. troop strength - the United States won't win the war. It's axiomatic among military thinkers that insurgencies are especially hard to defeat because the insurgents' goal isn't to win in a conventional sense but merely to survive until the will of the occupying power is sapped. Recent polls already suggest an erosion of support among Americans for the war.

One can only hope that a war based on a series of lies that's grinding up a generation of Americans, enticing our sons and daughters into torture, and sucking hundreds of billions of dollars out of the economy while slaughtering thousands of foreigners caught in the crossfire might generate a few tiny doubts in the public mind.

But not here. Here at Boring Diatribe, we say: Godspeed the Black Emperor. Next stop: Iran!

I, For One, Welcome Our New Theocratic Overlords.

From the day of our founding, we have proclaimed that every man and woman on this earth has rights, and dignity, and matchless value, because they bear the image of the maker of heaven and earth, [right up until we blow them into bloody fragements, being not in Our Sight.]
...
Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves; and, under the rule of a just God, [and His Annointed One, George W. Bush], cannot long retain it.
...
That edifice of character is built in families, supported by communities with standards, and sustained in our national life by the truths of Sinai, the Sermon on the Mount, the words of the Koran, and the varied faiths of our people [in God's Annointed One, George W. Bush]
...
Not because we consider ourselves a chosen nation; God moves and chooses as He wills, [and I'll let you know what His choices are.]
...
History has an ebb and flow of justice, but history also has a visible direction, set by liberty and the Author of Liberty, [me, George W. Bush]
...
May God bless you, and may He watch over the United States of America, [because I can't be bothered.]

Equal Time

It's come to the attention of Boring Diatribe that Newtonian Physics is Just A Theory. We'd like to advance our own theory concerning the revolution of the Earth, and we'd like you to consider bringing our theory forward to your local school board and textbook suppliers, especially if you live in California or Texas.

It is our opinion that the Earth rotates due to the agency of a vast, tireless hamster, called Leviathan, which runs on the inner surface of the hollow planet. Like relativity and evolution, the Leviathan Theory of Motion is, itself, Just A Theory, and therefore on equal footing with all those other False Doctrines which so plague the minds of our schoolchildren.

Thirst for Freedom

Go read Baghdad Burning:

It's amazing how as things get worse, you begin to require less and less. We have a saying for that in Iraq, "Ili yishoof il mawt, yirdha bil iskhooneh." Which means, "If you see death, you settle for a fever." We've given up on democracy, security and even electricity. Just bring back the water.

Right wing morons, listen carefully. Lean in close. No, closer. I want you to be absolutely clear on what I'm about to say. Ready?

THE IRAQI PEOPLE ARE NOT BETTER OFF NOW THAT YOU'VE DESTROYED THEIR COUNTRY AND KILLED 100,000 OF THEM.

Freedom to starve or die of thirst isn't freedom. It's chaos. Like many others, sadly in the minority in this benighted country, I and the rest of the staff at Boring Diatribe knew Bushco was utterly corrupt and incompetent, and as capable of reforming a conquered nation as a gang of monkeys trying to construct the Taj Mahal. You'll end up with something at the end, but it's probably going to be a steaming pile of excrement.

All Hail

See, here's how democracy works: When you vote someone into office, from that moment forward you lose all voice in how that person makes decisions, and what decisions he makes. In fact, even if that person commits crimes, including treason, the only recourse you have is to vote that person out of office, because that's the only "accountability moment" that exists in a democracy. Get it?

Bush Says Election Ratified Iraq Policy
No U.S. Troop Withdrawal Date Is Set

By Jim VandeHei and Michael A. Fletcher
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, January 16, 2005; Page A01

President Bush said the public's decision to reelect him was a ratification of his approach toward Iraq and that there was no reason to hold any administration officials accountable for mistakes or misjudgments in prewar planning or managing the violent aftermath.

"We had an accountability moment, and that's called the 2004 elections," Bush said in an interview with The Washington Post. "The American people listened to different assessments made about what was taking place in Iraq, and they looked at the two candidates, and chose me."

All hail the Black Emperor, and his ex cathedra mandate from a slim majority of deeply deluded Americans that renders him immune from accountability from this moment on, since he cannot run for re-election. Or so I'd like to think. No decision is now open to question, no lie should be exposed, no hypocrisy uncovered, because THE PEOPLE HAVE SPOKEN. Got it? MAN-DATE! Now, shut up, stop writing your representatives, and pick up a gun. Them insurgents need repressin'. You don't like it? You get to say so in four years. Maybe. Unless Bush makes enough infallible decisions betwen now and then to render that question moot.

What A Surprise

Wow. No one but 20,000,000 antiwar protesters, and the staff of this blog, saw this one coming:

Iraq New Terror Breeding Ground
War Created Haven, CIA Advisers Report

By Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, January 14, 2005; Page A01

Iraq has replaced Afghanistan as the training ground for the next generation of "professionalized" terrorists, according to a report released yesterday by the National Intelligence Council, the CIA director's think tank.

Iraq provides terrorists with "a training ground, a recruitment ground, the opportunity for enhancing technical skills," said David B. Low, the national intelligence officer for transnational threats. "There is even, under the best scenario, over time, the likelihood that some of the jihadists who are not killed there will, in a sense, go home, wherever home is, and will therefore disperse to various other countries."Low's comments came during a rare briefing by the council on its new report on long-term global trends. It took a year to produce and includes the analysis of 1,000 U.S. and foreign experts. Within the 119-page report is an evaluation of Iraq's new role as a breeding ground for Islamic terrorists.

President Bush has frequently described the Iraq war as an integral part of U.S. efforts to combat terrorism. But the council's report suggests the conflict has also helped terrorists by creating a haven for them in the chaos of war.

"At the moment," NIC Chairman Robert L. Hutchings said, Iraq "is a magnet for international terrorist activity."

Before the U.S. invasion, the CIA said Saddam Hussein had only circumstantial ties with several al Qaeda members. Osama bin Laden rejected the idea of forming an alliance with Hussein and viewed him as an enemy of the jihadist movement because the Iraqi leader rejected radical Islamic ideals and ran a secular government.

Bush described the war in Iraq as a means to promote democracy in the Middle East. "A free Iraq can be a source of hope for all the Middle East," he said one month before the invasion. "Instead of threatening its neighbors and harboring terrorists, Iraq can be an example of progress and prosperity in a region that needs both."

But as instability in Iraq grew after the toppling of Hussein, and resentment toward the United States intensified in the Muslim world, hundreds of foreign terrorists flooded into Iraq across its unguarded borders. They found tons of unprotected weapons caches that, military officials say, they are now using against U.S. troops. Foreign terrorists are believed to make up a large portion of today's suicide bombers, and U.S. intelligence officials say these foreigners are forming tactical, ever-changing alliances with former Baathist fighters and other insurgents.

"The al-Qa'ida membership that was distinguished by having trained in Afghanistan will gradually dissipate, to be replaced in part by the dispersion of the experienced survivors of the conflict in Iraq," the report says.

According to the NIC report, Iraq has joined the list of conflicts -- including the Israeli-Palestinian stalemate, and independence movements in Chechnya, Kashmir, Mindanao in the Philippines, and southern Thailand -- that have deepened solidarity among Muslims and helped spread radical Islamic ideology.

At the same time, the report says that by 2020, al Qaeda "will be superseded" by other Islamic extremist groups that will merge with local separatist movements. Most terrorism experts say this is already well underway. The NIC says this kind of ever-morphing decentralized movement is much more difficult to uncover and defeat.

That's right kids, and, incidentally, all the morons out there who keep chanting "flypaper" every time another car explodes in Iraq -- Iraq's not a Roach Motel, it's a big petri dish, a happy breeding medium producing terrorists at a clip faster than even we supposed was possible.

Reality to warmongers: you blew it. Everything you wanted to accomplish is running like dust through your fumbling, incompetent hands. How about you get out of the way and let the adults have a go at cleaning up your appalling catastrophe?

The Gulag Archipelago

Fellow naturalized Vermonter Alexander Solzhenitsyn's metaphor for the Soviet Union's system of prisons becomes more resonant all the time:

Bush is now thinking of building jails abroad to hold suspects for life

The promise of imminent release for four British detainees held at the notorious US prison at Guantánamo Bay is obviously welcome, but it is only a tiny exception in the surge of bad news from the Bush team on the human rights front. The first few days of the new year have produced two shocking exposures already.

One is the revelation that the administration sees the US not just as a self-appointed global policeman, but also as the world’s prison warder. It is thinking of building jails in foreign countries, mainly ones with grim human rights records, to which it can secretly transfer detainees (unconvicted by any court) for the rest of their lives – a kind of global gulag beyond the scrutiny of the International Committee of the Red Cross, or any other independent observers or lawyers.

The other horror is the light shone on the views of Alberto Gonzales, the White House nominee to be the chief law officer, the attorney general. At his Senate confirmation hearings last week he was revealed to be a man who not only refuses to rule out torture under any circumstances but also, in his capacity as White House counsel over the past few years, chaired several meetings at which specific interrogation techniques were discussed. As Edward Kennedy pointed out, and Gonzales did not deny, they included the threat of burial alive and water-boarding, under which the detainee is strapped to a board, forcibly pushed under water, wrapped in a wet towel, and made to believe he could drown.

Can't we just stamp out torturers instead of giving them jobs? Is that concept so fucking hard to understand?

The Free Market Succubus

For those with a taste for learned discussion on economics, we offer this essay on the free market as a legacy of Enlightenment Utopian thinking. An excerpt:

In the United States free markets have contributed to social breakdown on a scale unknown in any other developed country. Families are weaker in America than in any other country. At the same time, social order has been propped up by a policy of mass incarceration. No other advanced industrial country, aside from post-communist Russia, uses imprisonment as a means of social control on the scale of the United States. Free markets, the desolation of families and communities and the use of the sanctions of criminal law as a last recourse against social collapse go in tandem.

Free markets have also weakened or destroyed other institutions on which social cohesion depends in the US. They have generated a long economic boom from which the majority of Americans has hardly benefited. Levels of inequality in the United States resemble those of Latin American countries more than those of any European society. Yet such direct consequences of the free market have not weakened support for it. It remains the scared cow of American politics and has become identified with America's claim to be a model for a universal civilization. The Enlightenment project and the free market have become fatefully intertwined.

Ideology in conflict with reality will ultimately reap the whirlwind.

The author, John Gray:

John Gray is Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics. Prior to this he was Professor of Politics at Oxford University and Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford. He is a former supporter of the New Right, but has since revised his views, and now believes that the conventional political solutions of conservatism and social democracy are no longer viable. He is a regular contributor to the Guardian and the Times Literary Supplement and is the author of many books on political theory. He is married and lives in Oxford.

The entire article is worth the read.

No Weapons

Sometimes, an utter weariness washes over the entire staff of Boring Diatribe, rendering us incapable of even muttering "I told you so," when, once again, facts remind everyone that they're immutable. The irreducible fact in question is that highly sophisticated technologies, including weapons, require manufacturing facilitiies, raw materials, supporting infrastructure and vast expertise to bring them in to existence and maintain them once made. Other than the lingering expertise, it was painfully obvious to anyone with two neurons to rub together that Iraq, crushed into immobility and impotence by a decade of economic and political sanctions, was gradually sliding into a state of military readiness best characterized as "boards with nails". Military hardware left over from Iraq's bellicose heyday was disintegrating from lack of spare parts and the knowledge to use them, and Iraq's Maximum Leader was too enraptured by the false, glowing reports peddled to him by sycophantic underlings to understand that his scientists were spending more time figuring out how to stay alive than how to slaughter the enemy.

So, more than two years after witnesses to verbal Diatribes will attest that I said, "There's an inadequate industrial base to support the production of weapons of mass destruction. There are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq," a conclusion I came to, I'll remind everyone, at a cost in money and lives of exactly zero, merely by applying the commonly ignored strengths of Common Sense, the Washington Post makes it "official":

Search for Banned Arms In Iraq Ended Last Month
Critical September Report to Be Final Word

By Dafna Linzer
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, January 12, 2005; Page A01

The hunt for biological, chemical and nuclear weapons in Iraq has come to an end nearly two years after President Bush ordered U.S. troops to disarm Saddam Hussein. The top CIA weapons hunter is home, and analysts are back at Langley.

In interviews, officials who served with the Iraq Survey Group (ISG) said the violence in Iraq, coupled with a lack of new information, led them to fold up the effort shortly before Christmas.

President Bush, Vice President Cheney and other top administration officials asserted before the U.S. invasion in March 2003 that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program, had chemical and biological weapons, and maintained links to al Qaeda affiliates to whom it might give such weapons to use against the United States.

Bush has expressed disappointment that no weapons or weapons programs were found, but the White House has been reluctant to call off the hunt, holding out the possibility that weapons were moved out of Iraq before the war or are well hidden somewhere inside the country. But the intelligence official said that possibility is very small.

Duelfer is back in Washington, finishing some addenda to his September report before it is reprinted.

"There's no particular news in them, just some odds and ends," the intelligence official said. The Government Printing Office will publish it in book form, the official said.

The CIA declined to authorize any official involved in the weapons search to speak on the record for this story. The intelligence official offered an authoritative account of the status of the hunt on the condition of anonymity. The agency did confirm that Duelfer is wrapping up his work and will not be replaced in Baghdad.

The ISG, established to search for weapons but now enmeshed in counterinsurgency work, remains under Pentagon command and is being led by Marine Corps Brig. Gen. Joseph McMenamin.

Intelligence officials said there is little left for the ISG to investigate because Duelfer's last report answered as many outstanding questions as possible. The ISG has interviewed every person it could find connected to programs that ended more than 10 years ago, and every suspected site within Iraq has been fully searched, or stripped bare by insurgents and thieves, according to several people involved in the weapons hunt.

Satellite photos show that entire facilities have been dismantled, possibly by scrap dealers who sold off parts and equipment to buyers around the world.

"The September 30 report is really pretty much the picture," the intelligence official said.

"We've talked to so many people that someone would have said something. We received nothing that contradicts the picture we've put forward. It's possible there is a supply someplace, but what is much more likely is that [as time goes by] we will find a greater substantiation of the picture that we've already put forward."

Congress allotted hundreds of millions of dollars for the weapons hunt, and there has been no public accounting of the money. A spokesman for the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency said the entire budget and the expenditures would remain classified.

Two years, one hundred thousand lives, $200 billion and counting, and all to produce a report of what I was sure of all along. I'm really looking forward to four more years of George Jr. working out his Oedipal conflicts with Poppy while using the rest of the world to wipe up the blood and pay the bills.

Let the Death Squads Begin Their Holy Work

Newsweek reports this new thinking, over at the Pentagram... er ... gon:

Now, NEWSWEEK has learned, the Pentagon is intensively debating an option that dates back to a still-secret strategy in the Reagan administration’s battle against the leftist guerrilla insurgency in El Salvador in the early 1980s. Then, faced with a losing war against Salvadoran rebels, the U.S. government funded or supported "nationalist" forces that allegedly included so-called death squads directed to hunt down and kill rebel leaders and sympathizers. Eventually the insurgency was quelled, and many U.S. conservatives consider the policy to have been a success—despite the deaths of innocent civilians and the subsequent Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal. (Among the current administration officials who dealt with Central America back then is John Negroponte, who is today the U.S. ambassador to Iraq. Under Reagan, he was ambassador to Honduras.)

Following that model, one Pentagon proposal would send Special Forces teams to advise, support and possibly train Iraqi squads, most likely hand-picked Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and Shiite militiamen, to target Sunni insurgents and their sympathizers, even across the border into Syria, according to military insiders familiar with the discussions. It remains unclear, however, whether this would be a policy of assassination or so-called "snatch" operations, in which the targets are sent to secret facilities for interrogation. The current thinking is that while U.S. Special Forces would lead operations in, say, Syria, activities inside Iraq itself would be carried out by Iraqi paramilitaries, officials tell NEWSWEEK.

Why try half measures? I say, kill every single Iraqi, man woman and child. Wipe them, and the memory of them, from the face of the Earth. Only then will they be truly free.

Sarcasm aside, I don't agree with everything the current Pope, John Paul II proposes, but when he warned at Christmas of 2000 about a cuture of death this is the sort of thing he had in mind:

The pope said the world was confronted by "alarming signs of the culture of death which pose a serious threat for the future."

Sin, he said, was reflected in many of the problems that continue to mar humanity, including violence against women and children, the marginalisation of the young and elderly, and "endless streams of exiles and refugees."

The United States has already brought itself to very brink of the final abyss with its War on Terrorism. It's not going to be long before genocide starts to look like a reasonable response to the insurgency in Iraq. The United States has already lost more of its soul and its humanity than I care to tabulate. Before we become complete monsters, it's time to disengage from Iraq, stop affording Israel mindless support for all its doomed policies, and pull our troops from Saudi Arabia, rather than let another day go by when Americans act as a mercenary army to support a corrupt regime. We have enough problems of that kind at home. It's time to let the Middle East care for itself.

By the Numbers

Haven't seen this remark talked about too much:

IRAQ’S rapidly swelling insurgency numbers 200,000 fighters and active supporters and outnumbers the United States-led coalition forces, the head of the country’s intelligence service said yesterday.
...
“I think the resistance is bigger than the US military in Iraq. I think the resistance is more than 200,000 people,” General Muhammad Abdullah Shahwani, director of Iraq’s new intelligence services, said.
...
“People are fed up after two years without improvement,” he said. “People are fed up with no security, no electricity, people feel they have to do something. The army (dissolved by the American occupation authority) was hundreds of thousands. You’d expect some veterans would join with their relatives, each one has sons and brothers.”

I can't find a citation for the NPR report some weeks ago, but after the latest reports of poor electrical service and the inability of Iraqis to purchase gasoline (not kidding), I heard an Iraqi say something that was translated as "Under Saddam, we did not have such troubles."

When Iraqis are looking back on Saddam Husseins rule with nostalgia, the message is clear: Time to go.

The Bar

By the way, if anyone's wondering what my test is for supporting for re-election a Democrat currently serving on the Senate Judiciary Committee, including, especially including, my own Senator Patrick Leahy, it's the following: I'd need to see those Senators, individually or in a group, call a press conference and say, with regard to the Alberto Gonzales nomination to Attorney General:

"We're not going to vote to confirm for Attorney General any fucker who supports torture. And, furthermore, we regard any of our colleagues, Democratic or Republican, who do vote to confirm the appointment of Alberto Gonzales, as torture-supporting fuckers."

I mean, just in case anyone was wondering.

Desperation

If increasing levels of destruction and mayhem visited upon your enemy are a sure sign of desperation, the United States must be the most desperate nation on the planet. TAPPED has a good roundup of the assessed desperation of the insurgents in Iraq.

Public Service

For a number of years, there has been public discussion and description of the United States as the world's policeman. Hopefully, you've had little occasion to require the attentions of police officers in their professional capacity, but if you've ever been involved in a situation which evolved into a police matter, you know how other people react to their arrival.

Some people are frankly glad when police officers arrive, with the expectation that justice will be done, order restored, and miscreants restrained. Other people will be convinced that the police are bound to misunderstand the situation, play favorites, meet out arbitrary penalties and end by making a bad situation worse. The tension between these two extremes of expectation leads all involved parties to attempt to sway the opinion of officers to beliefs favorable to one side or another of a dispute. Officers must parse the situation and make the best judgment they can on the basis of imperfect information, relying on the later, cooler appraisal of a court, if necessary, to judge guilt or innnocence.

Consequently, the arrival of the police can be met with any of a range of emotional responses.

Now, contrast this tableau with the reaction greeting ambulance workers.
No one except the deranged believe that emergency medical technicians have any agenda other than to treat the sick and wounded, and do their best to make sure that lives and limbs of everyone are preserved. They're healers, and they are typically greeted with relief, offers of assistance, and hurried explanations of bystanders meaning to help:

The U.S. helicopters carried about 60 survivors — including two pregnant women and some so weak they could neither walk nor talk — to the Banda Aceh hospital after the American military got permission from Jakarta to pick up those in bad shape. Many had had little food or water for eight days, and they suffered from ailments including pneumonia, broken bones, infected wounds, tetanus and trauma.

Several also were brought to the USS Abraham Lincoln on stretchers.

"I'd much rather be doing this than fighting a war," said helicopter pilot Lt. Cmdr. William Whitsitt of Great Falls, Mont.

Also on Sumatra, U.S. helicopters dropped off cartons of food aid donated by Singapore schools. Flying missions along a 120-mile stretch of Sumatra coastline, the extent of the damage from the earthquake and tsunami became eerily obvious.

Like torture on the other end of the spectrum, aid to the victims of disaster is morally unambiguous. If the United States spent more time, effort and money trying to be the world's ambulance instead of the world's policeman, America and its policies would be a damn sight more popular and effective than they are.

The best defense is to make sure nobody WANTS to attack you. I'm going to go out on a limb and postulate that a United States that spent $200 billion to cure disease, house the homeless, stop the bleeding and feed the hungry would be a difficult enemy to recruit against, even among those who "hate freedom". Nobody hates the ambulance. Emergency workers aren't there to judge, they're there to help. It's time for this misguided country to seize the moment and do the same.

Whoopsie

Iraqi houses all look alike:

Jan. 8, 2005  |  BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- The United States military acknowledged dropping a 500-pound bomb on the wrong house outside the northern city of Mosul on Saturday, killing five people. But the man who owned the house said the bomb killed 14 people -- including seven children.

We must keep killing the Iraqis until they love us.

Questioning Gonzales

Since evidence gathered through torture is now admissible to military panels judging the status of detainees, I recommend to the Senate Judiciary committee that the post of Attorney General is too vital to the interest of national security to stop short of any method which may yield compelling testimony concerning the momentous decision of filling the vast, echoing shoes of departing Attorney General John Ashcroft.

Torture Alberto Gonzales. The American people must know the truth about this nominee, and only questioning under extreme duress can elicit responses on which we can rely.

Political Bankruptcy

It's hard to imagine how destitute your ideas must be if you have to pay your own supporters to talk up your policy proposals:

Amstrong Williams, a prominent conservative commentator who was a protégé of Senator Strom Thurmond and Justice Clarence Thomas of the Supreme Court, acknowledged yesterday that he was paid $240,000 by the Department of Education to promote its initiatives on his syndicated television program and to other African-Americans in the news media.

Can I just emphasize "conservative commentator"? This slimeball, who one might predict would support the policy proposals of a conservative president, STILL has to be paid a quarter million embezzled taxpayer dollars to furnish the propoganda the Bush administration needs to garner support for anything they do.

However, do I really believe Williams needed to be paid? No, I do not. This is merely one more instance of Republicans finding a way to make the friendly rich richer by looting the public coffers. So, who else is on the payroll? How many other "journalists" and "commentators" are richly compensated mouthpieces feeding at the trough of public money?

Couldn't we just eliminate the middleman? Here's my proposal for tax reform: we abolish the Federal income tax system, and instead, taxpayers each select 5 of the richest Americans from Forbes' annual list, and all citizens divide 50% of their income between the lucky winners.

Then the nation can depend on the public spirit and investment of these patriotic Americans to fund whatever public works seem advantageous to them.

What could go wrong?

The Moral Values of the Christian Right Laid Bare

Wow.

Is this what Jesus would do?

Soft in the Middle

Have you noticed that it’s the folks least likely to be affected by terrorism who are most afeared of it? The September 11 attacks struck New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington D.C.—all of which went for Kerry on November 2, by the way—yet the loudest voices calling for Muslim roundups come from the sea of red in the Midwest and South. Could it be that gullible, poorly educated, "regular" ’Murcans are more susceptible to a fear-mongering government?

Now word out of West Tennessee is that locals don’t want Muslims to build a cemetery on the site of an old farm, on accounta it might become a tairrist staging area. (You know, Graceland represents the very kind of freedoms them tairrists hate—the freedom to put shag carpeting on the ceiling, the freedom to wear spangled jumpsuits, the freedom to eat seventeen fried peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches at a single sitting, etc.*) Even worse, the unembalmed bodies of them dirty A-rabs might spread disease. (See? Even the dead ones are trying to kill us!)

Says one local farmer/patriot named John Wilson:

"We know for a fact that Muslim mosques have been used as terrorist hide-outs and centers for terrorist activities….Ladies and gentlemen, you may think this is far-fetched, but that is what the Jewish people thought when the Nazis started taking a small foothold, a little at a time, in their community."

Wait a minute…the Nazi’s "started taking a small foothold" on the Jewish community? By "started taking a small foothold" do you mean "started forming roving bands of brown-shirted thugs to beat and murder random citizens and destroy their property"? 'Cause I'm pretty sure that’s not the same thing as building a cemetery.

*None of this is meant to denigrate the musical talents of the King, which I admire greatly. But he was one over-the-top, fat, tacky sumbitch at the end there.

How to Lose

Not that I think that the Americans can ever "win" (whatever that means) in Iraq, but do we really expect to garner allies when our soldiers are kicking down doors and screaming "Where's the guns, bitch?" at terrified Iraqi women whose command of English is, you know, doubtful? Here's James Wolcott's take on the Economist article.

We are so done in Iraq.

Morality

In America, let no graven image of a farm animal go naked, lest it inflame the lusty hearts of men:

She said the city's Design Review Board, which makes recommendations about exterior changes to buildings in the district, objected to the painting because it doesn't fit the district's landscape and because naked pigs might lead to paintings of naked people.

America: naked beneath its clothing.

Credibilty

Yup, this upcoming Iraqi election's just gonna be AWASH in credibility:

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Three militant groups warned Iraqis against voting in Jan. 30 elections, saying Thursday that people participating in the "dirty farce" risked attack. All 700 employees of the electoral commission in Mosul reportedly resigned after being threatened.

Interestingly, the insurgents appear to be taking a page from the Republican campaign playbook:

The radical Ansar al-Sunnah Army and two other insurgent groups issued a statement Thursday warning that democracy was un-Islamic. Democracy could lead to passing un-Islamic laws, such as permitting homosexual marriage, if the majority or people agreed to it, the statement said.

Followed by the obligatory whistling past the graveyard by the American forces:

Wednesday's attack in the northern city of Mosul exhibited a coordination rarely seen among Iraq's insurgents. The violence began with a massive truck bomb exploding just outside a U.S. checkpoint, followed by attacks by squads of 10-12 insurgents.

A Stryker vehicle reinforcing the Americans was hit by a roadside bomb and a second car bomb. U.S. forces then called in airstrikes by F-18 and F-16 fighter jets, which launched three Maverick missiles and conducted several strafing runs.

U.S. officials called the attack a sign of desperation ahead of the vote.

"The fact of the matter is we're keeping the insurgents off balance and they're reeling backward. They're trying to come at us and we're giving it right back," spokesman Lt. Col. Paul Hastings said.

"The terrorists are growing more desperate in their attempts to derail the elections and they're trying to put it all on the line and give it all they can."

Oh yeah, these guys are on the ropes all right. The more they butcher our troops, the more obvious their utter desperation. A couple more suicide bombings inside military bases and we'll have those insurgents waving the white flag, yessir.

Speaking of Babies...

Crybabies, that is. NTodd has a pithy take on the apparent conclusion to the Washington state governor's race.

Killing Babies

The next time you have an argument with a six-year-old (or his parents) about which politician kills babies, feel free to reference this article.

Or this one.
Or this one.
Or this one.
Or this one.
Or this one.

Tsunami Relief

Since our taxpayer dollars are better spent butchering uppity Iraqis who hate freedom, pry loose some disposable income and drop it where it'll do some good. Courtesy of the NY Times, contact and donate. Millions of people need our help.

Dear Dickhead Lawmakers...

... murder is already illegal, morons.
Today we have a story about a 22-year-old gangbanger and 18 fellow thugs who are going to be tried as terrorists because of a number of criminal acts. Not that I'm defending the murder of children, (though some might, as long as they're Iraqi children) robbing restaurants, shooting teenagers or firing randomly into crowds, but we used to call such acts "murder", "robbery", "attempted murder" and "crazy as a snake's armpit" respectively, or, more generically, "crime", because not everything that makes you afraid is a terrorist act.

But that point has escaped the walnut-sized brainpans of lawmakers in 33 states. No, we need special statutes because killing frightened people is apparently worse than killing people who aren't afraid to die . Forgive me, or hell, don't forgive me, but this has "hate crime legislation" written all over it, and it's just as boneheaded as that idea. Everyone pay attention: murder, robbery and assault are already illegal (hence the monicker "crime"). Increasing penalties because of the ideas people have in their heads is thought policing.

I'm all for a distinction between malice aforethought and crimes of passion. Penalties for impulsive actions under stress should come with an option for amelioration, but please, people, if we're going to try citizens for conspiracy to:

“intimidate or coerce a civilian population.”

then by God, I've got a long list of powerful people who work at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue to haul before a grand jury.

Look, America. I've been patient, but this is it. Don't make me stop this country and come back there.

Disaster Update

With the additional $20 million offered by the US Government, our Disaster Relief movie can star Angelina Jolie AND Halle Berry, and even have a Jodie Foster cameo appearance!

Suffer the Children

Yesterday evening, I was standing in front of the TV with my six-year-old nephew when pictures of Bush and Kerry flashed on the screen. Andrew—whose parents are hardcore Catholics—said, "Those are the two people who want to be President, George Bush and John Kerry." I was impressed that he knew both names. Then he said, "We had a vote at my [Catholic] school." I asked him who won, and he replied, of course, that Bush had. Then he asked me who I wanted to win. Warily, I said, "Not Bush." Here's how the rest of the conversation went:

ANDREW [wide-eyed]: You wanted JOHN KERRY?!
ME: Yup.
ANDREW [incredulous]: Are you KIDDING?!
ME: No, Andrew.
ANDREW: JOHN KERRY KILLS BABIES!

At that point I had to quickly walk away. The kid is six. fucking. years. old.

Now, I can understand how someone can be against legalized abortion, and I respect that person's right to vote on that issue. However, it takes a sick and twisted mind to teach a first-grader that the Democratic nominee "kills babies." Even if that's not how his parents explained it to him, why are they even discussing the subject with him? I can't imagine why a parent would want a child that young to know that such a thing as abortion exists.

I love by brother- and sister-in-law, but I'm seriously troubled by the ways that they link religion and politics. The Catholicism that they practice bears little resemblance to that of my youth. It is much more strident and fundamentalist. There is literally no complex thinking behind their political views. It is all just cant and oversimplified, black-and-white dichotomies. How the hell do you make someone think when they are part of a community that equates thinking with Godless liberalism?

Simple Choice

The USA has a simple choice: send aid to nine countries with tens of thousands dead, or hire ONE of these actresses to make ONE movie:

These seven actresses earn $14 million-$15 million per movie: Drew Barrymore, Nicole Kidman, Reese Witherspoon, Halle Berry, Sandra Bullock, Angelina Jolie and Jodie Foster.

Yup, $165 million PER DAY to occupy Iraq, $40 million to throw a Bush Inaugural, but $15 million to split between nine countries suffering one of the worst natural diasters in a decade. If you're not vomiting, you must be a compassionate conservative.

Opportunity

Imagine this:

"My fellow Americans, two days ago an earthquake, followed by tsunamis, devasted the shorelines of nine nations and killed at least 30,000 people. Tonight, our Muslim brethren are suffering, but because of our commitment in Iraq, it is difficult for us to respond as we should. Therefore, I am ordering an immediate drawdown of troops in the Iraqi theatre and committing our resources where they will do the most good. There is no organization on Earth more accomplished at logistics than the United States military, and the problem of relief to these millions of disaster victims is a problem of logistics. I call on all other nations to help us in this great effort to rescue the imperiled, comfort the wounded, and reverently bury the dead. What the rest of the world supplies, we pledge to deliver, and I ask all Americans to examine whether they can make the sacrifice to lend their skills, their time, their wealth and their compassion to this mobilization. Let us show all nations that no one who suffers is ever alone as long as America is in the world. Thank you, my friends, God bless you, and God bless the United States of America."

Only White People Matter

Nine countries struck by killer tsunamis in southeast Asia, tens of thousands dead, and the New York Post puts two distressed British tourists on its front page to symbolize all the suffering and death of the wogs.

Pop Quiz

Quick! What's wrong with this sentence:

It's time to SUPPORT the Christmas holiday across America, which over 96 percent of Americans celebrate.

Theatre of the Absurd

Last night I went to Rockefeller Center in New York City to see the Christmas tree, and was startled and somewhat disgusted by the presence of armored police officers carrying assault weapons wandering the crowd, but not for the reasons you might immediately assume.

I have no problems with New York's finest. They've always been there when I needed them, and seemed genuinely interested in repairing a situation gone awry, usually with the least fuss. My distress stems from the difficulty in imagining what exactly these police were prepared for.

I'll digress for a moment to describe another situation in order to expand the point. Recently, I was in Dulles airport outside of Washington DC airport during a security gate closure after a businessman rushed through a metal detector. While the situation was sorted out, thousands of people filled the terminal as the security line backed up to the street.

Last winter, I had to alert TSA personnel twice to get them to do something about an abandoned bag in the middle of the Albany Airport ticket concource.

Recently, vague information of a threat against the Citicorp building in New York City led to all visitors putting their bags on an x-ray belt -- but not walking through a metal detector or being searched, not even to the extent of removing their coats.

A couple of weeks ago, a test of the new corporate welfare -- ahem -- "missile defense" system was postponed because it was cloudy that day.

All this by way of saying, who are we kidding? Examining the recent tactics of the enemies of the United States, we see two primary modes of attack:

1) Fly a plane into a building.
2) Detonate an explosive concealed in one's clothing.

So, in review, let's take each situation in turn:

Paramilitary police in NYC:

What's a cop with an assault weapon and body armor going to do to protect the public against
a) a plane flying into a building, or
b) a suicide bomber, besides

a) nothing and
b) nothing?

Albany Airport:
A bag rests abandoned in a concourse for 10 minutes after two warnings from a concerned passenger before the TSA cares? Did the soldiers (assault weapons, camo) at the upstairs security check help in the least? What would they have done with their heavy armament had the bag turned out to be a weapon?

Dulles Airport:
Who besides me was looking at a crowd of thousands of vulnerable people packed into a tight area that has no security checks on entry, with an easily repeatable method of reproducing the situation?

Citicorp:
Do I need to go into this one? Check the bags but not the people? Why not put a sign out front with instructions on bypassing security checks?

Missile Defense:
I hope Kim Jong Il doesn't get the Weather Channel.

"Security" in this country is an expensive joke. This is not an argument for more security, but for less. Certain minimum standards are fine to maintain, but it's a lack of imagination that made the United States vulnerable to attack on September 11, 2001, and it's a lack of imagination that's leaving Americans exposed worldwide.

Security measures as practiced in the USA are tableaus in a theatre of the absurd, designed to scare the bejeesus out of the populace while doing absolutely nothing to make them safer.

The only way to be truly safe is to make people not want to attack you. And you don't approach that goal by occupying other countries, alienating allies, or, at the root, ignoring inconvenient reality.

Last night a man walked by one of the assault police and said, "Glad to see you guys out here tonight," in a tone that indicated he felt safer.

I had the sensation that any minute I'd turn a corner and find painted backdrops and a crew surprised in the act of setting up the next comforting absurdity. People are often accused of fighting the last war, of protecting yesterday's vulnerabilty -- we're not even doing that.

The NYC police are waiting for terrorists to make a frontal ground assault on the city, the TSA is leaving notes in a tiny minority of checked luggage to prove their diligence, Citicorp security is playing with their new detector toy and the Pentagon is dumping money into a project that will never, ever, be used, and will never, ever, do anything but reveal exactly how we should be attacked.

I propose that the Bush Administration launch a new faith-based initiative to have all Americans pray for safety. It'll be at least as effective as everything else the country is doing, and probably just as comforting to, at minumum, the 59 million people who thought Bush and his cronies needed time to finish off -- er -- finish the job.

Debased Medal

Once, you had to know a few wise guys and sing in Las Vegas for a couple of decades to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest honor the United States can confer on a civilian.

Now it's merely necessary to fabricate intelligence (George "Slam Dunk" Tenet), complete fuck up an occupation (Paul "We Don't Need No Stinkin' Iraqi Army") Bremer, or go to war with the army you have like a good, silent general (Tommy "I'll Watch My Unarmored Troops Get Massacred As Long As You Don't Fire Me" Franks) to receive the trinket, which, hereinafter, Boring Diatribe will refer to as "The Bush Loyalist Medal".

What's a Banana Republic without a whole Special Olympics worth of medals strewn among the meat-packing glitterati? The Maximum Leader should award himself a few medals, and since he's the C-in-C, a chest full of happily clanking hardware both military and civilian would not be amiss.

If any of our readers are tapped for the "honor" (although reading this blog probably just disqualified you) we advise you to the hock the bauble and buy a soldier a bulletproof vest. Maybe you'll have enough left over to buy the bar of soap you'll need after the ceremony.

Hugging the Horse

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) is regarded as one of the finest minds Europe has ever produced. Plagued by a family history of mental disease, ill health, and possibly by advanced syphilis, the philosopher who produced the towering works Beyond Good and Evil, On The Genealogy of Morals, The Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist, Ecce Homo, The Case of Wagner, and Nietzsche Contra Wagner between 1886 and 1888, suffered a complete nervous collapse in 1889 at the sight of a coachman whipping a horse in Turin, Italy. Found weeping and embracing the animal, Nietzsche spent the last decade of his life in an asylum and in his family's care, a brain once like a bright scalpel collapsing into utter ruin at the stroke of an instant.

Which brings us to William Safire today.

Today, as is his increasingly disturbing wont, Safire wandered off the grounds and into the Hundred-Acre-Wood surrounding what we in the reality-based community refer to as "reality". Out in the wilderness, Bill found this revelation of an alternate history where the United States didn't invade Iraq:

Dissolve to a scene in a Tikrit palace where Saddam lays out his plan to (a) amass billions through a U.N. oil-for-food scam and his secret oil pipeline to Syria,

Which would have taken (a) decades Saddam didn't have (mortal as he is) and (b) a pipeline that didn't exist

(b) increase contacts with Al Qaeda,

Who hated him and would have danced with joy to his secular leadership ended... oh wait, that happened, didn't it?

(c) take leadership of the Arab world by developing W.M.D. or pretending to have them already

Because, clearly, THAT worked for 10 years in the 1990s

, and (d) openly challenging Bush.

Yeah, well, he did that. Sort of.

Agree with him or not, once you could count on Safire for a well-reasoned argument, rather than portraits of a fantasy land where he wasn't dead wrong for four solid years on politics. It's a shame to watch a fine mind disintegrate so publicly into a lumpy porridge of boot-licking cognitive dissonance, but a mercy he's retiring from his regular column. If only he had bowed out before the sand of the actual began running through his fingers.

Next time: Bill Safire and Dan Rather team up to fight crime!

Nothing To Lose

In our ongoing series entitled, "What difference does it make?" and in our continuing effort to clue-in the clueless, memo to the Pentagon: You can't "shatter" what you don't have:

WASHINGTON, Dec. 12 - The Pentagon is engaged in bitter, high-level debate over how far it can and should go in managing or manipulating information to influence opinion abroad, senior Defense Department civilians and military officers say.

Such missions, if approved, could take the deceptive techniques endorsed for use on the battlefield to confuse an adversary and adopt them for covert propaganda campaigns aimed at neutral and even allied nations.

Critics of the proposals say such deceptive missions could shatter the Pentagon's credibility, leaving the American public and a world audience skeptical of anything the Defense Department and military say - a repeat of the credibility gap that roiled America during the Vietnam War.

Yeah, it's going to take a Department of Disinformation to make the world skeptical. Not finding any WMD's in Iraq must have been insufficient.

I hope the Defense of Disinformation will put a little (TM) next to its pronouncements so that we can tell the difference between their press releases and the plain old lies we get every day anyway.

Once, America had other ways to influence opinion abroad, like Doing Good (TM) and Leading By Example (TM). But I guess that didn't leave the world skeptical enough. Keep trying guys. I'm sure you'll get us to the point where I Can't Believe It's America (TM) will be the order the of day.

Besides Bush, Who Does?

Bush-hugging toady Senator John McCain bares a fang:

Dec. 13, 2004  |  PHOENIX (AP) -- U.S. Sen. John McCain said Monday that he has "no confidence" in Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsf(ailed), citing Rumsf(ailed)'s handling of the war in Iraq and the (Rums)failure to send more troops.

McCain, speaking to The Associated Press in an hourlong interview, said his comments were not a call for Rums(ailed)'s resignation, explaining that President Bush "can have the team that he wants around him."

"No matter how stupid, bloodthirsty and blinded by ideology they may be."

"I have strenuously argued for larger troop numbers in Iraq, including the right kind of troops -- linguists, special forces, civil affairs, etc.," said McCain, R-Ariz. "There are very strong differences of opinion between myself and Secretary Rumsf(ailed) on that issue."

"Since he's an idiot who thinks a small, lightly armed occupation force can keep a lid on 25 million poverty-stricken, heavily armed Arabs with nothing left to lose."

When asked if Rumsf(ailed) was a liability to the Bush administration, McCain responded: "The president can decide that, not me."

He's not a liability to the administration. He's a liability to the troops. Here's nickel kid. Go buy yourself some better armor.

Army Invoice

I think this privatization of the military might be going a little too far. Here's your bill, soldier. Sorry about the arm.

(I can't believe I'm having to post another article like this. Then again, you'd also think my wellspring of incredulity would be dry by now.)

WASHINGTON -- Specialist Robert Loria of Middletown lost his arm in Iraq, but instead of a farewell paycheck from the U.S. Army he got a bill for nearly $1,800.

On Friday a platoon of New York lawmakers came to his rescue.

Loria found himself stuck in Fort Hood Texas this week when Army officials claimed he owed them money for travel expenses to a hospital and lost equipment.

Several lawmakers _ Rep. Maurice Hinchey and Senators Charles Schumer and Hillary Rodham Clinton _ interceded on behalf of the 27-year-old veteran after his irate wife, Christine Loria, told the Times-Herald Record of Middletown about the problem.

Loria was wounded in February. But as he was about to leave the Army this month, officials told him he had been overpaid for his time as a patient at a military hospital in the Washington area, and claimed he still owed money for travel between the hospital and Fort Hood, and $310 for items not found in his returned equipment.

Instead of a check for nearly $4,500, Loria was told he had to pay nearly $1,800.

Notice how it was Democrats fixing this problem. The real question is: Why should they have to?

Homeland Insecurity - Part 4

So, Bernard Kerik withdraws from his nomination as the Homeland Security Poobah, and everybody wants to natter on about why that was necessary, and how we're all going to move on from this unfortunate episode.

Here at Boring Diatribe, we receive the news and tedious commentary with a protracted and heartfelt yawn. Paying attention to who's running Homeland Security is like getting worked up about the new maitre 'd on the Titanic. Really, what difference does it make who's running the awful show? The job requirements of the next chieftan of Homeland Security are pretty simple:

1) Scare the shit out of Americans.
2) Not so much that they question Our Rulers.

See? Easy.
What difference does it make what jackal they prop up in front of the cameras to tell us how well the Maximum Leader is protecting us? They might as well hire someone photogenic since we'll have to look at the asshole every time there's a scandal the media can't be paid off to ignore. There's got to be one or two actors who haven't entered politics, yet. I'm sure they'd like to put down the dishrag and take a turn at the podium.

Fiddle on, America.

The Bush Religion

Every now and then there's speculation (since he doesn't actually go to church) about George W. Bush's religious convictions. Sure, he's "saved", but what exactly does that mean? Here at Boring Diatribe, our crack team of investigative reporters thinks they have the answer. Given the recent noises from Bush and his sect about passing on the favor and "saving" Social Security, it's pretty clear that Bush is a Fundamentalist Mormon:

If the 9,000 members of a polygamous Mormon sect in south-west Utah felt comfortable borrowing from their local bank like there was no tomorrow, it was because, in their minds, that was precisely the case. The world, they had been told, was coming to an end.

The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints gladly used high-interest funds to finance suspect business ventures. There was the water melon farm on which not a single water melon was planted, and plans to convert old military barracks into homes fell through when they found lead paint and asbestos inside. Now, though, the tap has been turned off. After years of obliging the sect, the local Bank of Ephraim has been forced to shut down after state regulators found it could no longer handle all the loans it had extended.

If you're convinced the Apocalypse is imminent, and, in fact, you're in a position to hurry along the End Times, there's really not too many worries about paying back $2 trillion in bad debt to finance the Rapture party for you and your friends. Although it seems like things would go a bit smoother if they'd just get Jesus hauling ass back to this mortal coil to gesture all the uppity towelheads into the Lake of Fire.

Here's hoping Bush and friends are correct on every count. Bring on the Rapture, gang. Let's get all you irresponsible sanctimonious creeps sucked into Heaven so the rest of us can get on with taking care of the Earth.

How to destroy Social Security

As what passes for the staff economist at Boring Diatribe, I've been asked to comment on the Social Security Destruction and Embezzlement proposal (AKA Privatization).

Now as it happens, Paul Krugman, a gifted economist and editorialist at the NY Times has already done so at the link provided in this posts title.

Once you realize that privatization really means government borrowing to speculate on stocks, it doesn't sound too responsible, does it? But the details make it considerably worse.

First, financial markets would, correctly, treat the reality of huge deficits today as a much more important indicator of the government's fiscal health than the mere promise that government could save money by cutting benefits in the distant future.

After all, a government bond is a legally binding promise to pay, while a benefits formula that supposedly cuts costs 40 years from now is nothing more than a suggestion to future Congresses. Social Security rules aren't immutable: in the past, Congress has changed things like the retirement age and the tax treatment of benefits. If a privatization plan passed in 2005 called for steep benefit cuts in 2045, what are the odds that those cuts would really happen?

Second, a system of personal accounts, even though it would mainly be an indirect way for the government to speculate in the stock market, would pay huge brokerage fees. Of course, from Wall Street's point of view that's a benefit, not a cost.

There is, by the way, a precedent for Bush-style privatization. One major reason for Argentina's rapid debt buildup in the 1990's was a pension reform involving a switch to individual accounts - a switch that President Carlos Menem, like President Bush, decided to finance with borrowing rather than taxes. So Mr. Bush intends to emulate a plan that helped set the stage for Argentina's economic crisis.

Ah yes, the Argentina plan. I have used this metaphor for the current administration in the past. They complain about Tax and Spend practitioners (what I like to call the Great Btritain model) but employ the BORROW AND SPEND model - patterned after the economic and political success of Argentina.

But just so we're clear here, the Social Security destruction plan involves incurring a stunning amount of debt, and then placing an irresponsibly large bet on the markets.

On the plus side it will be a windfall for well connected fund managers and investment advisors to whom Bush hands out the spoils of this victory over common sense and rational economics. Using retirements funds, and the lucrative management thereof, as a form of patronage is nothing new for Bush however, as it was one of the most successfull ways he robbed the citizens of Texas on behalf of his cronies. Now he can duplicate that important success at the federal level, where he has already developed other patronage tools, like war profiteering, and targeted tax breaks into a robber-baron-enriching art form.

Hopefully 4 more years of this sort of greedy, evil, misgovernance will cause a backlash among the electorate, and lead to the election of more enlightened officials.

If it does not, get used to living in North Argentina.

For Their Own Good

Guerrilla News has published an article about new Iraq patent law ordered by the Coalition Provisional Authority. The law remains binding until such time as a new Iraqi government repeals it.

Excerpts:

For generations, small farmers in Iraq operated in an essentially unregulated, informal seed supply system. Farm-saved seed, agricultural experimentation, and the unrestricted exchange of planting materials among farming communities has long been the basis of Iraq’s cultivation practices. All this is rendered illegal by the new law. The seeds that farmers are now allowed to plant—“protected” crop varieties brought into Iraq by transnational corporations in the name of agricultural reconstruction—will be the property of the corporations.

. . . . .

The new law is presented as being necessary to ensure the supply of good quality seeds in Iraq and to facilitate Iraq’s accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO). What it will actually do is facilitate the penetration of Iraqi agriculture by the likes of Monsanto, Syngenta, Bayer, and Dow Chemical—the corporate giants that control seed trade across the globe. Eliminating competition from farmers is a prerequisite for these companies to establish operations in Iraq, a condition that the new law has achieved. Taking over the first step in the food chain is the next corporate move.

America, R.I.P.

I had 6 days in Las Vegas, during which my access to the Internet was intermittent, and my schedule was packed with technical classes, mostly as a student but for the one course I taught. Also, I didn't read any newspapers, watch any TV, or read any blogs, and found myself more blissful for my ignorance. Through this experiment, I came to understand the red state of mind. The slots are spinning, Rita Rudner's on the big monitor, the cocktail waitresses are wearing short skirts -- what's not to like? For this week, immersed within amazingly geeky tech issues, I could understand how many Americans are going through their lives, focused on their personal affairs, having fun, furthering their careers, and regarding politics as a distasteful, irrelevant sideshow to their lives. God knows, this attitude is seductive. I've been happier this past week nattering on about programming and writing code than I can remember being for four years.

Before the election, a friend declared his intention, if Bush was elected, to "watch out for me and mine", with the implication that the rest of the nation could go to hell as far as he was concerned, and deserve whatever happened to it. I'm starting to understand that attitude, especially when I see this news:

WASHINGTON - Evidence gained by torture can be used by the U.S. military in deciding whether to imprison a foreigner indefinitely at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as an enemy combatant, the government says.

Statements produced under torture have been inadmissible in U.S. courts for about 70 years. But the U.S. military panels reviewing the detention of 550 foreigners as enemy combatants at the U.S. naval base in Cuba are allowed to use such evidence, Principal Deputy Associate Attorney General Brian Boyle acknowledged at a U.S. District Court hearing Thursday.
...
Attorneys for the prisoners argued that some were held solely on evidence gained by torture, which they said violated fundamental fairness and U.S. due process standards. But Boyle argued in a similar hearing Wednesday that the detainees "have no constitutional rights enforceable in this court."

Leon asked whether a detention based solely on evidence gathered by torture would be illegal, because "torture is illegal. We all know that."

Boyle replied that if the military's combatant status review tribunals "determine that evidence of questionable provenance were reliable, nothing in the due process clause (of the Constitution) prohibits them from relying on it."

I write about torture often because I find the subject morally unambiguous. Comments on this post may avoid the hackneyed "but if you have the guy who knows where the nuclear time-bomb is..." Spare me. Spare all of us this ridiculous, Hollywood-induced illusory scenario. Torture is evil. We will "win" nothing through its use, except the contempt of civilized peoples. Meanwhile, the Oligarchy continually argues for its use. Sometimes subtly, sometimes explicitly, sometimes by becoming apologists for torturers.

We will become a mad, pariah nation on this course. A people capable of such heights of nobility and such base crimes will be wondered at as the bones and the blasted shell of what was once a great civilization are picked over by historians of curious character and strong stomachs.

It's not good to be back.

"I Keep Wondering If They'd Be Crazy Enough to Do It"

An excerpt from Baghdad Burning, the latest entry from a female blogger in Iraq:

The situation in Falloojeh is worse than anyone can possibly describe. It has turned into one of those cities you see in your darkest nightmares- broken streets strewn with corpses, crumbling houses and fallen mosques... The worst part is that for the last couple of weeks we've been hearing about the use of chemical weapons inside Falloojeh by the Americans. Today we heard that the delegation from the Iraqi Ministry of Health isn't being allowed into the city, for some reason.

I don't know about the chemical weapons. It's not that I think the American military is above the use of chemical weapons, it's just that I keep wondering if they'd be crazy enough to do it. I keep having flashbacks of that video they showed on tv, the mosque and all the corpses. There was one brief video that showed the same mosque a day before, strewn with many of the same bodies- but some of them were alive. In that video, there's this old man leaning against the wall and there was blood running out of his eyes- almost like he was crying tears of blood. What 'conventional' weaponry makes the eyes bleed? They say that a morgue in Baghdad has received the corpses of citizens in Falloojeh who have died under seemingly mysterious conditions.

Burning Questions

That by which we call napalm
By any other name would burn as bright.

Remember how much hay Republicans made of Clinton's discussion of the meaning of "is"? Boy, that was a perfect example of how liberals try to twist things to make themselves look better.

Well...maybe it's a nonpartisan kind of defect of character. During the initial invasion of Iraq, our military spokespeople were asked if we were using napalm. Oh no, we were told; the military didn't even have any napalm.

Now it turns out that, while such a statement was technically, narrowly true, it wasn't quite...what's the word?...honest. Napalm, firebomb, who knows what these crazy military kids will come up with next?

Do we even have real reporters anymore? Do any of them care that this administration serves them shit sandwich after shit sandwich? I'm really getting tired of this "Thank you, sir, may I have another" attitude of our press.

I took my own advice and broke out my well-worn copy of Dispatches. It's simply an incredible book, and it says a lot about war, the military, the press, and a million other things. This little tidbit jumped out at me.

If a commander told you he thought he had it pretty well under control it was like talking to a pessimist. Most would say that they either had it wrapped up or wound down; "He's all pissed out, Charlie's all pissed out, booger's shot his whole wad," one of them promised me, while in Saigon it would be restructured for briefings, "He no longer maintains in our view capability to mount, execute or sustain a serious offensive action," and a reporter behind me, from the The New York Times no less, laughed and said, "Mount this, Colonel."

Can you imagine that today? Me neither.

Stick It To 'Em

Now that evangelical christians are feeling empowered, we can expect their assaults on the public education system to begin anew. Already, we hear of school boards requiring that "intelligent design" be taught alongside evolution in science classes. Oy. What next? Spontaneous generation?

It's all a bit too much for a professor of biology at Swarthmore College (aka The Kremlin on the Crum), who has devised a nifty sheet of textbook stickers based on the original disclaimer mandated by the school board of Cobb County, Georgia, in 2002, which read:

This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered.

Professor Purrington offers many great alternatives, in a handy format that can actually be printed onto a sheet of stickers. Here's my favorite:

This book mentions Creationism, New Creationism, Scientific Creationism, or Intelligent Design. All of these beliefs rely on the action of a supernatural entity to explain life on earth. Scientists rejected supernatural explanations for life in the 1800s, and still do today.

When all in life seems lost, sarcasm brings me joy.

Lost in America

Antonius, our spiritual leader, called me from Las Vegas last night to tell me that his palatial hotel has no wi-fi, leaving him high and dry Internetwise and whatnot. Thus, he may be silent for the whole week. (Horrors!) However--have no fear--he promises not to lose the nest egg at the tables, and he will regale us with tales of the sandy Sodom and Gomorragh upon his return.

And thus sayeth Antonius: that in his absence, others shall fill the void.

So get crackin', y'all.

Viva Las Vegas

It'll be light posting this week for me, so hopefully the rest of the Boring Diatribe staff will be picking up the slack. I'm in Las Vegas at a professional convention for the week, taking a savage journey to the heart of the American dream. Or, teaching a class on programing, whichever comes first. I'm in the convention center of the MGM Grand Hotel, where the sponsors have thoughtfully provided a wireless lounge. Las Vegas is a strange place.

Nascar Economics

Remember during the election season, when there was all that talk about Nascar dads, and the certainty that the Nascar vote would be for Bush? Well, it was, and I think I've found the reason. I'm not sure we should be bothering with even our simplified explanations of economic issues, when NascarFan82088 is willing to pay $127.51 for a$125 Walmart gift card.

Paying In Blood

Here's your administration, supporting the troops:

DOÑA ANA RANGE, N.M. — Members of a California Army National Guard battalion preparing for deployment to Iraq said this week that they were under strict lockdown and being treated like prisoners rather than soldiers by Army commanders at the remote desert camp where they are training.

More troubling, a number of the soldiers said, is that the training they have received is so poor and equipment shortages so prevalent that they fear their casualty rate will be needlessly high when they arrive in Iraq early next year. "We are going to pay for this in blood," one soldier said.
...
"I feel like an inmate with a weapon," said Cpl. Jajuane Smith, 31, a six-year Guard veteran from Fresno who works for an armored transport company when not on active duty.
...
Military analysts, however, questioned whether the soldiers' concerns could be attributed entirely to the military's attempt to mirror conditions in Iraq. For example, the soldiers say that an ammunition shortage has meant that they have often conducted operations firing blanks.

"The Bush administration had over a year of planning before going to war in Iraq," said Jonathan Turley, a George Washington University law professor who has acted as a defense lawyer in military courts. "An ammunition shortage is not an exercise in tough love."
...
They said they had been told, for example, that the vehicles they would drive in Iraq would not be armored, a common complaint among their counterparts already serving overseas.

They also said the bulk of their training had been basic, such as first aid and rifle work, and not "theater-specific" to Iraq. They are supposed to be able to use night-vision goggles, for instance, because many patrols in Iraq take place in darkness. But one group of 200 soldiers trained for just an hour with 30 pairs of goggles, which they had to pass around quickly, soldiers said.
...
The soldiers also said they were risking courts-martial or other punishment by speaking publicly about their situation. But Staff Sgt. Lorenzo Dominguez, 45, one of the soldiers who allowed his identity to be revealed, said he feared that if nothing changed, men in his platoon would be killed in Iraq.

Dominguez is a father of two — including a 13-month-old son named Reagan, after the former president — and an employee of a mortgage bank in Alta Loma, Calif. A senior squad leader of his platoon, Dominguez said he had been in the National Guard for 20 years.

"Some of us are going to die there, and some of us are going to die unnecessarily because of the lack of training," he said. "So I don't care. Let them court-martial me. I want the American public to know what is going on. My men are guilty of one thing: volunteering to serve their country. And we are at the end of our rope."

Yeah, that's how we want to conduct a war -- making sure the troops are stressed-out, pissed-off, ill-equipped, and badly trained BEFORE they get to the war zone.

We're not going to win like this. So, a modest proposal:

1) Draft the unemployed. Lose your job, go to Iraq.
2) Draft criminals. They can supply their own weapons,(at least clubs, no ammo required) and send them to Iraq.
3) Draft the insane. Nothing scarier to our enemies than a psychotic in a tank.
4) Eat the fallen. Our new troops can save on the cost of their deployment by eating the fallen soldiers from both sides, realizing a further savings benefit since the deliveries of flag-draped coffins to communities nationwide would no longer be necessary.

In future posts, we'll be examining solutiuons to the difficulties of the infirm, the old, the rebellious, the queer and the liberally elitist. Iraq may offer answers to all sorts of domestic problems.

Blame the Tailor

Leader of the free world, looking for a man-date at the APEC summit, apparently dancing a hornpipe with his fly unzipped.

Ignorance is Strength

How much money do schools need to tell children "Don't have sex."? Apparently, they need at least $131 million, to promote the only certain way to avoid sexual transmitted diseases, unwanted pregancies, and a lot of furtive meetings in remote parking areas:

"The only 100 percent way to avoid a car collision is not to drive, but the federal government sure does a lot of advocacy for safety belts," said James Wagoner, president of Advocates for Youth, a group that promotes education about birth control and condom use.

Since children are obedient, I'm sure when they understand that their elders would rather they didn't have sex with one another, underage sex will immediately stop. The problem is just one of proper communication. It's not as if the species is genetically programmed to reproduce or anything. Clearly, the less children hear about sex, the more likely they are to grow up into fine, upstanding Republican voters.

Explains a lot, doesn't it?

Thankful

If you're wealthy, George W. Bush's election gives you a lot to be thankful for. Joe Conason hits the highlights in Salon:

To offset those generous new breaks for Soros, Barbra Streisand and Eminem, the White House wants to eliminate the deductibility of state and local tax payments. For most middle-class taxpayers that will constitute a far larger burden than any benefit from the Bush plan.
...
Although he neglected to discuss any such proposal during the presidential campaign, when he emphasized his commitment to expand health coverage, Bush reportedly plans to eliminate corporate deductions for health insurance coverage. With company health plans already under tremendous pressure from increasing costs, the elimination of deductibility will make insurance unaffordable for most companies (and will certainly give all employers an excuse for eliminating those benefits). That will leave wage and salary earners to fend for themselves against the big private insurers.
...
According to the Washington Post, Bush and his advisers have finally figured out how to pay for the trillion-dollar cost of privatizing the system. They're just going to ignore it by taking the costs "off-budget." Or, as one of the plan's proponents at the Cato Institute explained, the White House economists will use "creative accounting" to hide enormous holes in future budgets.
...
So smile again, a bit sardonically, as you sum up what middle-class Americans, red and blue, can expect as the second Bush regime begins: Higher taxes, exploding deficits and the end of health coverage as we know it.

There's just so much to be thankful for, isn't there?

I'm sure the citizens of the United States are going to have all sorts of fun "bargaining" with enormous insurance companies for "fair" (stop it, you're killing me) health insurance rates, which we'll all be paying for out of our incredible shrinking paychecks as the federal government chews into our earnings to help finance permanent tax cuts for the plutocracy.

When Bush talks about an ownership society, what he's talking about is the happy day when he and his cronies own society. 59 million of you just gave away the store. Remember that as you become part of the underclass, working to support a tiny, viciously uncaring minority that's most interested in bleeding you white before starting in on your children to finance and fight its bloody foreign adventures.

I hope everyone had a Happy Thanksgiving. Start making your list of things to be thankful for next year so you can start crossing them off as we begin our descent into darkness.

Another Private Sector Triumph

Or not:

A new study commissioned by the Department of Education, which compares the achievement of students in charter schools with those attending traditional public schools in five states, has concluded that the charter schools were less likely to meet state performance standards.

In Texas, for instance, the study found that 98 percent of public schools met state performance requirements two years ago, but that only 66 percent of the charter schools did. Even when adjusted for race and poverty, the study said, the charter schools fell short more frequently by a statistically significant amount.
...
"In five case-study states, charter schools are less likely to meet state performance standards than traditional public schools," the report said. Those states, Texas, Colorado, Illinois, Massachusetts and North Carolina, all have made significant public investments in charter schools.

The report's finding appears to present a new complication for the Bush administration as it seeks to carry out the No Child Left Behind law, which says that public schools failing to meet achievement objectives over several years may be converted into charter schools.

Pop Quiz:

The mission of a private sector school management firm is to...
a) Educate Children
b) Maximize Shareholder Value

The mission of a private medical insurer is to...
a) Provide Health Care
b) Maximize Shareholder Value

I could keep going, but you get the point. There are some missions that are essential to society, and need to be accomplished whether or not anyone can make a profit on it. Education is one of them. You only get a second chance on education on a macro scale, and while you're fooling around on that level, thousands of children get cheated of a decent education and you get an electorate that can't make decisions based on reason.

Which, of course, is the real point.

Staying Single

I'm hoping Reductio will also weigh in on this idea, since this is more up his alley of expertise, but it's clear to me that the Republicans continue their determined march away from reality:

Republican budget writers say they may have found a way to cut the federal deficit even if they borrow hundreds of billions more to overhaul the Social Security system: Don't count all that new borrowing.

As they lay the groundwork for what will probably be a controversial fight over Social Security, Republican lawmakers and the Bush administration are examining a number of accounting strategies that would allow the expensive transition to a partially privatized Social Security system without -- at least on paper -- expanding the country's record annual budget deficits. The strategies include, for example, moving the costs of Social Security reform "off-budget" so they are not counted against the government's yearly shortfall.

Well, that was easy. Boring Diatribe will shortly be informing its credit-rating agency that our various debts and obligations shouldn't be counted because -- well, just because we say so, that's why.

This nonsense will go on just long enough to achieve calamity, as a certain chief economist with Morgan Stanley had occasion to remark recently (thanks, Atrios):

Stephen Roach, the chief economist at investment banking giant Morgan Stanley, has a public reputation for being bearish.

But you should hear what he's saying in private.
Roach met select groups of fund managers downtown last week, including a group at Fidelity.
His prediction: America has no better than a 10 percent chance of avoiding economic ``armageddon.''

Press were not allowed into the meetings. But the Herald has obtained a copy of Roach's presentation. A stunned source who was at one meeting said, ``it struck me how extreme he was - much more, it seemed to me, than in public.''

Roach sees a 30 percent chance of a slump soon and a 60 percent chance that ``we'll muddle through for a while and delay the eventual armageddon.''

The chance we'll get through OK: one in 10. Maybe.

Hell, at least while we're all starving to death, the queers won't be married. In fact, put that on America's headstone:
"At Least The Queers Stayed Single."

And So It Begins...

Contrary to what many liberals believe, the Bush administration will not execute its assault on reproductive rights out in the open, where there might be actual political repurcussions. No, they'll simply use legislative tricks to sneak provisions in under the radar, kinda like this.

As the father of a 5-week-old daughter, I find myself suddenly hyper-attuned to these issues. Vigilance will be the key.

On a not unrelated note, perhaps this will be another thing to push Olympia Snowe over to the light.

Betrayal

I'm going to out myself this far to readers unfamiliar with my back story: I live in Vermont. You'll need to know that to understand how nauseated I feel at this news:

WASHINGTON, Nov. 17 - President Bush's nominee for attorney general, Alberto R. Gonzales, was all but guaranteed Senate confirmation today when a leading Democrat expressed fondness for the nominee and signaled that he would not stand in his way.

"I like him," Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, the leading Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said today after a closed meeting with Mr. Gonzales, whom he has known as White House counsel.

"I said jokingly that the president, with the majority he has in the Senate, could have sent up Attila the Hun and got him confirmed," Mr. Leahy said. "But Judge Gonzales is no Attila the Hun; he's far from that, and he's a more uniting figure."

No, Attila the Hun was a conqueror. Alberto Gonzales is a torturer.

Contact this Senator who used to be a hero of mine and tell him what you think of moral midgets who "like" those who justify torture: Senator Leahy

This is the last straw for me.

The Democrats can go fuck themselves.
It's the only thing they're good at.

Tax Resistance

Rex Saxi wrote in and asked us to comment on employing tax resistance to send a message to the Maximum Leader. We confess it's a subject that we haven't explored thoroughly, but these folks have some ideas, and so does this writer. Being at heart a soak-the-rich and living-wage sort of publication, our stance is that tax resistance should be accomplish within the boundaries of the law, lest the tattered social contract begin to fray further. This is no easy task -- the resister may have to manage his or her income to remain below the poverty line -- not an inviting prospect for those capable of earning more, and living more comfortably.

However, another form of tax resistance could involve heavy charitable contributions to praiseworthy causes helping to fill the gaps compassionate conservatism fails to acknowledge. If you choose this course, research it well, obtain professional advice, and divert your capital where it will do the most good.

Meanwhile, work to encourage Federalism. The most telling tax resistance may come from states demanding an end to unfunded federal mandates and a closer match of federal tax revenue funds collected and redistributed to the contributing states.

A Piece of Our Action

The United States brings the stellar successes of its South American War on Drugs to Afghanistan, with similar results:

KABUL, Afghanistan, Nov. 18 - Poppy cultivation in Afghanistan, the source of most of the opium and heroin on Europe's streets, was up sharply this year, reaching the highest levels in the country's history and in the world, the United Nations announced on Thursday.

"In Afghanistan, drugs are now a clear and present danger," said Antonio Maria Costa, director of the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime, on the release of the 2004 Afghanistan opium survey. "The fear that Afghanistan might degenerate into a narco-state is becoming a reality."

So glad we're taking seriously the War on Terrorism:

If the drug problem persists, "the political and military successes of the last three years will be lost," Mr. Costa said in a preface to the report. There are indications that Al Qaeda and the Taliban are profiting from the Afghan trade, the report said.

At this rate, soon the Afghanis will figure out that they can purchase a couple dozen Congressman and the executive branch for a few paltry millions and start running the joint.

Doodling

During those long, boring cabinet meetings, do you think the nominee for the Secretary of State writes "Condoleezza Bush" over and over again on her legal pad?

Philadelphia to Darwin: Drop Dead

Yup, another one:

"Because Darwin's theory is a theory, it is still being tested as new evidence is discovered," the statement said. "Gaps in the theory exist for which there is no evidence."

We at Boring Diatribe wish to remind the Dover school district that Newton's Theory of Gravitation is a theory, and encourage the study of alternative theories by the members of the Dover school board, preferably from a great height.

Understanding Iran

The folks over a Needlenose have a handy pictorial reference for grasping the Axis of Evil.

Evildoers Beware!

Congress is going to take away your fast-forward button:

A new bill before Congress may eventually have DVD-viewers thinking twice before fast-forwarding through the ads and previews.

The proposed legislation would make fast-forwarding through those ads illegal -- not only in theaters, but also at home, NBC News reported.

Direct Democracy

John Kerry's asking that we, the people, co-sponsor a health care bill to cover all children in the United States. Go sign the petition.

Austerity

...for everyone:

WASHINGTON - Republicans whisked a $388 billion spending bill through the House on Saturday, a mammoth measure that underscores the dominance of deficit politics by curbing dollars for everything from education to environmental cleanups.

Except, of course, for Our Ruler, whose sycophants in Congress believe the Maximum Leader needs to have a little something included in the same budget that shortchanges the rest of the country:

A potential boon for Bush himself, $2 million for the government to try buying back the presidential yacht Sequoia. The boat was sold three decades ago, though its current owners say the yacht is not for sale.

Citizens go begging while the sanguine Emperor whiles away his time on fabulous cruises. It's hard to imagine a better metaphor for Republican rule.

Jargon

Working in a profession awash in jargon, I find it hilarious when I run into an opaque collection of terms in someone else's story:

If I may relate a piece of extraordinarily good luck that has nothing to do with anything, let me subject you all to the tale of the Best Poker Hand Ever. I was playing some Texas hold 'em last not and get dealt a pair of pocket sevens. Not such a hot hand, but with no pre-flop raising and a large table, I figured why not see the flop. The three cards come down -- 7, 7, Queen. I'm in luck. Even better, two other players each had one Queen in the pocket. On the turn, the going gets really good -- down comes the fourth Queen. The flop was shit, but there I sat holding the nuts with two other players who each thought they had a winning hand of three Queens. Nobody ever worries about the chance that someone has four of a kind, especially because seeing the flop with pocket sevens was a pretty questionable move. I'm all in and, naturally enough, I clean up. If only we didn't play with extremely low stakes, I would now be a wealthy man.

I know, I know. You all watch poker on TV now, and your 13-year-old is bluffing you out of twice his allowance every week, so maybe this story makes sense to you, but commonly having the experience of altering my language to convey complex technical issues in layman's terms makes me susceptible to finding this sort of thing funny. Yes, I'm easily amused. Don't worry Matt, we all still love you.

The Rule of Law

Hey, remember when Nixon ran on a "law and order" platform? Yeah, nobody else in the Republican Party can, either:

WASHINGTON -- "And I want to say to you bluntly: You live today with the most corrupt congressional leadership we have seen in the United States in the 20th century. You have to go back to the Gilded Age of the 1870s and 1880s to have anything comparable (to) that we've lived through."
...
The words were spoken in February 1992 by a House Republican named Newt Gingrich. Gingrich was then building the momentum that led to the historic Republican takeover of Congress two years later. The GOP modestly called what it was up to a "revolution."
...
What's surprising...

Hardly.

...is how shameless House Republicans were on Wednesday in casting aside their 11-year old rule requiring a member of their leadership to step aside temporarily if he or she came under indictment.

The repeal might be called the Tom DeLay Protection Act of 2004. DeLay, the House Majority Leader, is under investigation by Ronnie Earle, the district attorney in Texas' Travis County. Earle, who is a Democrat, is investigating charges that corporate money was used illegally to help Republicans win Texas legislative races in 2002. Republican victories that year paved the way for changes in the state's congressional district lines that helped Republicans win additional seats in Texas this year, solidifying their hold on power.
...
Recall how Republicans dismissed any and all who charged that the investigations of President Bill Clinton by special prosecutor Ken Starr were politically motivated. Ah, but those were investigations of a shady Democrat by a distinguished Republican. When a Democrat is investigating a Republican, it can only be about politics. Is that clear?

Rep. Henry Bonilla, the Texas Republican who sponsored the resolution to protect DeLay, said it was designed to protect against "crackpot" prosecutors whose indictments might get in the way of the ability of House Republicans to choose their own leaders. Can't let a little thing like an indictment get in the way of the sovereignty of House Republicans, can we?

"Attorneys tell me you can be indicted for just about anything in this country," said Bonilla. Remember the old days during the Clinton impeachment when Republicans went on and on about the importance of "the rule of law?" Oh well.

Join the Republicans, because Might is Right.

Turning the Corner

Our victory in Falluja has apparently broken the back of the Iraqi insurgency:

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- Baghdad exploded in violence Saturday, as insurgents attacked a U.S. patrol and a police station, assassinated four government employees and detonated several bombs. One American soldier was killed and nine were wounded during clashes that also left three Iraqi troops and a police officer dead.

Some of the heaviest violence came in Azamiyah, a largely Sunni Arab district of Baghdad where a day earlier U.S. troops raided the capital's main Sunni mosque. Shops were in flames, and a U.S. Humvee burned, with the body of what appeared to be its driver inside.

U.S. forces and insurgents also battled in the Sunni Triangle city of Ramadi, where clashes have been seen almost daily. Nine Iraqis were killed and five wounded in Saturday's fighting, hospital officials said.

Or, you know, maybe not.

Resistance

Here's one place to start:

United States foreign policy is a major reason Naylor himself advocates secession.
“It just really bothers me paying my taxes to annihilate innocent people in Iraq and Afghanistan or anywhere else that Bush or Clinton or whoever decides they want to beat up on,” he says. “I think our foreign policy is just corrupt to the core.”

More detail here.

Cry Havoc

Despite the strains on the United States military,

The Army has encountered resistance from more than 2,000 former soldiers it has ordered back to military work, complicating its efforts to fill gaps in the regular troops.

Many of these former soldiers - some of whom say they have not trained, held a gun, worn a uniform or even gone for a jog in years - object to being sent to Iraq and Afghanistan now, after they thought they were through with life on active duty.

despite unfinished business in Iraq,

The unrelenting wave of assaults in the Sunni-dominated parts of the country indicate that the attack on Falluja could have inflamed Sunni resentment against the American presence. American and Iraqi officials have found it impossible in the 19 months since the invasion to persuade hostile Sunni Arabs to lay down their arms and engage in the emerging political system.

it seems Our Rulers can't wait to adventure in Iran, even trotting out professional Lame Duck Fig Leaf Colin Powell to lay the groundwork:

``We believe we are on very, very solid ground in pointing to a clandestine effort by Iran to develop weapons of mass destruction and their delivery systems,'' Adam Ereli, a State Department spokesman, told reporters.

The Washington Post cited unidentified U.S. officials as saying the information, made public by Secretary of State Colin Powell, was unverified and based on a single ``walk-in'' source. Ereli said he would not discuss intelligence.

The refusal to discuss intelligence has become a sort of shibboleth for Our Rulers, hasn't it? I suppose it's difficult to discuss anything you don't know much about, or have much of, for that matter. Refresh my memory: didn't someone just invade some country on the basis of faulty intelligence? Don't tell me, it's right on the tip of my tongue.

Well, whoever it was, I'm sure it turned out all right.

Now that milquetoast Powell is out, it's clear that the real men have taken over:

One senior British official says: “Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran.” [Newsweek, 8/11/02] Later in the year, Bush's influential advisor Richard Perle states, “No stages. This is total war. We are fighting a variety of enemies. There are lots of them out there. All this talk about first we are going to do Afghanistan, then we will do Iraq … this is entirely the wrong way to go about it. If we just let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely and we don't try to piece together clever diplomacy, but just wage a total war … our children will sing great songs about us years from now.” [New Statesman, 12/16/02] In February 2003, US Undersecretary of State John Bolton says in meetings with Israeli officials that he has no doubt America will attack Iraq, and that it will be necessary to deal with threats from Syria, Iran and North Korea afterward.

At least we'll have more pictures like these to look forward to, along with all those great songs our dismembered children will be singing about us. Thanks to Rex Saxi for locating the photographs.

Once More, Dear Friends, Unto The Breach

Although other obligations have also intervened, the sheer volume of evil news momentarily daunted even the most Boring instincts of this Diatribe. However, bloody but unbowed, we return to the fray. We're going to continue news commentary, but we're also going to begin a couple of new types of post. A discussion around the Diatribe's watercooler has led us to the conclusion that the relentless drumbeat of bad news and sarcasm may eventually wither the souls of even our determined staff, so we'll be sprinkling in some cultural leavening now and again, to remind everyone of the good bits of America-that-was-and-shall-be-again. In addition, and more in line with our central mission, we're going to venture an essay or three on the policies, philosophies, and methods of Opposition.

A recent series of conversations with Reductio has put us in mind of the word "obstruction", often bandied about by Our Rulers when it appears some vestige of Responsible Government still glimmers in the heart of a lawmaker or public official. Like "liberal" before it, a word with a proud history, "obstructionist" is sometimes loaded into the media's chamber and fired with all the discrimination of a drunken Bush supporter showing off his new automatic weapon. As is typical of the breed, the elected federal Don't-Hurt-Me-Crats employ all manner of rhetorical dodges to avoid the taint of the "obstructionist" stink bomb whenever it's lobbed into the political conversation, and, as many such choices their party has made for the last four years, it is dead wrong.

When hundreds of thousands of soldiers stood in opposition to the spread of fascism in World War II, undoubtedly the Axis Powers considered those soldiers "obstructionist". When police officers thwart crime, no doubt criminals conceive of them as "obstructionist". If the opposition to Our Rulers, who seek to dismantle, by inches and leaps, the very structure of modernity is obstructionist, then count this blog and its sympathetic readers as an obstacle to the progress of the 14th century into the 21st.

So, we urge you to resist Our Rulers at every opportunity, and we urge you to find the ears within the government who will help. Do not compromise. Our Rulers are not governing, they are exploiting. They are a race of locusts, determined to consume the fat, then the substance, then the bones of the land and its people, and they will not stop until the corpse has been utterly devoured. You cannot negotiate with a swarm of mindless, hungry insects, and you cannot negotiate with the rapacious appetites of Our Rulers. Oppose, obstruct, resist, because that is the only language they understand. Reason and logic are useless in this struggle. They have already abandoned that field for the enticements of naked power. Very well. Hold your representatives to the highest standard of obstruction: let Our Rulers make no change with complicity of the Opposition. Offer alternatives. Do not accept their watery compromises. They will be undone in any case.

Make them roll over us in tanks. Make them fight for every bloody inch of territory, real and philosophical. Make their victories costly. We have reality, they have ideology. They cannot sustain themselves unless we help them. In the upcoming months, we're going to talk about how to oppose Our Rulers, how to find the chinks in their defenses, and how to turn their own power, paranoia and insularity against them. And we're going to be Boring as hell while we're doing it.

Friends, Foes, and Frogs

This report on Americans' opinions of our allies and enemies is so mind-numbingly depressing that it has knocked the snark right out of me. Just go read it and weep.

With Dems Like These...

Apparently eager to show that he, for one, welcomes his new ant Republican overlords, Representative Sylvestre Reyes (D-TX) told the House Armed Services Committee that we should rethink our policy of embedding reporters with the military in light of the video showing an American soldier shooting a wounded and unarmed Iraqi insurgent. Comparing combat to a football game, Reyes argued that "we don't want to know everything that's going on on the field." But, says the enlightened congressman, this isn't a question of censorship. No, no, no. It's just that "We should not be providing the Al-Jazeera the kind of propaganda they've had the last couple of three days." I guess that it doesn't matter if the propaganda is, you know, true and whatnot.

Strangely enough, the freaking miltary disagrees. The AP quotes one Marine Corps commandant General Michael Hagee, who thinks that the embeds are doing a good job of informing the American public "what these great young Americans are doing over there."

Um...maybe it's just me, but I do want to know what's going on on the field. However, it's heartening to see our Democratic representatives showing they can be such team players. And by "team players," of course, I mean "waterboys." This is gonna be a fun four years.

For what it's worth, I don't think anyone should be calling for that soldier in the video to be prosecuted. I think we should be demanding that he gets psychologial counselling. And can I humbly suggest that we force every American to read Michael Herr's Dispatches by Christmas?

Lab Rats

The best way to test a drug is to make sure a lot of unsuspecting "people" ingest it, and loot them while you do. At least, that's the FDA's theory:

In the past four years, the Food and Drug Administration has taken a noticeably less aggressive approach toward policing drugs that cause harmful side effects, records show, leading some lawmakers, academics and consumer advocates to complain that the agency is focusing more on bolstering the pharmaceutical industry than protecting public health.

We're, of course, shocked that the Bush administration's primary aim at the FDA is to bolster the profits of pharmaceutical companies. It's not as if that were a pattern, or anything:

WASHINGTON — An emerging prescription drug benefit for retirees represents a victory for drug companies and their lobbyists, who have spent heavily to keep Republicans in control of Congress.
...
But pharmaceutical-makers already have averted what they feared most: a single new bloc of 40 million consumers with the market power to dramatically drive down prescription prices — and industry profits. Both the House and Senate versions of the bill bar the government from getting involved in price negotiations.

At least the faith-based government is resolute in the face of contrary facts:

The decrease in FDA enforcement has come despite a steadily rising number of reports of potentially harmful side effects from approved drugs. From 1996 to 2004, the annual number of these "adverse events" almost doubled.

Fox, meet the Republican-controlled henhouse:

Concerns about the FDA's safety monitoring have been growing ever since Congress required in 1992 that the industry assume a significant share of the costs of evaluating new drugs. These "user fees" now pay for more than half of CDER's annual budget of almost $500 million, and the percentage is growing steadily.
...
The perception that the FDA has tilted from its public health mandate toward a focus on industry needs has been reinforced for some in Congress by court cases in which the agency intervened on the side of drug and medical device makers sued by patients claiming they were harmed.

Government aligning with business interests against the people? Where have we heard that idea before?

As the 1983 American Heritage Dictionary noted, fascism is: "A system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism."

Camo Day, anyone?

Homo Training Nixed in the Nick of Time

Lest you think that Election Day slaked the thirst for bigotry of evangelical Christians, here comes the news out of Spurger, Texas:

A homecoming tradition in which boys dress like girls and vice versa in a tiny Texas school district won't be held Wednesday after a parent complained about what she regarded as the event's homosexual overtones...."TWIRP Day," which stands for "The Woman Is Requested to Pay," was hosted by Spurger schools for years during Homecoming Week — to give boys and girls a chance to reverse social roles and let older girls invite boys on dates, open doors and pay for sodas.

Cats and dogs living together, what an outrage! To think that our schools would promote such ungodly behavior offends your average evan to the maggot-filled core. Cuz, you know, this kind of gender-role tomfoolery is the moral equivalent of a gateway drug, as explained by Delana Davies, the complaintant:

"It's like experimenting with drugs," Davies said. "You just keep playing with it and it becomes customary. ... If it's OK to dress like a girl today, then why is it not OK in the future?"

Now, if you were making this whole thing up as a joke to ridicule Republicans, what would you use to replace TWIRP day? Hold that thought because here's the school's actual solution:

As a substitute for "TWIRP Day," the two schools, an elementary and high school, decided to hold "Camo Day" — with black boots and Army camouflage to be worn by everyone who wants to participate.

As my my friend Larry said, "Apparently no one in Spurger thought to suggest "Brown Shirt Day.""

If You're Not The Lead Dog...

...at least you can whine, bare your throat and hope the pack leader doesn't tear you a new one, but I wouldn't count on it. True to form, the Don't-Hurt-Me-Crats have elected a collaborator as Senate Minority Leader. Harry Reid's an anti-Roe v. Wade, anti-flag-burning-amendment-supporting Mormon who's about as close to a Republican as you can get without being Zell "Pistols at Dawn" Miller.

Senator Harry Reid of Nevada was elected the Senate's minority leader today and vowed to strive for good working relationships with President Bush and Republican lawmakers.

No doubt.

I'm sure Mr. Reid would strive for a close working relationship with Satan, since "You don't have to shout to prove you love America."

No, Harry, you don't. But sometimes you have to shout when your government is slaughtering thousands of people in an immoral war that's costing the United States its honor and security every single day.

Sometimes you have to shout when a war criminal is proposed for the office of Attorney General, or a base incompetent is nominated to the office of Secretary of State.

But you won't do that, Harry. No, I'm sure you'll accommodate, acquiesce, and find common ground with manifest evil whenever you can, thinking that, someday, the Devil will return the favor.

Dance on, Harry. Ignore the smell of brimstone. It's probably only a burning nation.

Fun, Firearms, and Faith

Okay, I'll admit it. I'm a member of the East Coast Liberal Elite. Fine. When do I get my free hair shirt?

However, I think that the Democrats have gotten this whole national-election thing wrong in some fundamental ways. Perhaps it's my rural New Hampshire roots or my frequent contact with red-staters, but I got me some idears about how to build a Presidential candidate who will play in the less-elite provinces of this great land of ours.

1. The Associative Property: Please, I beg of you, can we find a candidate who is even remotely likable? Don't get me wrong: Kerry is a damn good man. But you know who else was a good man—nay, an even better man? Mike Dukakis. And look where that got him. Let's agree right now not to put forth a candidate who inspires a person to create a Web site like this one. Our candidate needn't be over-the-top regular-guyish, like our Dobie Gillis-like president. But he also shouldn't be straight out of an episode of "Dynasty" or an Ivy League supper club.

2. Blood Work: If, as the sage Peggy Noonan avers, this election came down to "God, gays, and guns," it is the last of this trio that offers us the best chance of peeling votes away from Team Jesusland. You see, despite my hard-earned Ted Kennedy School of Government credentials, I own guns and enjoy shooting some of God's creatures and then eating them. And I ain't alone. But the average Nebraska hunter does not really believe that people like me exist. In his mind, the words "Democrats" and "guns" are always separated by "want to take away my." That's why Kerry's little goose hunt was the object of much derision. And that's why a lot of voters who would agree with Democrats on many issues—the environment, the economy, etc.—still vote Republican. If we had a candidate who enjoyed killing both beasts and fowl—and if we had the blood-soaked, tongue-lolling photos to prove it—you'd start to see the Dem's environmental agenda gaining some currency out there amongst the peeps. A huge population votes Republican on pro-hunting issues alone. They don't care about abortion, homosexuals, or prayer in schools. We can talk to those people. Look what happened in Montana.

3. God on OUR Side: Democrats have allowed the Christian Right to boil an entire belief system down to the twin pillars of anti-choice and defense of marriage. How many times did Jesus mention abortion and homosexuality in the New Testament? You guessed it: zero. To paraphrase that great philosopher Bono, The Christian Right stole this religion from Jesus; we’re stealing it back. The new pastor at a local Congregationalist church here in blueville wrote this in the local paper:

According to many exit polls in largely Republican states, voters apparently rated concerns over "moral values" as an overriding concern. This appears to center on the defense of marriage (about which both candidates shared a nearly equal position) with the legality of abortion and stem cell research in tow. As a Christian, I readily affirm that these topics demand faithful reflection and debate. But how, I wonder, did these particular values float to the top? Why aren't Christian supporters of the president equally passionate, at the very least, about the explicit values of Jesus as they are about heterosexual marriage?

Jesus consistently stands in solidarity with the poor, the marginalized and the oppressed. Shouldn't all who follow Jesus similarly advocate for the needs of low-income people and those who have historically been denied a fair shake in our society? Shouldn't we support leaders who seek to bridge the gap between the haves and have-nots?…

God has no national preferences. The body of Christ is worldwide. Do we look for leaders who reach out to global partners to confront the struggles that affect all of God's children? Do we commit the heresy of imagining God wrapped in an American flag, protecting American interests? Could it be that the above are not understood or vigorously defended as "traditional values" because the Christian majority has no real tradition to speak of in pursuing them? I hope not, and yet I fear that this is the case. In the end, this is has nothing to do with words like conservative or liberal and everything to do with how faithfully and fully we follow the values of Jesus.

How about our candidate talks explicitly about this version of Jesus on the campaign trail? Perhaps we ought to throw up revival tents all across Red America and preach this version of the gospel. Sure, the hardliners won’t listen, but at least more-thoughtful Christians will have something to consider.

These three things would go a long way toward opening the eyes and ears of many who voted Republican this time around.

The Border Burqa

If you regularly follow the news, you know that the Bush administration and Nobel Prize winners don't get along very well, but usually the disagreement involves disputed notions, such as whether the Earth revolves around the Sun or vice versa. However, the latest dispute involves a female Iranian author, Shirin Ebadi, a foot soldier in the real march of freedom, who the Treasury Department is delighted to trip up:

I have wanted to tell the story of how women in Islamic countries, even one run by a theocratic regime as in Iran, can be active politically and professionally. It is my impression, based on the conversations I have had during my travels in the United States and Europe, that such a book would be a welcome addition to the debate about Islam and the West.

Such charming naivete.

So I was surprised and angered when I learned that regulations in the United States make it nearly impossible for me to write a book for Americans. Despite federal laws that say that American trade embargoes may not restrict the free flow of information, the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control continues to regulate the import of books from Iran, Cuba and other countries. In order to skirt the laws protecting the flow of information, the government prohibits publishing "materials not fully created and in existence." Therefore, I could publish my memoir in the United States, but it would be illegal for an American literary agent, publisher, editor or translator to help me.

Publish anything you want in America, but you'd better do it without any Americans participating. That's us, free people, yesiree, unable to PUBLISH A BOOK WITHOUT FEAR OF PROSECUTION.

Everybody check their money again. Does it still say "United States of America"?

The Fig Leaf Departs

Here at Boring Diatribe, we're starting to get a handle on the Bush administration's attitude toward cabinet appointees, and, almost certainly, people in general. People, in the administration's view, are not sentient beings with opinions, needs, desires, ambitions and failings. These are traits shared only in private within the tight circle of those they consider "people". The remainder of the upright populace are merely instruments for the exercise of power.

Which brings us to the recent cabinet resignations. John Ashcroft was useful once as a sop to the American Taliban. (This latter group was once known as the Christian Right, until they expressed dissatisfaction with that label. I hope they enjoy the new nomenclature that we're using in our editorial meetings. But we digress.) Now that Bush the Lesser can't run again for president, Ashcroft's liability as a boob-crazed, ineffective US Attorney General with a morbid fear of calico cats became fully manifest, and with a genuine war criminal available for the Torturer General slot, it was time to show Mr. Ashcroft the door. Unfortunately for this addled product of far too many revival tents, he managed to outlive his usefulness to power.

Can Colin Powell be far behind? The answer is no. And, frankly, good riddance to a good soldier in a position that required a leader. Mr. Powell put his skills, knowledge, credibility and integrity in the service of eradicating the precepts that once made this country admirable. He sat before the United Nations, before the entire world, and regurgitated propaganda concerning phantom weapons programs in Iraq that served to hoodwink the credulous, and appall the informed. Under his watch, the State Department became an appendix to the Department of Defense, and he did nothing tangible to slow his administration's rush to an immoral war on false pretenses. He did his part as a useful tool, a gun with one round. The round was fired, and since then, he has held the status within the administration of an oddly-shaped hammer convenient for offering imperfect lessons to the occasional nail.

Powell's loyalty to his superiors (term used loosely) set askew his moral compass, and it will require years for him to regain his once unimpeachable reputation as a nonpartisan. Powell may begin on the lecture circuit by explaining to bored audiences how he sold his soul so cheaply to the Devil.

New Boring Staffers

A quick reminder for all our readers to start checking the "posted by" line at the bottom of our Diatribes. We have two new members of the Diatribe, in addition to our usual posters Antonius and Reductio. We expect our new writers will become especially Boring as the Long Darkness closes over America.

Please welcome Amangler and Eliani into your browser. We hope you enjoy their thoughts on King George II, his subjects, and what's going on beyond the border of this verdant shore, in this best of all possible worlds.

Gimme that Old-Time Religion

One of the scare tactics used against JFK during the 1960 campaign was that, as a Catholic, he would have amongst his weaponry an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope that would supersede his loyalty to his country. Protestants in the American Heartland were fed tales in which JFK was painted as Guy Fawkes with a great haircut and a Harvard diploma. Lucky for us, the zombie vote in Chicago kept that narrative from working. But just barely. (Thanks Mayor Daley!)

There's been a lot of talk since November 3 arguing that Democrats need to appeal more to the evangelical Christian voter. Nah. Instead, we should use a version of their own circa-1960 medicine to attack their one-track views. The argument is easy to make: just substitute words such as "anti-choice" and "homophobia" for "pope" in the previous example. It sounds a little like this:

The Christian Right is so fanatically devoted to the issues of anti-choice and "marriage protection" that they have allowed the Republicans to rape and pillage the public treasury, dismantle the social-service infrastructure (which is based on all that "love the poor" twaddle that Jesus was always going on about), tell lie after lie after lie, and take us to war on false premises. And that's just the short list of their crimes. Anti-choice Christians are so bent on getting their way that they are willing to hurt the country to achieve their narrow goals. You see, people, these things are ANTI-American.

It's the old God-is-blind-Ray-Charles-is-blind-Ray-Charles-is-God jujitsu, only this one is true!

Let's put the Dobsons, Falwells, and Robertsons on the defensive for awhile. I want to see how they defend these reality-based nightmares to their congregations when the facts and numbers have been served on a platter to the public. It will be like watching the Reverend Bob Tilton explain on national TV why he needed a 50-foot yacht. ("My doctor said that I couldn't play golf, that the stress of chasing that little white ball would kill me!")

We'll need the media's help, of course, and the only way to accomplish this is for us to do all the work for them. We need to start packaging the news ourselves. We can't count on the idiots in charge of newspapers, TV, and radio to do anything right. They've grown too fat and lazy.

But we've gotta stop treating the Christian Right with kid gloves. Sure, when we attack, we'll be called athiests. So what? They call us worse now.

Homeland Insecurity - Part Tres

When I want your opinion, I'll tell you what it is:

WASHINGTON -- The White House has ordered the new CIA director, Porter Goss, to purge the agency of officers believed to have been disloyal to President George W. Bush or of leaking damaging information to the media about the conduct of the Iraq war and the hunt for Osama bin Laden, according to knowledgeable sources.

"The agency is being purged on instructions from the White House," said a former senior CIA official who maintains close ties to both the agency and to the White House. "Goss was given instructions ... to get rid of those soft leakers and liberal Democrats. The CIA is looked on by the White House as a hotbed of liberals and people who have been obstructing the president's agenda."

Raise your hand if you ever considered the CIA (once headed by George H. W, Bush) a "hotbed of liberals".

I'm finally getting a handle on the definition of "liberal": it's anyone who presents inconvenient facts to public servants and the American people. Tell me what I want to hear, or you're gone. At least, we can be comforted that the same approach worked well for Saddamm Hussein:

From interviews with Iraqi scientists and other sources, he said, his team learned that sometime around 1997 and 1998, Iraq plunged into what he called a ``vortex of corruption,'' when government activities began to spin out of control because an increasingly isolated and fantasy-driven Saddam Hussein had insisted on personally authorizing major projects without input from others.

After the onset of this ``dark ages,'' Dr. Kay said, Iraqi scientists realized they could go directly to Mr. Hussein and present fanciful plans for weapons programs, and receive approval and large amounts of money. Whatever was left of an effective weapons capability, he said, was largely subsumed into corrupt money-raising schemes by scientists skilled in the arts of lying and surviving in a fevered police state.

``The whole thing shifted from directed programs to a corrupted process,'' Dr. Kay said. ``The regime was no longer in control; it was like a death spiral. Saddam was self-directing projects that were not vetted by anyone else. The scientists were able to fake programs.''

. Similarities to a missile defense system are purely coincidental. Whatever it takes to keep the Maximum Leader happy and not purging.

Victory Conditions

If you can't win without committing war crimes, maybe it's time to rethink your strategy:

Human rights experts said Friday that American soldiers might have committed a war crime on Thursday when they sent fleeing Iraqi civilians back into Fallujah.

Citing several articles of the Geneva Conventions, the experts said recognized laws of war require military forces to protect civilians as refugees and forbid returning them to a combat zone.

"This is highly problematical conduct in terms of exposing people to grave danger by returning them to an area where fighting is going on," said Jordan Paust, a law professor at the University of Houston and a former Army prosecutor.

James Ross, senior legal adviser to Human Rights Watch, said, "If that's what happened, it would be a war crime."

A stream of refugees, about 300 men, women and children, were detained by American soldiers as they left southern Fallujah by car and on foot. The women and children were allowed to proceed. The men were tested for any residues left by the handling of explosives. All tested negative, but they were sent back.

If the president, in his role as commander-in-chief of the armed forces, can order the suspension of the Geneva Conventions at will, then the Conventions have no meaning. I had wondered, years back, how anyone could be opposed to the United States joining the International Criminal Court. I mean, wouldn't American behavior be above reproach? How wrong I was.

The Phrase You're Groping For...

... is "checks and balances":

Federal judges are jeopardizing national security by issuing rulings contradictory to President Bush's decisions on America's obligations under international treaties and agreements, Attorney General John Ashcroft said Friday.

In his first remarks since his resignation was announced Tuesday, Ashcroft forcefully denounced what he called "a profoundly disturbing trend" among some judges to interfere in the president's constitutional authority to make decisions during war.

"The danger I see here is that intrusive judicial oversight and second-guessing of presidential determinations in these critical areas can put at risk the very security of our nation in a time of war," Ashcroft said in a speech to the Federalist Society, a conservative lawyers' group.

When federal judges block the exercise of naked power by the executive branch of the federal government, there's always the danger that democracy and the rule of law might break out. If these federal judges are endangering national security, then we at Boring Diatribe have to ask what the hell we're trying to keep secure?

I'm sure we'll see the end of moronic comments like this from the Amateur General John Ashcroft, since the professional Torturer General is about to take over:

Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, a New York-based group that represents families of some detainees at the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, said that Gonzales's legal opinions "opened the door and paved the way" for abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

"He's right in the middle of where this administration went off the page of the law and into chaos," Ratner said. "They're promoting someone who was one of the legal architects of the abuse. It's just appalling."

Yes Mike, yes it is. And the Democrats are rolling over for it, because, as Senator Charles Schumer (Craven-NY) says, Alberto Gonzales is "less polarizing" than Ashcroft. Only if your compass already points toward Hell, Chuck. There's a word for you and your kind: collaborator.

Rearguard Action

Yup, here we go:

Massive US military might is useless against a mosque network in full gear. In a major development not reported by US corporate media, for the first time different factions of the resistance have released a joint statement, signed among others by Ansar as-Sunnah, al-Jaysh al-Islami, al-Jaysh as-Siri (known as the Secret Army), ar-Rayat as-Sawda (known as the Black Banners), the Lions of the Two Rivers, the Abu Baqr as-Siddiq Brigades, and crucially al-Tawhid wal-Jihad (Unity and Holy War) – the movement allegedly controlled by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The statement is being relayed all over the Sunni triangle through a network of mosques. The message is clear: the resistance is united.

Remember when street-to-street warfare was predicted for the initial invasion of Baghdad? Seems like either the resistance needed time to find its bearings, or was actually giving the United States a chance for a few months to make things better after Hussein's fall. Not anymore:

Badrani also disputes the Pentagon spin: “It is misleading to say the US controls 70% of the city because the fighters are constantly on the move. They go from street to street, attacking the army in some places, letting them through elsewhere so that they can attack them later. They say they are fighting not just for Fallujah, but for all Iraq.” The mujahideen tactics are a rotating web – Ho Chi Minh’s and Che Guevara’s tactics applied to urban warfare by the desert: snipers on rooftops, snipers escaping on bicycles, mortar fire from behind abandoned houses, rocket-propelled-grenade attacks on tanks, Bradleys being ambushed, barrages of as many as 200 rockets, instant dispersal, “invisible” regrouping.

And this will make us wildly popular:

Dr Muhammad Ismail, a member of the governing board of Fallujah’s general hospital “captured” by the Americans at the outset of Operation Phantom Fury, has called all Iraqi doctors for urgent help. Ismail told Iraqi and Arab press that the number of wounded civilians is growing exponentially – and medical supplies are almost non-existent. He confirmed that US troops had arrested many members of the hospital’s medical staff and had sealed the storage of medical supplies.

The wounded in Fallujah are in essence left to die. There is not a single surgeon in town. And practically no doctors as well, as the Pentagon decided to bomb both the al-Hadar Hospital and the Zayid Mobile Hospital. So far, the International Committee of the Red Cross has reacted with thunderous apathy.

How is this going to get better? More force? Can this administration be this stupid? Yes, I know the answer. Who's going to be the last soldier to die for this mistake?