March 31
Congratulations to Air America surviving its first year. I didn't realize just how tough the first month was until watching "Left of the Dial" tonight. They really got down to the last hours before having to close. Regular readers have seen me mention some of the programs, and indeed I'm a fan of The Al Franken Show and The Laura Flanders Show. I'm starting to get into The Majority Report too lately. It's radio so good, I'm listening to commercial radio even when public radio isn't having a pledge drive.
I'm thinking that if there's a silver lining to the wall to wall coverage of the death of Terri Schiavo, it isn't just a warning about bulemia, living wills, or the knowledge we've all gained about vegetative states and feeding tubes. The silver lining is how grossly the Republicans overreached and were shown as liars manipulating grassroots conservatives. It was indeed different this time. Sure, they lied about Kerry's service record, but that played into prejudices much of the public already had. hey lie about Social Security, but that's complex. They lied in order to invade Iraq, but they could count on the public feeling they had to support the president in wartime no matter what. This time, there was a human face on the lie. The CT scans made visually clear about this case in way debunkings of propaganda usually can't that at a minimum, GOP leaders like the Bush brothers, Tom DeLay, and Bill Frist didn't know what they were talking about and didn't care to find out. The talking heads went right along, saying horrific things about the husband when they nothing about him. They used the pain of the Schindlers for political purposes, encouraging their delusions to anger the base and raise money. They did the usual denouncing of activist judges when something like 28 courts came to the same conclusion. They repeated as facts what was utter nonsense. They suckered people who believed these liars share their faith, and who convinced them to believe those who don't share the faith can't possibly be right, thus causing them to disbelieve the obvious facts.
The key thing here though is how easy the deception is to see, but this faith-based manipulation happens repeatedly on more complex issues, like gay marriage, global warming, and evolution. I hope everyone in the reality-based community learned a lesson too. We pushed back, and got a big majority of the public on our side. Now we need to be bold enough to say to grassroots conservatives you're being lied to. Gay marriage won't affect straight marriage one bit. Global warming is real and those telling you otherwise are fools, self-interested polluters, or both. Evolution is as much a theory as gravity and creationism is nonsense.
March 27
If you couldn't hear the recording on Laura Flanders tonight, you can read about it on The Free Press, but I hope you got to hear it. I refer to Ohio Sec. of State Kenneth Blackwell appearing before the US House Committee on Administration. When you hear it, you can hear the arrogance and patronizing attitude of this man. How dare those females ask him questions! For example, when reminded that in an ad campaign he told voters to vote in their precinct and didn't mention they could vote at the county elections board office, he said, "I sure didn't. Can you hear? I sure didn't". His excuse was there wasn't space in a 30 second ad, but he just then said it in a few seconds. That was a vital piece of information, and leaving it out sure supports the accusation the long lines at the polls were deliberate. When Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones, D-Ohio, who brought the challenge to Ohio's electoral votes, asked why he refused to shake her hand, he said, "I wanted to see how you were going to comport yourself." He sure sounded as unaccountable as he acted during the campaign and during the dispute afterward. Flanders guest, I didn't catch the name, said reports' jaws fell open as they listened to him. Why don't the democrats make more of this? They could be stuck with this guy as governor of Ohio. Apparently if you screw up an election in a way to benefit the Republicans, your punishment is higher office, or such is the lesson Blackwell learned from Florida's Katherine Harris getting into the US House of Representatives.
Speaking of corruption in the House, Harris' majority leader Tom DeLay pulled the plug on his own father. His family made the decision and he could have disagreed, but he went along --- rather than calling for a special session of Congress. I don't fault him for his decisions then. I fault him for screaming hypocrisy now.
And for even more blatant hypocrisy since the incidents are only a day apart, Jeb Bush today said, "I cannot violate a court order. I don't have powers from the United States Constitution -- or for that matter from the Florida Constitution -- that would allow me to intervene after a decision has been made." If you read yesterday's entry, you know that HE JUST TRIED IT! He tried using force in direct contravention of court orders, and from his statement he must have acted in direct contravention of Florida's constitution. He failed only because local police wouldn't back down. What a lying hypocrite. Aren't any legislators in Florida thinking about impeachment.
March 26
The Republican abuse of power continues, and Fox News Channel shows again why it's not only a propaganda outfit rather than a news channel, but it's an irresponsible one as well. Yesterday, FNC's John Gibson called on Jeb Bush to forcibly seize Terri Schiavo regardless of the law: "So Jeb, call out the troops, storm the Bastille and tell 'em I sent you." He's suggesting that even a governor, who has a lot to say about what the law is, blow it off when he disagrees with it and do whatever he wants. If you or I do that, it's called crime. When the guy in charge of the government does it, that's called dictatorship.
Now you want the really scary part? Brother Jeb tried it! He actually sent Florida Department of Law Enforcement agents to seize her against court orders, and obviously against Florida or federal law. The local police guarding the hospice refused to back down without a court order. Think about the ramifications of Bush's action. His personal opinion overrides the law and the courts, even when something like 25 straight decisions have gone the same way in this case. If Bush can do this, there is no law, just whatever he feels like doing unless he runs into a superior armed force. That's dictatorship. Now think back to a common subject on this blog, electoral fraud, particularly as regards Florida which was not only a laughingstock in 2000, but had problems in 2002 and last year, which mostly got ignored thanks to Ohio. Does it not suddenly seem more plausible that Bush would have acted in way to steal the elections for his brother and perhaps for candidates in other races? That doesn't prove fraud, but it gives reason to ask whether his surprisingly big win in 2002 was what it appeared to be, and maybe someone with subpoena power should be asking about the odd results in the parts of Florida that used touchscreen machines, as well the multi-hour waits in Democratic precincts like in Ohio. This, dear readers, is why I continue to refer to Brother George as the "acting" president.
Getting back to abuse of power on the congressional end, the radical right in the House of Representatives wants to gut the federal judiciary. This gets onto another 3G issue that touches on the Schiavo case, the claim of "judicial activism". The working definition of "judicial activism" is usually a decision conservatives disagree with. In the Schiavo case, judges are activist because they refuse to overturn the decision made by every court before them, which would seem to be the opposite of "activist". As demonstrated in the paragraph above, in the conservative mind, there isn't a distinction between good law and their whims. They want to act like they're being oppressed, like Gibson's bastille remark, and the judiciary is a favorite target -- even though conservatives are in charge of just about everything. They're got all three branches of the federal government firmly in their grip and until recently they had most governorships and state legislatures. Focusing just on the federal judiciary, we don't know judges' parties unless they're open partisans like Antonin Scalia, so we have to go from the party of the president that appointed them. Republicans appointed seven of the nine Supreme Court justices. The longest serving justices were appointed by Nixon. There are other Nixon appointees in the lower courts; that's what happens with lifetime appointments. Going back to the start of Nixon's presidency 36 years ago, we've had 12 years of Democratic presidents and 24 years of Republican presidents. That doesn't prove federal judges are two-thirds Republicans, but it sure argues against the courts being loaded with liberals. Obviously most Nixon appointees must be dead or retired by now, and maybe that's true with Ford and Carter appointees too. But even if we start counting only with Reagan, that's 16 years of Republicans and 8 years of Democrats, and we're talking about Reagan and the Bushes, the most hard right presidents we've ever had. Again, that doesn't prove the judiciary leans right, but it argues strongly against a preponderance of liberal judges.
What all that means is that the Republican far right is screaming about decisions being made by Republican judges. Even Republican judges are sometimes finding these theocons (a term I read recently and can't take credit for coining) somewhere off the deep end. Since the Constitution is so clearly opposed to theocon objectives, they want to bring it down, in this case by eliminating the ability of the courts to do their job. It's more subtle than Brother Jeb's attempt to use armed agents to defy court orders.
A quick thing: Laura Flanders will play the tape of Ohio Sec. of State Blackwell's appearance before a Congressional committee last week where he got a well deserved dressing down. Her show is on 6pm - 9 pm central time.
March 25
I've avoided commenting on Terri Schiavo because there's an overdose of commentary on it already, but I can't resist one angle on it which meshes with something I've brought up a few times before. Before the election, I urged readers to remove their Republican US representatives on the grounds that even if they were honest themselves, they would keep corrupt people in power, especially Majority Leader Tom DeLay. The story of last week was DeLay's ethics problem, with rampant speculation about how long he could last. By happy coincidence, right at this time the Schiavo case came to national attention, and DeLay decided Congress needed a special session to deal with it. He gets people riled up by out and out lying, like, "One thing that God has brought to us is Terri Schiavo to elevate the visibility of what is going on in America, that Americans would be so barbaric as to pull a feeding tube out of a person that is lucid and starve them to death.'' The woman has no higher brain function left. Even those who believe she can recover have to admit she's not lucid. He has no reason to believe she's lucid, and plenty of reason to believe she's not -- like all the medical evidence (so count this as part of the conservative assault on science). He's saying it just to get people worked up and hold the support of the base. He's blatantly manipulating people of sincere belief. I wish these Christian conservatives would show as much concern for the people being tortured to death in Bush's prisons, though to be clear, I'm accusing them of myopia and credulity, not hypocrisy. It's their leaders like DeLay who are hypocrites and liars.
It's not any better on the Senate side, where a talking points memo circulated giving not the moral arguments, but the political ones, like "This is a great political issue, because Senator Nelson of Florida has already refused to become a cosponsor and this is a tough issue for Democrats." Do don't it because life is precious. Do it to screw over Florida's Democratic senator. Majority Leader Bill Frist, the same guy who said classified testimony would show Richard Clark was lying about Bush's ineptitude on 911 and refused to release it when Clark called his bluff, and more recently wouldn't admit AIDS isn't passed through tears and sweat, made a diagnosis of Schiavo from a few minutes of video. At least having him in the Senate means he's not practicing medicine anymore.
March 24
Maybe democracy isn't spreading in quite the direction the neocons expected, but domino theories are tricky things, and give the neocons a break. They haven't been right about anything yet, so it's unfair to expect that to change now.
What specifically they were wrong about is a dictator was overthrown --- in Kyrgyzstan, where, interestingly, both Russia and America have a military base. Kyrgyzstan is in central Asia. We've had a base there since the buildup for the invasion of Afghanistan. Since he's been on our side, Bush's rhetoric of freedom has conveniently not applied to that particular dictator. I'm curious to know how Bush will react to a democracy movement overthrowing a government he supported. He might not know yet since this was an obscure democracy movement. The local dailies had it only in the section of one paragraph stories. I saw nothing on TV, and heard nothing on radio except this interview on All Things Considered with the writer of the article linked above, Greg Walters. Hopefully some smart person will pull out a map and show Bush where it is. He might notice something interesting.
For example, Kyrgyzstan is in a neighborhood of predominantly Muslim dictatorships. The defeat of election fraud in non-Muslim Ukraine has had quite an effect in other countries where governments stole elections, like Kyrgyzstan, and has jumped a considerable chunk of geography right into a region which has known some nasty governments, including the Taliban and our good friend Uzbekistan. Uzbekistan, by the way, has a quite nasty government but without a peep from Bush. So what we have is democracy spreading without Bush's help and against a government he backs. But that's not all.
Look at a map of the region, and something that should jump out is Kyrgyzstan borders on western China, which is Muslim, non-Chinese, and interested in independence. China has been keeping the screws down on this region, and now democracy breaks out across the border. I wonder if China is letting its people hear about Kyrgyzstan. These days, can they stop their people hearing about this? Of immediate importance, is anyone around our acting president thinking about this? Think about it --- our current conflict with fundamentalist Islam and our future concerns with a growing China coming together in one package. Uff da.
March 23
I found some more winners of the Take the Red Pill award, though I hesitated to award it this time because these winners actually killed some people. Specifically, a Shiite fundamentalist militia in Basra, the Mehdi Army of Shia cleric Hojatoleslam Moqtada al-Sadr, killed picnickers for the capital crime of playing music while multiple genders socialized. Al-Sadr was the same cleric who fought US soldiers in Najaf, seemingly determined to get them to attack one of Shiism's holiest mosques until he figured out martyrdom might include him. In this case, his militiamen shot and beat people while the police stood by. One of the Mehdi spokesmen, Sheik Ahmed al-Basri, said, "We beat them because we are authorized by Allah to do so and that is our duty. It is we who should deal with such disobedience and not the police."
In America, at least this time the fundamentalists didn't kill anyone. It's just that long term descent into pre-enlightenment times (that's before the mid 18th century, but feel free to pretend you already knew). Southern science museums are caving in to pressure to show only Imax movies that avoid mention of evolution or the age of the Earth. Some patrons don't want to hear anything contradicting their view of the bible, even though they're going to a science museum, and they're quite loud about it. God forbid a science museum should mention such heretical notions as science. An effect is producers of Imax films are self-censoring because losing the southern museums is financially painful.
March 22
I'm starting out this entry with a retraction. On Jan. 4, I criticized columnist Sandy Shanks for misleading his readers about Kevin Sites, the reporter who shot the video of a marine shooting a wounded insurgent in Fallujah. I said Shanks was deceptive because he didn't mention that Sites' employer, NBC, was part of a press pool that included Al Jazeera, thereby leaving the impression Sites chose to give the footage to Al Jazeera in particular, presumably an attempt to undercut the marines in the field. I take back my assertion Shanks was deliberately misleading. I received a polite but understandably pointed e-mail from him (you can contact me too -- it's fun and easy!) denying he was lying or trying to attack Sites, and that he meant to give Sites the benefit of the doubt. Rereading that column, I'm willing to see that. In my own defense, as I wrote about at the time, Sites came under attack by the rabid right, enough that, unusally enough for a journalist, he had to write a column in his own defense. I assumed Shanks was just one more war supporter going after the messenger who brought the bad news, and he happened to be the one I picked to go after. Bad assumption.
Shanks describes himself as a conservative, but finds neocons to be a danger rather than his ideological compatriots. He is a columnist for Al Jazeera, where he tries to explain America to an Arab audience, an activity which hasn't endeared him to fellow conservatives who think Al Jazeera is just propaganda. I've heard Al Jazeera defended as merely holding the bias of its audience, like Fox News for Arabs. That would be unfair to Al Jazeera which, albeit with an Arab point of view, is independent of any government, not something that can be said of Fox. In any case, you can't make peace with someone you won't talk to; not that I'm saying we're at war with all Arabs, but you see the point. In fact, Al Jazeera and the other independent Arab news channel, Al Arabiyah, have been credited as a a major influence on the democracy movement in Lebanon, specifically by extensive coverage of the "Orange Revolution" in Ukraine. Their coverage of Iraq War II has not been friendly to the Bush administration. Unfortunately, many Americans are unaware of how different the war looks when viewed through American media versus how it looks viewed from anywhere else. Forget the Arab media: go look at Canadian media, or even the media in the only country to make more than a token effort in the "coalition", Britain.
Another blogger picked up these threads, one who goes by the rather creative name "The Dread Pundit Bluto". He linked to and criticized Shanks for a particular column on Al Jazeera. Shanks and Bluto exchanged e-mails which Bluto (I'm referring to a grown man as "Bluto" --- the web is a weird place) posted on his site and mentioned my Jan. 4 entry.
Only 7,000,000 blogs. We were bound to connect eventually.
March 20
It was page 3 in the main news section today, but it deserved the front page more than the congressional Republicans' grandstanding on Terry Schaivo. The Bush administration lied about North Korea supplying nuclear material to Libya. North Korea sold the stuff all right, but to our ally Pakistan, and Pakistan sold it to Libya. They didn't just lie to the public as usual, or even to Congress. They lied to our allies about what US intelligence reported, and they did it just last month. Now Rice is running around trying to mitigate the damage. Yes, they've sent a liar to explain why they lied.
Speaking of Bush lies, Rice's boss provided an excellent example of a half truth yesterday in his weekly radio address: "We knew of Saddam Hussein's record of aggression and support for terror. We knew of his long history of pursuing, even using, weapons of mass destruction, and we know that September 11 requires our country to think differently." He regressed back to the argument for invading Iraq, so even though it's been proven false and admitted as such even by him, that's his story and he's sticking to it. Why is it a half-truth? Because each part of the sentence is true by itself. Saddam did have a record of aggression and using chemical weapons, and 911 requires us to think differently. However, sticking them together in the sentence says those two points are related when they aren't. To make it clearer, imagine I said, "There's a squirrel outside my window, and my carpet needs cleaning." Both are true by themselves, but are they related? I'm implying that by connecting them, so maybe you're trying to figure out how a squirrel dirtied my carpet, but there is no connection.
The newspaper the two links above point to has come under attack by conservatives for being liberal --- I mean beyond the usual complaints that the mainstream press doesn't act enough as a conservative propaganda outfit. The Minneapolis Star Tribune has a staunchly liberal editorial page and has engaged in sharp criticism of the acting president, but like any responsible newspaper it keeps the editorials separate from the news. The Chicago Tribune, with a conservative editorial board, manages the same thing. Both have good news sections, and both editorial sections include varying views. It's what real newspapers do. The more rabid conservatives don't see that distinction between news and opinion, and Minnesota's far right is engaging in a campaign against the Star Tribune, with national help from Hugh Hewitt, a talk radio host carried on a Twin Cities conservative talk station. I can understand why they think this tactic will work: it sometimes does. I've heard journalists admit that a barrage of conservative complaints have caused news organizations to self-censor information conservatives won't like. The most recent case I know of is from the last election, when conservatives working for Sen. John Thune, including James Guckert/Jeff Gannon, went after the Argus Leader of Sioux Falls, SD, to prevent it saying anything positive about Sen. Tom Daschle. The Argus Leader just sat there and took it. I hope the Star Tribune has more backbone. Interestingly, the political editor of the Star Tribune is DJ Tice, who used to be a conservative columnist and editorial page editor for the cross-river rival St. Paul Pioneer Press. His conservative credentials aren't insulating the Star Tribune. I'm wondering if a conservative will be willing to resist the attack, or whether facts supporting liberal positions will be cut.
March 19
I was gone a few days. Miss me? Yeah, well, I'm here anyway, with a few days of stuff to cover.
The first thing that strikes me about the House's hearing on steroids is it's a clash of two arrogant groups. On the one side are the House Republicans, who think they can go after steroids in baseball while refusing to examine the Bush administration's use of torture, the lies Bush told to trick the public and Congress into supporting the invasion of Iraq, war profiteering by cronies of Dick and George, or the fraud that got their party's presidential candidate "elected". On the other side, the players and the commissioner seem to think that for them, subpoenas are optional. Look guys, "subpoena" means "you have to go". You are free to dislike it, to take the fifth, to defend yourselves, to repeat the criticism I just made of holding the hearing, and you can even lie if you don't mind risking charges of lying to Congress (a felony, even if Bush's people do it routinely) ---- but you have to go! Good grief, these guys seem to think if you're wealthy enough and powerful enough that the rules don't apply to you.
They must be Republicans.
Speaking of torture, the Army and Navy have admitted to the homicides of 26 prisoners. It's not clear how many were executed on the spot in a combat zone, and how many were killed in detention. This seems not to account for the numbers killed during interrogations, or killed by the CIA. Once again, note that there is still no independent investigation of torture by anyone with subpoena power. Only the news media and advocacy groups have been looking into it. The investigation by Vice Adm. Albert T. Church says it was just discipline infractions, but with this as in the other other investigations by generals or admirals, they can't investigate anyone above their rank despite the memos signed by cabinet members just screaming for official investigating. Instead, once again, the Pentagon investigated itself and cleared itself. It would be like Ken Lay investigating Enron, or Dick Cheney investigating Halliburton.
This is interesting: the neocons and oil tycoons didn't agree on the strategy for handling Iraq's oil. They both were planning the war from the time Bush stole the presidency, and oil was a big motive, in accordance with common sense and against all denials (and these are the people conservatives want to credit with a democracy movement in the MIddle East? Again note no one in the region is saying so). Their argument wasn't over whether to invade --- they just wanted a pretext --- but over neocon plans for privatization versus the hope of the oil industry to keep it state owned, meaning under their control. It turned out privatization was great propaganda for the insurgents, as Naomi Klein revealed.
If you've ever sought proof the anti-environmentalists aren't the best informed people on the planet, listen to what some senators said during the debate on ANWR. George Allen called it "the dark side of the moon." Larry Craig described the low temperatures there, asked how anyone could call it an Eden, and then said, "That is not my vision of Eden." You're also not a caribou senator. If you're native to the arctic, then the arctic might look like Eden. Trent Lott thought it's ridiculous to oppose drilling, "Even in this remote area of Alaska..." Of course it's remote, that's why its a wildlife refuge! Considering the time until the oil can get to market this is hardly a cure for high oil prices. It's about power. Bush and the oil barons want to drill in a specific protected area just to show they can. The NPR report mentioned that some oil companies have lost interest in the area, but watch for the ones with the more right wing management to go drilling --- just to show they can.
See the archives for earlier entries.
