It's looking more and more wet on Mars.

And those "blueberries" - don't they sort of remind you of the manganese nodules that form on the ocean floor, and in antarctic lakes?

A professor of mine specialized in using the formation of those nodules in Antarctica. It would be interesting to see what he has to say about what we're seeing on Mars.

"Smeagol pops out like Janet Jackson's boob." This is the first time I can remember ever watching the Oscars. I usually just check the web for the results, and imdb for pictures of Jeri Ryan, Linda Fiorantino and Portia de Rossi walking the red carpet. But out of being a fan of Lord of the Rings, I'm watching it this time.

It's very surreal. The fixed rictus grins with which the actors in the audience are waiting for the crowd shots are the best part so far... though Catherine Zeta Jones Douglas just sashayed on stage.

Angelina Jolie looks even better in motion, and I forgot how cute Renee Zellwegger looks when she's over 80 pounds.

This whole awards show thing is better than I thought.

And... Peter Jackson finally gets Best Director. I loved Lost in Translation, but the scope of what Jackson did with Lord of the Rings is simply staggering. There hasn't been an epic like that work filmed before, ever. He got it for capping all three.

I haven't seen "Monster", but from the clip, they did quite a job with the makeup. Charleze Theron looks like John Voight did in "Heat."

The "liberal" Washington Post calls 100,000 firefighters "democratic pork." How stupid are these people? Federal mandates during the Homeland Security Agency elevated alerts have financially crippled local emergency services. Disaster response is one of the funding priorities critical to a real anti-terrorism agenda, and it has been completely underfunded by Bush - he hasn't even coughed up the money that Congress allotted for New York to help recover from the WTC attacks and the deaths of so many firefighters and police. A call to seriously plan for disaster recovery is a much-needed reality check on what a real terror-fighting policy would look like.

What happens when you give Mad Jeebus: Beyond Golgotha a bad review.

Picking apart what went wrong inside the Dean campaign at the end.

Plugging the local talent:

Go see comedian Brad Thacker!

QUOTE
Sunday-Bar Humbug-10:30: Butch Wesley and Friends (featuring me doing a short set) FREE www.barhumbug.biz 6th and Pike Street 21+

Tuesday-Funny Bone Newport On The Levee 7:30 (doors at 6....if you want to have dinner or something...the chicken parmesan is the shit)....5 dollars if you mention my name...this is going to be a HUGE night....www.funnyboneonthelevee.com I would call for reservations...mention my name and get 5 dollar tickets, but I would just wait and buy them at the door, IT MORE THAN LIKELY WILL NOT SELL OUT....

show starts at 7:30!!!! do not arrive any later than 7:30, you will not be counted among people there to see me, the more people i get in to see me, the more time in the future I receive. Which brings me to this....when I announce at the show that my time is done....start boo'ing and act like you really mean it. I think this will impress Jeff.

Also on Tuesday-The Mad Frog 10:30....Part of the Comedy Revolution (I will be doing 20+ here...also being reviewed for a future Artspike publication) www.themadfrog.net
UNQUOTE

UNQUOTE

The Price Of Allowing An Idiot To Be President

One would think the guy who wrote this would be uncomfortable that in the past three years the United States has suspended Constitutional rights for political prisoners, engaged in secret abductions and detentions, decided there is no right to public trial, that there is no right to privacy, that political prisoners may be held indefinitely without contact with either an attorney or family, that public libraries must turn over records of what people read, that librarians who reveal such snooping are guilty as terrorists, and that criticism of this fascist nonsense is "treason."

National Journal rates Kerry the "most liberal" senator.

Hmmm... what would make Dennis Miller's show stop falling on its face? I know... they need dittoheads!

A map of states that either have caved to creationists or are in danger of doing so.

It really isn't fair that these morons get to take advantage of all the science they deny. If only there was a creationist pledge that they won't accept medical treatment from doctors who believe in evolution, and that they will only keep pure-bred wolves as pets.

But there I am looking to Darwinism to solve problems again.

Atrios points out that Clear Channel, which just dropped Howard Stern, is still running Michael Savage, who on a live broadcast screamed at a caller that he's "a sodomite who should just get AIDS and die!"

via Slashdot, the latest survey of progress on brain-interface devices.

In honor of the release of The Passion of the Christ, I'm splurging on this. Gotta love the Criterion Collection treatment:

DVD Features:
Commentary by Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, and director Terry Jones

Commentary by John Cleese and Michael Palin

Production notes

Theatrical trailer(s)

Five Rarely Seen Deleted Scenes With Commentary by the Pythons

Four original Radio British Ads

Documentary The Pythons, Shot on Location During the Making 0f Life of Brian

Widescreen anamorphic format

UPDATE:

I always think of this section of the script when republicans start their schtick about how government is the enemy:

QUOTE
Reg: All right, but apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?
Attendee: Brought peace?
Reg: Oh, peace -- shut up!
Reg: There is not one of us who would not gladly suffer death to rid this country of the Romans once and for all.
Dissenter: Uh, well, one.
Reg: Oh, yeah, yeah, there's one. But otherwise, we're solid.
UNQUOTE

Hastert backs down! 9-11 commission gets another 60 days. Though they are still stonewalled by the White House.

$5.6 trillion surplus has turned into $2.75 trillion deficit. Thanks, Bush. And thanks, Ralph.

And now Bush and Ridge are endorsing a television show called "DHS - Department of Homeland Security."

Wonderful stuff, this. The Senate 9-11 Commission can't get access to the White House to actually fight the fucking war, but a remake of Dragnet gets free run.

QUOTE
President Bush and Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge both "endorse and contribute sound bites to the introductions of the series," according to the show's producers.

Though the series' theme relates to the President's agenda on national security and international terrorism, it is virtually unprecedented for the White House to endorse such a fictional representation. It is unclear what input or relation if any the President or the real DHS would have with the show in the future.

[...]

Producers at Steeple Productions claim "no other television series has ever had such access and clearance at the highest levels of real-life counter-terrorism agencies: The White House, Dept. of Homeland Security, FBI, EPA, California State Counter-Terrorism Units, LAPD (news - web sites), LAFD and the Los Angeles and Orange County Sheriff's Departments. These government agencies have rallied their resources and support behind the vision of DHS--The Series, including President G. W. Bush and Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, who both endorse and contribute sound bites to the introductions of the series."


When asked to elaborate on Bush and Ridge's involvement, show representatives told E! Online, "They love it. They think it is fantastic," and drew comparisons to the government's role on The F.B.I. No spokesperson for the White House who could comment on the show was available at press time; a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security said he was aware of TV shows related to the department, but said nothing about this particular show.


The show is billed as a realistic action series following the exploits of Special DHS Agents Andrea Bacall and Jack Callahan, portrayed by actors Alison Heruth Waterbury and Timothy Patrick Cavanaugh. The characters venture from the halls of Washington, D.C., to war-torn locales as they fight fanatical terrorism. Producers claim "the series will educate, inform, and inspire the average citizens around the world about America's front-line defense/offense against those who have declared war on the U.S. and our democratic allies."

UNQUOTE

The wave keeps rolling - a town in NY is marrying gays, too.

Even though I'm dead straight, I feel like marrying a dude just to be part of history!

I get tingly watching lesbians kiss. Does that count?

via Orcinus, a preliminary breakdown of the ways in which the Passion of the Christ diverges wildly from scripture.

UPDATE: Even better, Skeptic Magazine wades into the fluff.

If you aren't paranoid, you aren't paying attention. The National Security Agency, which through Echelon listens in on all telephone and internet communication in the world, employs directly or indirectly 120,000 people world-wide.

One bit of information missing in the article is that there is little need for physical wiretaps on telephones... the telcos were required to include trunk-interception technology in all areas of the United States, along with tower-triangulation for cellular locating.

Liberman does something good! He and McCain are forcing the issue, using the highway bill as leverage to get an extension for the 9-11 commission. via Atrios.

I still think Cuba is going to be part of the October Surprise this year. And it looks like the Miami cubans agree with me. Though the US envoy felt it necessary to say the US doesn't plan to attack Cuba this summer.

via Cursor, Jane's Defence shows that the sale of nuclear weapons technology to Iran, Libya and North Korea was pretty damned close to an official action of Pakistan's government.

The description of the booths at the arms bazaar was like something out of a Chevy Chase movie.

Also from today's Cursor:

Another Halliburton scandal is blowing up in Cheney's face.

and...

Greenspan's secret agenda.

Breaches of ethics aren't the exception for Justice Scalia, they're the rule.

Now Ashcroft is demanding medical records from Planned Parenthood clinics across the country.

Bush is planning to use the WTC crater for the site of his acceptance speech during the Republican Convention?

One more time... yes, there really is a difference between Democrats and Republicans. Only ONE Democrat so far is for the federal marriage amendment.

10,667 children report abuse by priests since 1950, involving 4% of the priesthood. So far.

Three months ago, Nader approached Howard Dean to pitch himself as a VP candidate?

Mario Brothers, the movie:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

A former procurement specialist for Halliburton charges that it failed to seek out competitive bids overcharging taxpayers by tens of millions of dollars. Just do the day-pass - it's only a few seconds, and a few clicks.

And while you're over there, how many different ways can a person excuse themselves for being a slut?

I know, it's like watching Jerry Springer to read these advice columns, but it's also like trying to look away from a train wreck.

I think that column says a lot about the gay marriage issue - she gets the State to honor her total lack of commitment, while a same sex couple gets chased away by a mob with pitchforks and torches. You don't stop being attracted to other people when you get married, but you do stop obsessing about it, and you do stop fucking them. How tough is that? These people make it out to be like quiting heroin. It's just fucking strangers, she should be able to find a replacement for that. Like maybe her husband?

The best part of all is the line "this is all so deeply out of character." Sweetheart, your behavior IS your character. Not your delusional self-image.

Almost as good is "I've maintained my dignity." Baby, don't talk with your mouth full.

And yes, there is a connection between the two articles besides both being from Salon.

We need to stop pretending that Halliburton is ever going to stop cheating on us. It's time for a divorce.

The anti-evolution crowd proves we are still apes.

Two new species of dinosaurs found in Antarctica.

I'm sure they were just fleeing Noah's flood.

A whole new way to fight cancer.

Digby (who should post on a more regular basis - he'll stop for a while, then I stop checking for updates) points out what Howard Stern was discussing that may have pissed Clear Channel off so much.

With 34 Senators already on record swearing to vote NO on the gay-bashing amendment, the issue is done.

No difference between Bush and the Democrats, right Ralph?

The total so far includes 8 Republicans. Thanks for voting your conscience, and sorry about the hell you are about to take from the brownshirts.

Little did I know that there is a new Cabinet position in the White House... Minister of Beer, Tits and Fast Cars.

The British spied even on Kofi Annan in their attempt to find ways to support the US invasion of Iraq. via Counterspin.

For years, I've been contrasting today's cryptofascists with true conservatives such as Barry Goldwater, who was in favor of gay rights and was pro-choice. I wasn't guessing about his attitude, I was lucky enough to talk to him about it a few times. I never could have voted for him, with his early opposition to the civil rights movement. But compared to today's wingnuts, he was the patron saint of democracy.


QUOTE

Feb. 26, 2004 | PHOENIX, Ariz. -- Barry Goldwater was the alpha of the conservative movement, his capture of the Republican Party nomination in 1964 prophetic. "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue." Even in defeat came the promise of ultimate triumph when Ronald Reagan appeared in a last-minute television appeal, the moment launching his political career. George W. Bush presents himself as Reagan's true heir down to his cowboy boots, not the scion to his wing-tipped Eastern patrician father.

It was Goldwater, the genuine article, who established the image of conservative as Western hero. His persona was indistinguishable from his ideology. He was the imperial individual, the free spirit embodying the free market. He seemed a natural force in Arizona, a state on the economic frontier. With less than a million inhabitants before World War II, it exploded afterward. In his time, Goldwater appeared as new and startling as the booming suburbs in the desert.

Yet in his older years the founding father of conservatism gazed out upon his works and recoiled. It was not, after all, what he had had in mind. In his plainspoken manner, indifferent to what anyone else thought, he railed against the right's intolerance, sanctimony and bullying. Mr. Conservative, author of its early seminal manifesto, "The Conscience of a Conservative," took to calling himself in public a "liberal." He spared no words in denouncing the right as the enemy of liberty.

"Barry was always a social liberal," Susan Goldwater Levine, his widow, keeper of the flame, told me at her home, high in the hills above Phoenix, watching a pastel sunset, in 70 degree winter weather. "Barry believed that people should be allowed to do whatever they wanted in their own homes." When Goldwater observed the right trying to use government to enforce private morality, he spoke up for women's right to abortion and for gay rights. His wife insisted that his convictions had remained unaltered, but that the movement for which he was the avatar had become warped. "He hated it that the right-wing zealots took over the party," she said. "Barry hated the right wing."

Perhaps, it might be argued, the widow Goldwater speaks for a man who can no longer speak for himself. But it is inarguable that Arizona, bastion of conservatism, along with other neighboring states in the Southwest, New Mexico and Nevada, which far more than those of the Deep South are the battleground in the presidential election, may vote Democratic.

UNQUOTE

Wes F. at A Walk in the Brain has a great Bill Maher essay on gay marriage.

Coin tosses aren't random.

The Supreme Court tells me that my tax money no longer needs to go to train cult leaders.

Bush wants 630,000 American children to be born each year with potentially brain-damaging levels of mercury exposure.

I used to react to things like this with "are they insane?" How could anyone possibly be that cynical, stupid, and greedy?

Well, yes. They are insane. It's the people who vote for them who are that cynical, stupid and greedy.

200 punk rock bands join forces to register voters and get rid of Bush.

It's only in the hard-copy version (pg. 30, March issue) but Scientific American calls Cincinnati the 8th most segregated city in the country.

1) Detroit
2) Gary, Ind.
3) Milwaukee
4) Chicago
5) Cleveland
6) Flint, Mich.
7) Buffalo
8) Cincinnati

The Least Segregated:

1) Bellingham, Wash.
2) Santa Cruz, Cal.
3) Boulder
4) Boise
5) Jacksonville, N.C.
6) Redding, Cal.
7) San Angelo, Tex.
8) San Jose, Cal.

Carl Lindner, in addition to giving his employees tickets to the Passion of the Christ and stongly suggesting attendance, is now offering to pay for employees to go to a religious "family life" conference, and pay for their attendance.

Greenspan wants Social Security cuts. The markets shudder every time he breathes. For him to come out on the impending collapse of Social Security is significant.

He's still not being honest about the tax cuts, though.

I'd rather see them all wearing crowns of thorns.

If all the fans of this snuff film are going to be wearing iron nails at their throats, I'm tempted to start carrying around a hammer.

Tbogg has a list of much better titles for the film... my favorite is "Crouching Jesus, Hidden Agenda."

Tom Tomorrow points this statement by our commander in Iraq, discussing how many brigades we will have stationed in Iraq for the next 30 or 40 years:

Noting how establishing U.S. naval bases in the Philippines in the early 1900s allowed the United States to maintain a "great presence in the Pacific," Garner said, "To me that's what Iraq is for the next few decades. We ought to have something there ... that gives us great presence in the Middle East. I think that's going to be necessary."

Atrios points out the best Bush/Cheney campaign slogan:

"Don't Switch Horsemen Mid-Apocalypse"

Dana Milbank gets to the cynical politics underneath the call for an anti-gay amendment.

It can't pass Congress, because it would need a two-thirds vote, and Democrats, contrary to Nader's lies, are a wall of protection against this kind of bullshit.

So why is Bush calling for a hopeless crusade in which he is not only morally wrong, but in which he knows he has no chance of victory? It's a sop to the slack-jaws, of course.

George Will piles on the neocon disinformation campaign, crying "antisemitism!" whenever anyone disagrees with them. You'd think that washed-up old queen would have something to say about gay marriage.

George, you pathetic asshole, Ariel Sharon is the worst danger the jews in Israel have faced since the country was founded after WW II. Supporters of his policy of turning Israel into an empire are the real anti-semites, for lusting after an apocalyptic confrontation that cannot have any outcome but the continuing siege, if not the destruction, of Israel. And, as the wizard always points out, Palestinians are ethnically semitic, while european jews aren't. His continuing calls for ethnic cleansing of the West Bank aren't exactly helping bring peace to Israel. Constant warfare is the lifeblood of neocons, both in the US and in Israel. In neither place are they the majority, so calling anti-neocons anti-semitic in Israel is as much of a lie as calling me unpatriotic because I won't be voting for George Bush.

How stupid do they think their followers, or cultists, are, that they would believe such nonsense?

The water in our nation's capitol is officially off limits to children and pregnant women because of lead contamination, and vulnerable populations are urged to get blood tests for the poisoning. What do you want to bet that the Bush solution is to raise the official level of "safe" lead poisoning?

The FBI covered up the involvement of other right-wing white supremacists in the Oklahoma City bombing.

I got this in my email today:

QUOTE

Accounts Receivable Tax

Building Permit Tax

Capital Gains Tax

CDL license Tax

Cigarette Tax

Corporate Income Tax

Court Fines (indirect taxes)

Dog License Tax

Federal Income Tax

Federal Unemployment Tax (FUTA)

Fishing License Tax

Food License Tax

Fuel permit tax

Gasoline Tax (42 cents per gallon)

Hunting License Tax

Inheritance Tax

Interest expense (tax on the money)

Inventory tax

IRS Interest Charges (tax on top of tax)

IRS Penalties (tax on top of tax)

Liquor Tax

Local Income Tax

Luxury Taxes

Marriage License Tax

Medicare Tax Property Tax

Real Estate Tax

Septic Permit Tax

Service Charge Taxes

Social Security Tax

Road Usage Taxes (Truckers)

Sales Taxes

Recreational Vehicle Tax

Road Toll Booth Taxes

School Tax State Income Tax

State Unemployment Tax (SUTA)

Telephone federal excise tax

Telephone federal universal service fee tax

Telephone federal, state and local surcharge taxes

Telephone minimum usage surcharge tax

Telephone recurring and non-recurring charges tax

Telephone state and local tax

Telephone usage charge tax

Toll Bridge Taxes

Toll Tunnel Taxes

Traffic Fines (indirect taxation)

Trailer registration tax

Utility Taxes Vehicle License Registration Tax

Vehicle Sales Tax

Watercraft registration Tax

Well Permit Tax

Workers Compensation Tax


COMMENT: Not one of these taxes existed 100 years ago and our nation was the most prosperous in the world, had absolutely no national debt, had the largest middle class in the world and Mom stayed home to raise the kids.
What the hell happened?

UNQUOTE

Now, I don't like paying taxes either. But it occurs to me that that 100 years ago, there was no national telephone system, no water treatment, no standing army, no unemployment insurance, no highway system, cars were novelty, and liquor was about to become outlawed.

Most importantly, whole families lived on a single income, because only the wealthy educated their children past age 12.

And the average life span in the United States was 47 years.

Not to mention that, yes, there were toll roads, toll bridges, marriage license fees, local sales taxes, license taxes, and tariffs.

Someone should introduce Andrew Sullivan to the writings of Pastor Martin Niemöller:

QUOTE

WAR IS DECLARED: The president launched a war today against the civil rights of gay citizens and their families. And just as importantly, he launched a war to defile the most sacred document in the land. Rather than allow the contentious and difficult issue of equal marriage rights to be fought over in the states, rather than let politics and the law take their course, rather than keep the Constitution out of the culture wars, this president wants to drag the very founding document into his re-election campaign. He is proposing to remove civil rights from one group of American citizens - and do so in the Constitution itself. The message could not be plainer: these citizens do not fully belong in America. Their relationships must be stigmatized in the very Constitution itself. The document that should be uniting the country will now be used to divide it, to single out a group of people for discrimination itself, and to do so for narrow electoral purposes. Not since the horrifying legacy of Constitutional racial discrimination in this country has such a goal been even thought of, let alone pursued. Those of us who supported this president in 2000, who have backed him whole-heartedly during the war, who have endured scorn from our peers as a result, who trusted that this president was indeed a uniter rather than a divider, now know the truth.

NO MORE PROFOUND AN ATTACK: This president wants our families denied civil protection and civil acknowledgment. He wants us stigmatized not just by a law, not just by his inability even to call us by name, not by his minions on the religious right. He wants us stigmatized in the very founding document of America. There can be no more profound attack on a minority in the United States - or on the promise of freedom that America represents. That very tactic is so shocking in its prejudice, so clear in its intent, so extreme in its implications that it leaves people of good will little lee-way. This president has now made the Republican party an emblem of exclusion and division and intolerance. Gay people will now regard it as their enemy for generations - and rightly so. I knew this was coming, but the way in which it has been delivered and the actual fact of its occurrence is so deeply depressing it is still hard to absorb. But the result is clear, at least for those who care about the Constitution and care about civil rights. We must oppose this extremism with everything we can muster. We must appeal to the fair-minded center of the country that balks at the hatred and fear that much of the religious right feeds on. We must prevent this graffiti from being written on a document every person in this country should be able to regard as their own. This struggle is hard but it is also easy. The president has made it easy. He's a simple man and he divides the world into friends and foes. He has now made a whole group of Americans - and their families and their friends - his enemy. We have no alternative but to defend ourselves and our families from this attack. And we will.

UNQUOTE

He's been the vicious little mutt of the far right for years, castigating any dissent, any call for better treatment of minority interests of any sort in Bush's empire. But now that Bush has declared war on gays, Sullivan is sputtering with outrage:

Pastor Martin Niemöller said:

"First they came for the Jews
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for the Communists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for me
and there was no one left
to speak out for me."

What the daughter of Reagan has to say about gay marriage.

Playing pork games with Homeland Security.

Religion kills.

"Feb. 24, 2004 | KADUNA, Nigeria (AP) -- Two more states in Nigeria's Islamic north joined a boycott Tuesday of a massive polio immunization campaign, demanding government proof the vaccines don't spread AIDS or sterility as Islamic leaders contend."

Republican Representative Dana Rohrabacher is sponsoring a bill that could, at a miniscule cost, give us the lead time to divert a globally catastrophic asteroid impact. There's one out there with our name on it. The only question is, when will it hit, and will we know about it in time to divert it. It could be thousands of years from now, or it could be tomorrow.

"The League of Conservation Voters has endorsed Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., who has a lifetime environmental voting record of 96 percent."

Sad times for Stephen Hawking.

Vote in the online polls on the amendment:

CNN (bottom right)

please post the addresses for any other online polls on the issue in the comments!

via Wonkette, proof of evolution, staring Bush.

Holy shit. Putin just fired the Russian government, 3 weeks before the election.

We're hearing it again: "If Bush wins another term, I'm out of here. If bigotry is reintroduced to the Constitution with this insane anti-marriage amendment, I'm leaving the country. If..."

That's not the right answer. It's tempting, of course. The radical wingnut branch of the GOP that is running wild right now would love nothing more than to drive progressives out of the country. And certainly there are many countries that have governments that share progressive values more than Bush does.

But simply put, if progressives leave the country, they take their votes and their voices away from change. That kind of exodus helps one group - the radical right wing.

Our love of this country, of what it stands for, and of what it can be, is stronger than the hatred, the attacks, and the fear-mongering of Bush and his cabal. And the stakes are too high... we're at a crucial moment of history, when the juggernaut of right wing power can be turned aside only by great effort. Abandoning that effort to hide in fear helps nothing.

War sometimes creates monsters out of previously good people. There is a lot of bullshit banging around the right wing about Kerry "fabricating" stories of atrocities by American troops in Vietnam. Counterspin points us to the proof here, and reminds us of the Toledo Blade's story last year. It wasn't every man, or even a majority, involved. But there were those who went around the bend, as there always will be, and as there are in Iraq right now. It's a fact of war.

via Atrios, bad news on Consumer Confidence.

US Army generals checking out Africa to see if it is ripe for harvest.

Such a good analogy... a scientist rides in a car driven by a libertarian...

I must have missed this... Parker Posey is playing one of the main vampire villians in the third Blade movie? That should be interesting. She rocks, and it's nice to see her get an opportunity in a mega-blockbuster vehicle.

Col. Hackworth has a great idea - Scott Ritter should be on the WMD intelligence probe.

Hah... Pat Buchanan was on Talk of the Nation talking about Nader... and instead he gave a stump speech every time he got the microphone. He REALLY wants in this race.

Run, Pat, Run!

A survey of Bush's environmental record, via Tapped.

Soldier for the Truth, via Billmon

QUOTE
She would soon conclude that the OSP — a pet project of Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld — was more akin to a nerve center for what she now calls a “neoconservative coup, a hijacking of the Pentagon.”

Though a lifelong conservative, Kwiatkowski found herself appalled as the radical wing of the Bush administration, including her superiors in the Pentagon planning department, bulldozed internal dissent, overlooked its own intelligence and relentlessly pushed for confrontation with Iraq.

Deeply frustrated and alarmed, Kwiatkowski, still on active duty, took the unusual step of penning an anonymous column of internal Pentagon dissent that was posted on the Internet by former Colonel David Hackworth, America’s most decorated veteran.

As war inevitably approached, and as she neared her 20-year mark in the Air Force, Kwiatkowski concluded the only way she could viably resist what she now terms the “expansionist, imperialist” policies of the neoconservatives who dominated Iraq policy was by retiring and taking up a public fight against them.
UNQUOTE

via the Cincinnati Blog, the Christian Coalition's agenda for this year.

And what is the response when the Bush Administration is forced to face facts on the inefficacy of "abstinence-only" sex education?

"Values trumps data"

IRS data directly contradicts Bush's lies about the affect of tax cuts on small business.

Bush Admin playing more games with the science, delaying morning-after pill.

Two thirds of Americans support televised executions.

The Saudi fields are drying up, so it looks like we're starting to hit "peak oil", which is the nightmare at the end of the oil slick rainbow.

Imagine if in 1980, Reagan had kept Carter's commitment to alternative energy. Instead, he even contemptuously tore the solar panels off the White House roof to show what he thought of the issue.

Knowing what we know about the impending catastrophe, which will multiply the importance of the remaining oil reserves with every year, could there possibly be anyone who still thinks the Iraq war wasn't about planting American bases on top of the remaining supply?

This is a problem that cannot be overstated. Everyone who has looked into the issue sees it coming, they just thought it would be around 2050.

Instead it's looking like 2010.

The only thing that could possible prevent the worst world crisis in modern history is a crash adoption of alternative energy which would have to combine the research efforts of the Apollo Program with the production shift/ramp-up of America after Pearl Harbor.

A new hands-on science museum is opening in April in D.C.

This isn't widely known enough - Jefferson's Letter to the Danbury Baptists:

The Final Letter, as Sent [earlier versions here]
To messers. Nehemiah Dodge, Ephraim Robbins, & Stephen S. Nelson, a committee of the Danbury Baptist association in the state of Connecticut.

Gentlemen

The affectionate sentiments of esteem and approbation which you are so good as to express towards me, on behalf of the Danbury Baptist association, give me the highest satisfaction. my duties dictate a faithful and zealous pursuit of the interests of my constituents, & in proportion as they are persuaded of my fidelity to those duties, the discharge of them becomes more and more pleasing.

Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," thus building a wall of separation between Church & State. Adhering to this expression of the supreme will of the nation in behalf of the rights of conscience, I shall see with sincere satisfaction the progress of those sentiments which tend to restore to man all his natural rights, convinced he has no natural right in opposition to his social duties.

I reciprocate your kind prayers for the protection & blessing of the common father and creator of man, and tender you for yourselves & your religious association, assurances of my high respect & esteem.

Th Jefferson
Jan. 1. 1802.

also via Atrios, the American Taliban is on a rampage.

via Atrios, Bush's Secretary of Education calls the nation's largest teachers union "a terrorist organization."

The lying dickweeds have a hoax email circulating that misrepresent's Kerry's service. Snopes debunks.

QUOTE

The crewman with the best view of the action was Frederic Short, the man in the tub operating the twin guns. Short had not talked to Kerry for 34 years, until after he was recently contacted by a Globe reporter. Kerry said he had "totally forgotten" Short was on board that day.

Short had joined Kerry's crew just two weeks earlier, as a last-minute replacement, and he was as green as the Arkansas grass of his home. He said he didn't realize that he should have carried an M-16 rifle, figuring the tub's machine guns would be enough. But as Kerry stood face to face with the guerrilla carrying the rocket, Short realized his predicament. With the boat beached and the bow tilted up, a guard rail prevented him from taking aim at the enemy. For a terrifying moment, the guerrilla looked straight at Short with the rocket.

Short believes the guerrilla didn't fire because he was too close and needed to be a suitable distance to hit the boat squarely and avoid ricochet debris. Short tried to protect his skipper.

"I laid in fire with the twin .50s, and he got behind a hootch," recalled Short. "I laid 50 rounds in there, and Mr. Kerry went in. Rounds were coming everywhere. We were getting fire from both sides of the river. It was a canal. We were receiving fire from the opposite bank, also, and there was no way I could bring my guns to bear on that."

Short said there is "no doubt" that Kerry saved the boat and crew. "That was a him-or-us thing, that was a loaded weapon with a shape charge on it . . . It could pierce a tank. I wouldn't have been here talking to you. I probably prayed more up that creek than a Southern Baptist church does in a month."

Charles Gibson, who served on Kerry's boat that day because he was on a one-week indoctrination course, said Kerry's action was dangerous but necessary. "Every day you wake up and say, 'How the hell did we get out of that alive?'" Gibson said. "Kerry was a good leader. He knew what he was doing."

UNQUOTE

The Rev. B-Rad sends us the latest attacks on Margaret Cho.

I'll be at the 10:15 Friday March 5th show.

Power switches made from carbon nanotubes.

The ultimate simulation of the Earth... what a gaming platform!

Big news on the cosmology front.

and more.

and more.

and more.

The Total Information Awareness program is, of course, still ongoing. Privacy is dead in this country, unless you are an oil executive bribing public officials, or a blowhard wingnut radio clown addicted to hillbilly heroin.

The New Scopes Trials - an excerpt from Alterman's newest book on Bush.

Also in the Nation this week, Robert Kennedy Jr. on Bush's Junk Science.

Billmon updates us on how Chalabi is making out on the war.

Another scientist tries, once again, to explain to republicans that the reason scientists won't support republican platforms is because there actually exists an objective reality, accessable through the scientific method, that is completely counter to the GOP platform on many issues.

Can the stakes get any higher?

A republican version of Nader? The "Ten Commandments Judge" says he might run for President.

It isn't actually going to happen - the right wing will join their coalition partners to get incremental advancement of their platform, which is why they have a monopoly on all three branches of federal government. Pat Buchanan is more likely, but so far as I know, hasn't said he'll do it again this year.

The Bush administration says it improperly altered a report documenting large racial and ethnic disparities in health care, but it will soon publish the full, unexpurgated document.

The Governator is trying to stop gay marriages, via The Rambler.

So, a lifetime of casual sexual assaults on any woman who stumbles close to his meaty grip, and clusterfucking a gym groupie with a dozen of his fellow oiled narcissists, is his idea of the American Dream. But letting someone else have a lifetime monogamous commitment to the person they love is against the law.

Nader is campaigning for Bush. This is what it looks like when ego is all you have left, when reality is a distant memory. Note that he saves his knives for Democrats, always. He's afraid that if he criticizes Bush too much, the Democrats could win and have the strength to force through progressive policies again. And note that he reiterates that two of his core principles have always been that the Democrats should drop the pro-choice, and gun control planks of the platform.

Anyone who defines even the traditional GOP, much less the Democratic Party, as equivalent to the Bush Cabal is so fucking out of touch with reality that any arguments with them are completely hopeless, and a waste of breath. Without a grounding in the actual reality of our national condition, what discussion is possible? Like arguments about science with creationists, arguments with Nader about the Democratic Party are impossible because his core context has become a fraud and a farce.

If you still he's Saint Ralph, you just might want to ask why, unlike every Presidential candidate in modern history, he refuses to release his tax returns.

And frankly, if I wanted a president who is so far down the "I don't give a shit, they owe me the presidency" road that he can't even be bothered to proofread his declaration of candidacy, I'd be voting for Bush.

At least he has the support of the radical wingnuts - they know who their true friends are.

See 1932-1933 Germany for a little historical context of what happens when the far left splits from a moderate democratic government. The democratic coalition fell apart, the communists were hunted down like dogs, and Hitler siezed power by taking advantage of he claimed was a terrorist arson of the Reichstag.

Via a couple of blogs, including A Walk in the Brain, we find that the American Taliban is getting very ambitious. This bill would strike the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. Except that it can't, because an Act of Congress may not supercede the Federal Constitution. So it is a publicity stunt, in an election year, by a couple of moronic assholes betting on the slack-jawed, limitless stupidity of the religious right.

Cute, you dumb wingnut fuckers, real cute.


QUOTE

`Notwithstanding any other provision of this chapter, the Supreme Court shall not have jurisdiction to review, by appeal, writ of certiorari, or otherwise, any matter to the extent that relief is sought against an element of Federal, State, or local government, or against an officer of Federal, State, or local government (whether or not acting in official personal capacity), by reason of that element's or officer's acknowledgement of God as the sovereign source of law, liberty, or government.'

UNQUOTE

Apparently, my picture is on the front page of the local section of the Enquirer (Kentucky version). Not for political ravings - for being a fiend in a big head at Mardi Gras. I haven't seen it yet.

What the hell are they doing, trying to say "there's a new sheriff in town?" Bush's admin is leaking that they've switched CIA station chiefs in Iraq.

NO ONE is more an advocate of government transparency than I am. But don't leak this shit.

Don't drink the water.

The 21st century of Watergate, computer break-ins of Democratic file-servers by GOP staffers, is about to explode.

Orcinus calls for liberals not to respond to republican threats with the same violent rhetoric.

I'm in an angry mood myself, and the thought of throttling a chickenhawk makes me smile. But he's right that talk like that just gives them straw men to argue against. And everything on the internet is archived.

But that doesn't mean being weak or mild in language. It is important that people look hard at what's going on around them and realize that the far right are liars, fools, knaves, thieves, and most of all, pathetic cowards.

Respect for the Constitution IS patriotism. Raping the Constitution is treason.

via Tbogg, here's the pinhead that Bush just put on the appeals court with a recess appointment, bypassing the Senate.

QUOTE

"I will never forget January 22, 1973, the day seven members of our highest court ripped the Constitution up and ripped out the life of millions of unborn children," Pryor said in 1997. Indeed, he opposes abortion in almost every instance, including rape and incest. Pryor even backed a ludicrous bill in the Alabama legislature that would have appointed a lawyer to act as a guardian ad litem for the fetus of any woman considering an abortion.

His views haven't mellowed over time. "Abortion is murder and Roe v. Wade is an abominable decision," Pryor said last year. "I support the right to life of every unborn child."

Once those fetuses reach term, though, Pryor washes his hands of them, especially if they are poor or black. As attorney general he tried to undermine a consent decree aimed at improving Alabama's notorious state child welfare system, which stored troubled kids in abusive foster homes and wretched psychiatric wards. When asked about his maneuvers to shirk the requirements of the consent decree, Pryor cloaked it in the addled rhetoric of states rights. "It matters not to me whether the actions would leave children unprotected," Pryor said. "My job is to make sure that the state of Alabama isn't run by federal courts. My job isn't to come here and help children."

UNQUOTE

New Mexico is now allowing same-sex marriages.

Checking sitemeter, with which I can see the traffic to this blog, I tend to find some very interesting URLs... military, Department of Homeland Security, etc.

But this is a first - a big hearty welcome to our friends at the Texas Association of School Boards!

Before anyone jumps on them, I have no idea whether that group has a problem with this guy or not. For all I know, maybe they are the frontline advocates of scientific education.

The Supreme Court is going to decide, via the "enemy combatant" rules, whether we still have a Constitution.

Oh fuck. The bird flu has hit Texas.

Messiah complex.

Wait, the actor playing Jesus was STRUCK BY LIGHTNING during the shoot? And ignoring that, they're taking the babblings of crazy homeless as holy signs?

QUOTE

Mel Gibson says he took it as a sign to make "The Passion of the Christ" when a strange French woman approached him several years ago and said, "Jesus loves you."

"There were signals like this all over the place," Gibson said in a documentary about the making of his controversial movie, which opens Wednesday.

Gibson did not directly address Jewish concerns that his film is anti-Semitic but said he expected it would generate "hubbub."

"The truth is powerful stuff," he said. "The Gospels are for everybody, from the smallest child to the wisest sage."

James Caviezel, who plays Christ, said he got an equally eerie sign six months before he auditioned when a stranger came up to him and said, "You'll be playing Jesus."

Caviezel noted his initials are J.C. and was 33 - the same age as Jesus when he was killed. He said he's had fans bow down before him, and shrugged off the hardships of playing the physically demanding part.

"We're not called to the easy life," he said. "You either carry your cross, or you're crushed under the weight of it." But Caviezel did not sound so Christ-like when he described how he looked after he was struck by lightning as he hung on the cross. "I looked like I went to see Don King's hair stylist," he said.

UNQUOTE

Nader is going on Meet the Press this Sunday to announce whether he's officially campaigning to reelect Bush.

22,000 crime reports are missing in Atlanta?

Would you like to supersize your recession?

Chalabi laughs at how stupid the neocons were to buy his phony "intelligence" and says he got what he wanted - a US overthrow of his political rivals.

The wizard sends us a satire of what Dennis Miller would be saying if he had either a spine or a soul left.

Heh... this has been the most right-wing, theocratic presidency in US history, but the fundies still aren't satisfied. The American Taliban is threatening to pull their support from Bush.

Eight girls schools in Pakistan blown up in the last few days.

also via Slashdot (an interesting day over there!), arctic ice is an incredible sink for CO2.

Interview with William Gibson, via Slashdot.

Lovely. Now we're relying on South African apartheid mercenaries in Iraq. via Atrios.

via Slashdot, another of those fantastic inventions that will improve the lives of, literally, billions.

Top ten winter sky objects. Now if only it would clear up here for an evening so I could take my scope out.

Salt water on Mars?

Another Pluto-type object found. I'm not even going to get into the "is Pluto a planet" debate.

Ok, yea I am... it's a Kuiper object, of course.

As someone who finally quit smoking on New Year's Eve, I'm excited at this news that there may be a vaccine cure for lung cancer. Hell, I might as well start chain smoking again.

The bird flu sounds like a hell of a reason to switch to telecommuting.

Why the AWOL issue is important:

1) The flight suit prance on the carrier was intended by Rove to be the main image of the election.

2) Because Kerry's heroism is going to be attacked over and over and over again, as was that of McCain and Cleland.

3) Because, even though military service is not in any way a requirement of political viability, honesty should be.

Arianna Huffington on Bush's new crusade.

QUOTE

Regrettably, this perversion of presidential priorities is not limited to campaign rhetoric -- it extends to how our increasingly limited tax dollars are being spent. Take the administration's new anti-obscenity push -- a blast from our blue-nosed past. Bush's 2005 budget calls for a boost in funding for government efforts to crack down on the adult entertainment industry -- one of the precious few non-terror-related programs to garner a spending increase.

I kid you not: While the White House is cutting back on its housing budget, veterans' benefits, and the National Institutes of Health, it's opening up the coffers to make sure you have a harder time downloading the Paris Hilton sexcapade on the Net.

But that's not even the worst of it. The Justice Department has recently assigned a team of FBI agents to focus exclusively on adult obscenity cases. That's right, with the war on terror in full swing, our war president is going to have a group of G-men doing nothing but working the porn beat when they could be tracking down -- oh, I don't know -- terrorist sleeper cells. Talk about your misguided allocation of manpower. I don't know about you, but I certainly feel safer knowing the feds are going to be keeping close tabs on Jenna Jameson.

UNQUOTE

Love and joy, courtesy of Atrios, and courtesy of the people of California.

When I think of the offensive wreckage that the most conservative people I know have made of their marriages through years of infidelity, alchoholism, and emotional and physical abuse, then look at the joy in these pictures, it really does hit home that it is all about civil rights. No one is telling any religion they have to honor these marriages. But for Bush to be backing a Constitutional amendment to try to stop them is pathetic.

The election year is too important for me to limit the blog to my original obsession, but this is exactly it, courtesy of Bartlet for America, who immediately gets a permalink for this fine start (after, of course, being dead wrong with his first post about the AWOL issue):

QUOTE

WASHINGTON - A group of more than 60 top U.S. scientists, including 20 Nobel laureates and several science advisers to past Republican presidents, accused the Bush administration yesterday of manipulating and censoring science for political purposes.

In a 46-page report and an open letter, the scientists accused the administration of "suppressing, distorting or manipulating the work done by scientists at federal agencies" in several cases. The Union of Concerned Scientists, a liberal advocacy group based in Cambridge, Mass., organized the effort, but many of the critics aren't associated with it.

White House Science Advisor John Marburger III called the charges "like a conspiracy theory report, and I just don't buy that." But he added that "given the prestige of some of the individuals who have signed on to this, I think they deserve additional response and we're coordinating something."

The protesting scientists welcomed his response.

"If an administration of whatever political persuasion ignores scientific reality, they do so at great risk to the country," said Stanford University physicist W.H.K. Panofsky, who served on scientific advisory councils in the Eisenhower, Johnson and Carter administrations. "There is no clear understanding in the (Bush) administration that you cannot bend science and technology to policy."
UNQUOTE

Yet another death row inmate acquitted after a decade. I'm actually pro death penalty. But not under our current system. I've seen the inside of too many courtrooms and lawyer's offices to believe it's, as an old friend used to say, "Justice" instead of "just us."

Wild data on a black hole munching a star. I actually had an astrophysics professor in 1991 who was convinced that black holes don't exist, that they were an artifact of bad math. He didn't believe in anything discovered since 1950.

via Cursor, the tax cuts by average and by state.

It must be a full moon or something. I agree with Pat Buchanan. Not about his racist immigration attitude. But about the overblown apocalypse fantasies of the chickenhawks.

QUOTE
To suggest Frum and Perle are over the top is not to imply we not take seriously the threat of terror attacks on airliners, in malls, from dirty bombs, or, God forbid, a crude atomic device smuggled in by Ryder truck or container ship. Yet even this will never “overthrow our civilization.”

In the worst of terror attacks, we lost 3,000 people. Horrific. But at Antietam Creek, we lost 7,000 in a day’s battle in a nation that was one-ninth as populous. Three thousand men and boys perished every week for 200 weeks of that Civil War. We Americans did not curl up and die. We did not come all this way because we are made of sugar candy.

Germany and Japan suffered 3,000 dead every day in the last two years of World War II, with every city flattened and two blackened by atom bombs. Both came back in a decade. Is al-Qaeda capable of this sort of devastation when they are recruiting such scrub stock as Jose Padilla and the shoe bomber?

In the war we are in, our enemies are weak. That is why they resort to the weapon of the weak—terror. And, as in the Cold War, time is on America’s side. Perseverance and patience are called for, not this panic.

In 25 years, militant Islam has seized three countries: Iran, Sudan, and Afghanistan. We toppled the Taliban almost without losing a man. Sudan is a failed state. In Iran, a generation has grown up that knows nothing of Savak or the Great Satan but enough about the mullahs to have rejected them in back-to-back landslides. The Iranian Revolution has reached Thermidor. Wherever Islamism takes power, it fails. Like Marxism, it does not work.
UNQUOTE

via Cursor, a picture worth 14 million words on the Medicare debate.

This brings tears to my eyes. I really shouldn't expose myself to things that are going to affect me like this while I'm at the office. If the religious leaders in America were more like Fr. Greg Boyle than like Pat Robertson, I'd still be an atheist, but no longer convinced that religion is universally as divisive and hateful as it is in American politics. 23 minutes into it he talks about the difference between his approach and that of evangelists.

Marines are about to take over the most dangerous part of Iraq from the Army. But one strange thing in this article is that the commander of the Marine force has a name that looks like it would be a homonym with the most common derogatory term the army has for Iraqi citizens.

Mmmmm, brains.

Ah, nothing like picking your own successor for Governor of Texas, eh George?

It just goes back to the old truism - the more righteous and homophobic a guy is, the more likely he's dreaming of smoking some pole in his spare time. Republicans, you'd be so much happier if you just dumped your sham marriages and admitted your love. It's nothing to be ashamed of. I think assless chaps would be more comfortable in Texas this time of year than up here on the northern coast of the Southern wasteland.

Nathan sends an update on the wounded that the Administration ignores.

QUOTE
The betrayal of GIs and veterans continues in the so-called war on terrorism. The promises that the U.S. military would be greeted with flowers as liberators have disintegrated as soldiers die every day in a deadly guerrilla warfare that tells the GIs they are not wanted in Iraq. An article last July in The Christian Science Monitor quotes an officer in the 3rd Infantry Division in Iraq as saying: "Make no mistake, the level of morale for most soldiers that I've seen has hit rock bottom."

And those who come back alive, but blind or without arms or legs, find that the Bush Administration is cutting funds for veterans. Bush's State of the Union address, while going through the usual motions of thanking those serving in Iraq, continued his policy of ignoring the fact that thousands have come back wounded, in a war that is becoming increasingly unpopular.

The quick Thanksgiving visit of Bush to Iraq, much ballyhooed in the press, was seen differently by an army nurse in Landstuhl, Germany, where casualties from the war are treated. She sent out an e-mail: "My 'Bush Thanksgiving' was a little different. I spent it at the hospital taking care of a young West Point lieutenant wounded in Iraq. . . . When he pressed his fists into his eyes and rocked his head back and forth he looked like a little boy. They all do, all nineteen on the ward that day, some missing limbs, eyes, or worse. . . . It's too bad Bush didn't add us to his holiday agenda. The men said the same, but you'll never read that in the paper."
UNQUOTE

Once again from the "no shit, Sherlock" files, the US Commander in Iraq says we're staying there for years. The REAL point was to build bases not dependant on Saudi politics, and to get strategic control of the oil fields. Of course we're staying there.

I am glad to see him being honest. I hope Cheney doesn't punish him too harshly for being a good man.

The Onion's AV Club interviews Arthur C. Clarke.

Also, though I can't link directly to it since my work filter stops the main Onion site, read the "Hungover Couple Unaware They Broke Up" article - quite funny.

I've had friends with relationships like that. In fact, I'm sure there will be plenty of entertaining dramas like that at the Mainstrasse Mardi Gras this weekend. The Theatre House reportedly has the best prices on beads. I'm wearing a Big Head in the parade, though with the way it fits, I'm going to have a nose like Ed Asner by Sunday morning.

Dean drops out. Sort of. Maybe.

If Dean is serious about turning his organization toward local races all over the country, he'll be my hero forever.

Stephanie points out another murder in Iraq. The Americans are slaughtering them. The resistance is slaughtering them. The poverty is slaughtering them. I can't imagine why Iraqis aren't singing "Up With People" every moment of their joyous lives.

A little more on the Shiites vs Sunnis problem in Iraq, that is heating up the civil war.

Virginia is a lesson for the nation.

Write to Don Imus and call Rumsfeld a fucking liar!

Speaking as a guy who wears size 12 triple-E boots, I like this fundraising pitch.

QUOTE
Last week we took Tom DeLay out back and kicked the crap out of him. This week, we plan to do it again. Help support this ass-kicking! For only $25, your name can be on a bootprint on DeLay's mottled ass!
UNQUOTE

Hey, even we in Kentucky despise lying, cryptofascist, imperialist, fundamentalist, moronic jackasses like those who control today's GOP.

It's really something when we're nostalgic for Nixon. At least he was honest, compared to these psychopaths.

Do you see the writing on the wall, Cheney? Step a little closer. And here, wear this blindfold. Would you like a cigarette?

Prosecutor blows the whistle on Ashcroft.

via Tom Tomorrow, get your Ebola plush-toy.

Johnny Cash's family won't let Ring of Fire be used for hemorrhoid-relief commercials.

Madonna has optioned the movie rights to the true story of the Stanford Prison Experiment. I remembered reading about it in law school, and talking to a fellow student who runs a prison reform group about the experiment, but had forgotten just how serious it got.

via Eschaton, Bill Bennet likes to be bound and beaten? "Developing...."

Dude, you don't need to pay for that. I'll beat Bill Bennett for free. Fuck, I'll pay HIM to do it.

Time Magazine to offer its entire archive online to subscribers.

Rock on Cincinnati! Via The Cincinnati Blog, we find that 25,000 Baptists will be attending the convention in 2008.

A Walk in the Brain brings us news that 5,000 troops are going to be brought in to intimidate protestors at the Republican Convention.

Kent State?

Larry Flynt claims he's got all the proof that Bush paid for his girlfriend's abortion. He's coming out with a book this summer containing the allegations (which have been floating around for years) and the proof.

The NYTimes thinks there haven't been many attack ads by Democrats yet. I guess they don't count those by or against Dean.

11,000 claims against 4,450 priests.

Religion kills.

Gephardt backers and Torricelli were the main sources of the funding behind the anonymous attacks on Howard Dean that arguably killed his candidacy just when it could have really taken off.

QUOTE
NOW THAT IT doesn't much matter anymore, we learn, finally, the financiers behind a group called Americans for Jobs, Healthcare and Progressive Values. The group surfaced in December, about a month before the start of the Democratic primaries, with $500,000 worth of hard-hitting television ads attacking former Vermont governor Howard Dean, then the front-runner. Its organizers refused to release the names of its donors -- and the archaic reporting schedule that governs disclosure by such groups didn't require them to do so until this month.

The list makes clearer than ever that the rules need to be changed to provide timely disclosure -- to ensure that voters know who is behind this kind of attack advertising in time to factor that into their decision-making, should they so choose. We learn now that unions that had endorsed Rep. Richard A. Gephardt (Mo.) contributed $200,000 of the group's $663,000 in donations. Two top Gephardt backers also contributed: Leo Hindery Jr. of YES Network ($100,000), who served as a national finance co-chair, and Swanee Hunt ($25,000), who was a national campaign co-chair.

While Mr. Gephardt's backers constituted the bulk of the donors, they weren't alone: Slim-Fast Foods founder S. Daniel Abraham, a major Democratic donor who contributed to his home state senator, Bob Graham (Fla.), and to Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.), gave $100,000. J. McDonald Williams, a former chairman of the Trammell Crow construction company and a donor to the Bush-Cheney campaign this year, though to Democrats in previous cycles, gave $50,000.

And then there's former senator Robert G. Torricelli (D-N.J.), who donated $50,000 -- not from his own pocket, but out of his leftover campaign funds. Mr. Torricelli, you will remember, had the cash to spare because he was forced to quit his reelection race after being "severely admonished" by the Senate Ethics Committee for accepting expensive gifts from a campaign donor he was doing official favors for. Now a champion at collecting special-interest money is gathering checks for Mr. Kerry, who's busy railing against those interests.

All this is interesting, but it would have been nice to know who was financing these attacks -- and who they were allied with -- while they were still airing. Adding insult to injury, the group's report -- which was filed Jan. 30 -- didn't show up on the Internal Revenue Service Web site until Friday, due to an IRS glitch that prevented it from submitting the report electronically. The IRS was given the job of releasing this information because groups such as this one don't have to register with the Federal Election Commission. But the agency is used to keeping data secret, not making sure information is publicly available. It needs to get better at this new task.
UNQUOTE

The Washington Post has a good editorial calling attention to the absurdity of keeping secret even the total amount we spend on intelligence.

Another good moment for my favorite quote:

"When information which properly belongs to the public is systematically withheld by those in power, the people soon become ignorant of their own affairs, distrustful of those who manage them, and, eventually, incapable of determining their own destiny." - Richard M. Nixon

In Virginia, the GOP acts to end tax breaks for business, in order to balance the budget. Imagine that - Republicans acting responsibly. It's sort of a "man bites dog" story, isn't it? Could this possibly be the first attempt by real Republicans to retake the GOP from the psychopaths?

Hard core racism as public policy. Right here. Right now.

Here's a link that shouldn't need membership to the NYTimes.

QUOTE
Ohio Town's Water at Last Runs Past a Color Line
By JAMES DAO

Published: February 17, 2004


ZANESVILLE, Ohio — In January, a strange thing happened when people along Coal Run Road turned on their taps. Drinking water came out. Not the sulfur-tinged, bug-infested stuff that collected in their cisterns or swirled in their wells. Cool, clean, straight-from-the-pumping-station city water.

For most of their lives, residents of this tiny hollow on the edge of town lived a bit like frontiersmen, keeping drinking water in jugs, collecting rainwater in barrels, even occasionally melting snow from their yards, all because they did not have city water service.

"I never thought I'd live to see it," said Helen McCuen, an 89-year-old widow who has lived in the hollow for 57 years.

The story of how they got that water, and were for years denied it, seems anachronistic in 21st-century America. But it speaks volumes, the residents contend, about disparities in living standards that are related to the color of one's skin.

For years, decades really, residents of the hollow had been asking local officials to extend water lines down their narrow, twisting roads. Not enough water pressure, they were told. Too expensive. Too hilly.

Yet just up the hill, not 200 yards away, homeowners have had running municipal water for years. One new homeowner even installed a hot tub and routinely sprinkled his lawn, something residents of the hollow could never do with their 1,000-gallon cisterns, which were constantly running dry.

Almost all the people living at the top of the hill are white. Almost all the people in the hollow are racially mixed: white, black and American Indian. And it increasingly seemed to residents of the hollow that this had something to do with their plight.

"The water stopped where the black folks started," said Saundra McCuen, 49, one of Helen McCuen's seven children. "I don't want to use the race thing, but what else could it be?"

In 2002, two dozen residents filed a complaint with the Ohio Civil Rights Commission, asserting that they had been denied water service because of racial discrimination. Last summer, the commission agreed.

The commission found that on Coal Run Road, none of the 17 black or mixed-race homes had city water service, while two white homes did. On nearby Langan Lane, all of the 18 white homes on top of the hill had city water, while five of the eight black or mixed-race homes in the hollow did not. (The other three families had connected to the municipal lines by themselves.)

The commission concluded there was probable cause to believe that the city, county and local water authority had "failed to provide the complainants with access to public water service because of their race."

One month after the report was released, Muskingum County announced it had found enough money to issue a $730,000 contract to extend water lines into the hollow. (Officials had used a much higher estimate — $2 million — when they told hollow residents a few years ago that it was too expensive to connect them to the water system, residents said.)

Government officials say race had nothing to do with the lack of water service in the hollow. But they have also begun blaming one another.

City officials contend that a now-defunct water authority removed the hollow from its service area many years ago, leaving responsibility for water to the city. But Zanesville, a city of 28,000 people, decided it could not extend lines into the hollow because it lies just outside the city limits, said Scott Hillis, the city's law director. The city assumed that the county would provide the water.

But Muskingum County officials contend they did not become aware of the hollow's situation until two years ago. (Zanesville officials said they told the county of the hollow's requests at least eight years ago.)

County officials also contend they have not had enough money to meet the county's needs, since about half of its residents — most of whom live in remote rural areas — do not have running water.

"As far as I'm concerned the suit is ludicrous," said Dorothy Montgomery, a Muskingum County commissioner. "There is nothing done by the commissioners that is based on black or white."

Zanesville, 60 miles east of Columbus, was founded 200 years ago as a way station for migrants moving from Virginia to Kentucky. It became famous for its clay pottery and Y-shaped concrete bridge over the Muskingum and Licking Rivers, but fell on hard times after World War II as many of its kilns and mills closed.

Before the Civil War, the underground railroad ran through the city. But city businesses remained segregated until the late 1950's, residents said. And the Ku Klux Klan has been active for decades, holding small rallies in the region as recently as the late 1990's.

The denial of water service "wasn't in-your-face racism," said Vincent Curry, executive director of Fair Housing Advocates Association, a group based in Akron that helped the residents file their complaint. "This was more, `We won't respond to you because we don't care about you.' "

Until January, Helen McCuen paid a "water man" to fill a cistern buried in her front yard twice a month. And until the 1980's, when she finally bought an electric pump, she and her children used a hand pump and pail to bring water into the house. Drinking water was bought by the jug. And if supplies ran low, the family rationed baths and caught rain in barrels.

"I didn't think I could get used to drinking water out of the tap," Ms. McCuen said, sitting in her cozy living room surrounded by photographs of grandchildren and great-grandchildren. "But I did."

For Jerry Kennedy, 54, the indignity of hauling water struck home a few years ago when he offered a friend a cup of coffee. His cistern was empty, so he opened the door and walked into the winter air to gather snow.

"What are you doing?" his friend asked.

"Getting water for your coffee," he replied.

She was stunned, he said, to learn that he did not have water service.

A few residents drilled wells for drinking water. But most local wells have been polluted by iron and sulfur runoff from abandoned mines that turns the water red and makes it smell like rotten eggs in the summer.

John P. Relman, a lawyer in Washington representing residents of the hollow, said they spent 5 or 10 times as much as other people in the area for water because they had to buy or haul it themselves. Mr. Relman has filed suit for the homeowners, seeking compensation from local authorities for those higher costs.

"They stereotyped us as poor, uneducated black folks who didn't have enough sense to ask for water," said Cynthia Hairston, a nurse who grew up along Coal Run Road, left for two decades and then returned with her husband three years ago. "And then we did. And they said: `Where did they come from? We thought we had pushed them back into the corner.' "
UNQUOTE

via A Walk in the Brain, a rundown of how THIS President has honored the office.

Counterspin has quote a theory on scandal-mongering by Stooge, I mean Drudge.

It's still clearly Rove, trying to divert attention from the drug arrests hiding underneath the AWOL document destruction scandal.

This is so self-referential I'm not even going to describe it. I'm not sure if it is post-post-post-modern, an empty simulacra, a powerful political-economic protest, or just a hilarious joke. In any event Sonic Youth has made a hell of a statement.

Calpundit shows how to make NYTimes permalinks. Dunno yet if it works. I'll try it at home later.

Plans are being drawn up to dismantle the BBC as vengeance for reporting that there were no WMD in Iraq.

In vivo gene therapy doubles muscle strength in rats.

Alexandra Polier yet again denies anything ever happened between her and Kerry.

and again. and again.

Does Nader actually understand what the word "censorship" means?

Days after he's pardoned by Musharaff for selling nuclear weapons tech to everybody in the Axis of Evil, the godfather of the Pakistani nuclear program has a heart attack and is in critical condition.

Hmmmmm.

via Hegemo, Amazon Glitch Unmasks War of Reviewers.

QUOTE
The weeklong glitch, which Amazon fixed after outed reviewers complained, provided a rare glimpse at how writers and readers are wielding the online reviews as a tool to promote or pan a book — when they think no one is watching.

John Rechy, author of the best-selling 1963 novel "City of Night" and winner of the PEN-USA West lifetime achievement award, is one of several prominent authors who have apparently pseudonymously written themselves five-star reviews, Amazon's highest rating. Mr. Rechy, who laughed about it when approached, sees it as a means to survival when online stars mean sales.

"That anybody is allowed to come in and anonymously trash a book to me is absurd," said Mr. Rechy, who, having been caught, freely admitted to praising his new book, "The Life and Adventures of Lyle Clemens," on Amazon under the signature "a reader from Chicago." "How to strike back? Just go in and rebut every single one of them."

Mr. Rechy is in good company. Walt Whitman and Anthony Burgess both famously reviewed their own books under assumed names. But several modern-day writers said the Internet, where anyone from your mother to your ex-agent can anonymously broadcast an opinion of your work, has created a more urgent need for self-defense.

Under Amazon's system, any user may submit a review without publicly providing any personal information (or evidence of having read the book). The posting of real names on the Canadian site was for many a reminder that anonymity on the Internet is seldom a sure thing.

"It was an unfortunate error," said Patricia Smith, an Amazon spokeswoman. "We'll examine whatever happened and make sure it won't happen again."

But even with reviewer privacy restored, many people say Amazon's pages have turned into what one writer called "a rhetorical war," where friends and family members are regularly corralled to write glowing reviews and each negative one is scrutinized for the digital fingerprints of known enemies.

One well-known writer admitted privately — and gleefully — to anonymously criticizing a more prominent novelist who he felt had unfairly reaped critical praise for years. She regularly posts responses, or at least he thinks it is her, but the elegant rebuttals of his reviews are also written from behind a pseudonym.
UNQUOTE

I guess that's a downside to online anonymity. Hilarious, none the less.

McCain, a far more reliable defender of Democrats than most democrats, boot stomps the asshole behind Vietnam Vets Against Kerry. via Counterspin.

Dean's campaign chairman is already publicly talking about supporting Kerry.

UPDATE: And he's kicked off the campaign staff.

They may have found The Beagle. No, not the Beagle 2, Britain's Mars probe... I mean Darwin's ride on that fateful tour.

Looks like I'm not the only one getting hits from Homeland Security... they're doing a little window shopping. via Counterspin.

via A Walk in the Brain, 867-5309 is for sale on ebay.

An update on the DARPA unmanned vehicle race, via Slashdot.

Hubble (murdered by Bush) photographs a galaxy on the far edge of time.

Democrats NOT trying to destroy the front-runner? Did they get switched with pod-people? Seriously, the idea of a democrat wanting the party to win an election, even if he isn't the candidate, just boggles the mind.

Lets just for a minute suspend our belief, and take Bush seriously that the invasion, occupation, and nurturing of civil war in Iraq was motivated by a desire to remedy human suffering. Yea, I know, it doesn't even pass the laugh test. But just for a second, give him the benefit of the doubt...

So when is he going to do something for Haiti?

The issue is on the first hour of the Diane Rehm show this morning.

UPDATE:

Listening to the show, the US Ambassador is coming off as encouraging the International Republican Institute backed coup currently overthrowing Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and advocating the riots and death squads of the opposition.

I have no idea who's right there. But the involvement of the International Republican Institute lends a sordid and money-smelling pall over the chaos there.

More hilarious double standards... the leader of a group of college repugnicans who founded a "whites-only" award to protest the awarding of blacks-only scholarships, is only at the school because he himself the recipient of a Puerto Ricans-only scholarship.

"The school temporarily froze the Republicans' money in the fall during a fight over a series of articles published in its monthly newsletter. One article alleged that a gay-rights group indoctri nates students into homosexual sex."

So... what exactly does he think he was getting initiated into when his frat brothers brought out the paddles and told him to grab his ankles?

"Iraq may be slipping into civil war."

No shit? They actually pay "experts" to figure these things out.

The wizard sends us the logical progression of myth-centered marriage amendments.

Pay attention to me! Pay attention to me! Pay attention to me! Pay attention to me! Pay attention to me! Pay attention to me! Pay attention to me! Pay attention to me! Pay attention to me! Pay attention to me! Pay attention to me! Pay attention to me! Pay attention to me!

Brought to you by Naderites for Bush-Cheney 2004

"You work, and you slave, and you steal just enough for a sweet lick of that shiny brass ring... don't I get a lick?
Doesn't Gil get a lick?"
-- The Simpsons "The Trouble With Trillions"

Intelligent Design theory of economics

One for the Wizard - a collection of punk rock album art.

Hmmm... Is Fox News reporting that the Bush Administration asked Britain to bug Democrat phones? via Eschaton.

Of course, the fella is a little out there.

But then, it's already public knowledge that we do it, and that the UK and the US bypass our privacy laws by agreeing to spy on each other's citizens.

In all the talk about Gibson's remake of "Jeebus, The Snuff Film" being either a ridiculous polemic by a holocaust revisionist, or, alternatively, a brilliant evangelism by a holocaust revisionist, there's not much talk about one of the basic measure of the verisimilitude of a movie about the area 2,000 years ago - the actor playing Jeebus is a little, um, pale.

Post-google theory.

Was Bush kicked out of the Texas National Guard? It looks like it - the regulation under which he was transferred states:

"Officers who are substandard in performance of duty or conduct, deficient in character, lacking in professional qualifications or status, or otherwise unsuited for continued military service are not to be retained in the Texas National Guard. Presence of one or more of these conditions will be sufficient basis for the administrative discharge of an officer from the Texas National Guard. Additionally, an officer of the Texas National Guard may be administratively discharged from his appointment for one or more of the following reasons or conditions."

His refusal to take an official physical because they started drug testing would trigger this. As would worse behavior that may be represented in all the redacted arrest records.

Failed states are the breeding ground of terrorists. Bush seems to be making damn sure it happens in Iraq.

It occurs to me that there is a simple way for Bush to end all this controversy over the fact that he went AWOL and never completed his National Guard obligations - he should go back and finish them now. I think a year in Iraq would do him a world of good, too.

via Counterspin, a right wing christian terrorist, and former army ranger, pleads guilty to plotting to blow up abortion clinics, gay bars, and "churches that refused to take a tough stance against abortion" across America.

again via Eschaton, the children's hospital in Baghdad:

QUOTE

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Feb. 13 — At Baghdad's Central Teaching Hospital for Children, gallons of raw sewage wash across the floors. The drinking water is contaminated. According to doctors, 80 percent of patients leave with infections they did not have when they arrived.

Doctors say they have been beaten up in the emergency room. Blood is in such short supply that physicians often donate their own to patients lying in front of them.

"The word `big' is not enough to express the disaster we are facing," said Ahmed A. Muhammad, the hospital's assistant manager.

To be sure, Iraq's hospitals were in bleak shape before the American-led invasion last year. International isolation and the sanctions imposed after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990 had already shattered a public health care system that was once the jewel of the Middle East. Crucial machines stopped working. Drugs were in short supply.

Conditions eased a bit once the United Nations oil-for-food program started in 1996, but the country still suffered, especially the children.

But Iraqi doctors say the war has pushed them closer to disaster. Fighting and sabotage have destroyed crucial infrastructure and the fall of Saddam Hussein precipitated a breakdown in social order.

"It's definitely worse now than before the war," said Eman Asim, the Ministry of Health official who oversees the country's 185 public hospitals. "Even at the height of sanctions, when things were miserable, it wasn't as bad as this. At least then someone was in control."


UNQUOTE

The Washington Post compares Kerry and Bush contributions from special interest lobbies.

via Eschaton, the Bush Administration has appointed a 5 person panel to ban closed captioning for the hearing impaired from shows they disagree with. Yes, the Simpsons is one that will no longer be eligible for captioning (at least with federal disability funding.)

QUOTE


The Bush administration has decided that people with bad hearing have bad judgment, too, and need special guidance from the federal government.

So the U.S. Department of Education is declaring about 200 television programs inappropriate for closed-captioning and denying federal grant requests to make them accessible to the hearing-impaired.

The department made its decisions based on the recommendations of a five-member panel. Who the five members are, only the government seems to know, and it isn't saying. But the shows they censored suggest a perspective that is Talibanesque.

The government is refusing to caption Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie, apparently fearing that the deaf would fall prey to witchcraft if they viewed the classic sitcoms.



UNQUOTE

The newest reality show.

Don't run for office in Russia... candidate drugged and kidnapped? Have they checked whether he still has both kidneys?

FINALLY! Greenspan finally admits that deficits are a terrible danger.

What a tired old fraud, to hold such power. But what else would be expect from an Ayn Rand cultist?

Interview regarding the Iran-Contra and October Surprise connections of the weasel Bush put in charge of the latest intelligence probe. via Cursor.

Porn ring at St. X. Heh - big deal. Things haven't changed much at my alma mater... freshman year on a school trip to NY, I was the only one with the nerve to go down to the hotel lobby and buy dirty magazines, which I then sold to the other guys at a profit.

The teachers were at a taping of the David Letterman show at the time, heckling his pronunciation of the name Deng Xiaoping.

And what do you know - a classmate of mine is in the paper on the same day.

The freepers talk evolution. It's like watching 1st graders talk existentialism.

Makr points out over on the Rambler that Snopes should be checked any time you get email from a republican. 99% of it is bullshit. The other 1% is a request for money.

Slate calls on the NYTimes to come clean about Judith Miller's terrible track record of reporting on the WMD issues.

Robot Stories sounds really interesting. via Slashdot.

via Eschaton, US Army intelligence agents demand information on participants in a UT law school panel on women's rights under Islam.

Imagine the outcry among conservatives had they started aggressively investigating the anti-abortion movement in South Carolina, three years ago, when it was sheltering actual fugitive murderers and terrorists.

As for the Kerry "scandal" it appears Drudge pulled it out of his ass. Or out of Karl Rove's ass, or whatever asses Drudge is playing with this week (yes, I am outing Drudge. He's gay. He's a big homo! Naya naya naya! The only reason he's in the closet is because his first love is the attention he gets from the radical right wing.)

A british tabloid tracked it down, found that the woman in question sent Kerry a resume, he offered her a campaign job, she declined, and that's the end of it. No blow jobs, rim jobs, intercourse, kissing, snuggling, infidelity, forced laughter at bad jokes about May-December romance, no Meg Ryan movies, no massages, no weekend getaways, no "I told you never to call me here!", no thongs, no cigars, just NO FUCKING SCANDAL AT ALL!

Which gets us back to the timing... the National Guard AWOL records destruction story is serious. And there's something even more serious hiding underneath it.

The Guantánamo detainees may never be released, never have access to legal counsel, never appeal, and never have a ray of hope. Welcome to the Gulag Archipelago.

World Press Photo of the Year

via Salon.com, the Ayn Rand dating service.

Google is banning environmental ads that criticize Royal Caribbean.

Aaron sends us a glimpse of what the far right theocrats are up to. Scary stuff.

He takes special note of the part about the evils of women driving.

The parts about the "Talmudites" boiling Jesus in hot semen seems a little fevered to me, but who am I to criticize someone's religion? ;-)

Isn't it funny how at the exact moment that the Bush AWOL story is breaking wide open, and pointing to even more serious scandals such as destruction of records that possibly show drug arrests, suddenly the bomb is dropped that Kerry may or may not have fucked a woman in her 20's during his marriage.

I wonder who orchestrated the timing on that one? But it's a good sign... Rove wouldn't have voluntarily used that ammo until it was closer to the election, unless he absolutely had to find some misdirection from a crippling Bush scandal, or desperately wanted to derail Kerry from being the Democratic candidate.

Either way, it comes out that Kerry is the Bonesman in this race.

I don't think it is likely the scandal Drudge wants it to be. They would have known it was going to come out sooner or later, and after Clinton, no one wants to be back defending that bullshit again.

But even if it is real, Kerry's not knocked out by it.

I don't approve of adultery in any way, shape or form. But other people have all kinds of arrangements in their marriages, humans are weak, and politicians especially seem to be a bunch of horn-dogs. If adultery were a litmus test for political office, Washington would be empty and silent except for the barking of a lone dog off in the distance. After the past few years, Washington is coming off as one big 24/7 swingers party in slow motion. And the more pompous and judgmental a politician, the more likely he's got someone kneeling under the desk. Just look at our boy Newt Gingrich.

Clark is endorsing Kerry.

Update on the UT2004 demo

Here's a nice fast download I just found... it's maintaining faster than 70kbs on zoomtown. The torrents are slow and the main download sites are swamped: Download Unreal Tournament 2004 Demo

via Counterspin, the guys who served in the Alabama National Guard unit to which Bush was supposed to report, and who were specifically told to look out for him, say he never showed up.

via TORN A deep thematic comparison of the three major fantasy/scifi trilogies.

QUOTE

The Matrix is based on the 1968 East German play Wirklichkeit ist eine Illusion, also lassen Sie uns sprechen Rätsel, Eintragfaden-Polizei und Tanzkampf ("Reality is an Illusion, so Let Us Speak Riddles, Shoot Police and Dancefight"). The original live production ended with a stunning dance sequence (set to Wagner's Nightsong of the Gun Mechs) which the Wachowski brothers have set side in favor of a silly RoboCopesque sky-shooting fireworks display that resembles an inner-city New Year's Eve celebration from the year 2214.

[...]

From Jackson's insulting portrayal of women - Legolas is reduced to simplistic, mindless interjections ("a diversion!") and decorating the scenery with her beauty - to his dwarf who, in every single sentence, mentions the fact that he is a dwarf, Jackson's cast of characters is a group one would long to never meet in real life.

[...]

Keanu Reeves' performance as this courageous mentally challenged man is an inspiration to P.C. gamers everywhere who have had their vocabularies destroyed by monitor radiation. His tragic bout of gamma-induced impotence in mid-intercourse during Reloaded, and the look of erectile frustration on his face, was heart-wrenching.

The rest of the casting leaves much to be desired, with the only bright spot being Monica Bellucci in both sequels. Her performances in the two films are a pair of ripe, full, well-rounded portrayals of firm, voluptuous womanhood that will go down as as two of the breast roles in recent mammary.

[...]

As if this were somehow not enough, Lucas shocks us with a point of view that is almost heresy in a 21st Century USA. Lucas believes it is justified to destroy the inhabitants of a large building, if it facilitates the means of those called to martydom by The Force. Further, aggressive military action is never to be unilateral and pre-emptive. Han Solo knows he is in mortal danger in the Cantina scene... but he waits until Greedo fires before responding with deadly force. This is a lesson a certain American President could learn.

[...]

American civil rights activist Martin Luther King, in his famous 1968 speech, pleaded to "let freedom ring" across the land, "ringing" in a new era of racial harmony. In Bakshi's film, we have that very "ring" in our hands, the "ring" of freedom and racial equality, the "ring" that will let every white and black child play with race-blind eyes.

Frodo's mission is to destroy the ring.

The Orcs are to be wiped out, not integrated into society. The elves are to slowly die off, not to be merged with the world of man. You look for the central symbolism and story theme of these films and I say we find it here. Let freedom ring, Dr. King. Let freedom ring, from the hills to the valleys, across the countryside. Let freedom ring, until a midget melts it in the fires of Hell itself.

[...]

In Lord of the Rings there are but two failures to note. The first and most obvious weakness is the CGI Gollum, specifically the physics and fabric movement of his loincloth. Gollum is seen climbing up and down cliffs in the garment and not once are his genitals seen falling out. I can attest to the real-world failing of this popular loincloth design (often called a Siamese Dongcurtain) as I had to wear one during my service with the RAF in the 1950's and even a trifling English wind would make my most masculine of secrets public.

UNQUOTE

Don't miss his 50 Reasons to Reject the Matrix post - I'm laughing so hard I'm going to have to stop goofing off or leave work. My boss's office is dark, so guess which it's gonna be?

via Eschaton, Robert Novak needs to go to jail, now. Two senior officials have testified that they told Novak that Plame was covert and warned him not to blow her cover.

QUOTE

Two government officials have told the FBI that conservative columnist Robert Novak was asked specifically not to publish the name of undercover CIA operative Valerie Plame in his now-famous July 14 newspaper column. The two officials told investigators they warned Novak that by naming Plame he might potentially jeopardize her ability to engage in covert work, stymie ongoing intelligence operations, and jeopardize sensitive overseas sources.

These new accounts, provided by a current and former administration official close to the situation, directly contradict public statements made by Novak. He has downplayed his own knowledge about the potential harm to Plame and ongoing intelligence operations by making that disclosure. He has also claimed in various public statements that intelligence officials falsely led him to believe that Plame was only an analyst, and the only potential consequences of her exposure as a CIA officer would be that she might be inconvenienced in her foreign travels.

The two administration officials questioned by the FBI characterized Novak's statements as untrue and misleading, according to a government official and an attorney official familiar with the FBI interviews.

One of the sources also asserted that the credibility of the administration officials who spoke to the FBI is enhanced by the fact that the officials made their statement to the federal law enforcement authorities. If the officials were found to be lying to the FBI, they could be potentially prosecuted for making false statements to federal investigators.

Novak declined to be interviewed for this article.


UNQUOTE

Calpundit has a must-read interview on the illegal National Guard records destruction by the Bush cabal.

This line of attack on Kerry's Vietnam protest just tickles me more and more.

George W. Bush thinks it was a great thing that 55,000 American soldiers died for a mistake, but he made damn sure by pulling every privilege string imaginable that his drunk ass stayed right at home.

John F. Kerry thinks it was shameful that 55,000 American soldiers died for a mistake, but he left blood in muddy Vietnam rivers, and has a chest full of commendations for valor, because he thought it his duty.

Yet the morons on the right think this issue breaks for them.

No one ever accused a republican of being smart, I guess.

Via Wes F. at A Walk in the Brain, a great cartoon.

The second part of Salon's series on the new Cointelpro.

via A Voyage to Arcturus, a collection of those great 70's concept art designs for space colonies.

I've heard many people talk about how horrible it would be to live in a colony, imagining a submarine, I guess.

My image of a Lunar colony has always been this one peak aesthetic possibility - the incredible view from a transparent dome. That could be yours.

And don't tell me Mars would be ugly... I lived in Phoenix... deserts are beautiful.

This is a very cool navigation system for space art.

via [about ten links in through a bunch of blogs I can't recall so who knows the credibility] the George Bush we all know is underneath the pancake makeup and stuffed socks:

QUOTE

Those who encountered Bush in Alabama remember him as an affable social drinker who acted younger than his 26 years. Referred to as George Bush, Jr. by newspapers in those days, sources say he also tended to show up late every day, around noon or one, at Blount's campaign headquarters in Montgomery. They say Bush would prop his cowboy boots on a desk and brag about how much he drank the night before.

They also remember Bush's stories about how the New Haven, Connecticut police always let him go, after he told them his name, when they stopped him "all the time" for driving drunk as a student at Yale in the late 1960s. Bush told this story to others working in the campaign "what seemed like a hundred times," says Red Blount's nephew C. Murphy Archibald, now an attorney in Charlotte, N.C., who also worked on the Blount campaign and said he had "vivid memories" of that time.

"He would laugh uproariously as though there was something funny about this. To me, that was pretty memorable, because here he is, a number of years out of college, talking about this to people he doesn't know," Archibald said. "He just struck me as a guy who really had an idea of himself as very much a child of privilege, that he wasn't operating by the same rules."

During this period Bush often socialized with the young ladies of Huntington College, located in the Old Cloverdale historic neighborhood where he stayed. Bush even dated Nixon's daughter Tricia in the early 1970s, according to newspaper accounts. Bush was described as "young and personable" by the Montgomery Independent society columnist, and seen dancing at the Whitley Hotel on election night November 7 with "the blonde, pretty Emily Marks."

During the 2000 campaign, the Boston Globe named Marks as one of Bush's former girlfriends. But she and several other women who dated him during that time refused to say anything bad on the record about Bush, now a sitting president.

Many of those who came into close contact with Bush say he liked to drink beer and Jim Beam whiskey, and to eat fist-fulls of peanuts, and Executive burgers, at the Cloverdale Grill. They also say he liked to sneak out back for a joint of marijuana or into the head for a line of cocaine. The newspapers that year are full of stories about the scourge of cocaine from Vietnam and China, much of it imported by the French. (Remember the French Connection?)

According to Cathy Donelson, a daughter of old Montgomery but one of the toughest investigative reporters to work for newspapers in Alabama over the years, the 1960s came to Old Cloverdale in the early 1970s about the time of Bush's arrival.

"We did a lot of drugs in those days," she said. "The 1970s are a blur."


UNQUOTE

Drudge is reporting that Kerry had an affair with an intern, and alleges that Kerry "prodded her to flee the country" during the campaign.

And just think, this is only the warmup.

Via Counterspin, Firefighters for Kerry

and some revealing background on Ted Sampley the guy behind "Vietnam Veterans Against Kerry" - not only is he the guy behind the vicious slanders on John McCain in 2000, he's also done evil at the expense of families who lost loved ones in Vietnam.

Aaron send us this strange bit of Bush family history:

QUOTE

http://msn.ancestry.com/landing/msn/strange/bush3/tree.htm

he's probably related to torquemada as well.

nah, i always said the bushes act like they're entitled or something...

just a reminder...

http://www.britannia.com/history/monarchs/mon30.html

UNQUOTE

Christian religious freaks shut down a demonstration of Buddhist chants.

via Atrios, the National Guard AWOL thing is splitting wide open, and it is very, very bad for the Bush cabal:

Bush didn't request permission to flee to Alabama, and was denied permission after he got there.

QUOTE

George W. Bush left his Texas Air National Guard assignment and moved to Alabama in 1972 even though the Air Force denied his request for a transfer, according to his military records.

In fact, Bush did not even ask for an official transfer until nine days after he moved to Alabama in May 1972.

The Air Force quickly rejected Bush's request, saying the fighter pilot was "ineligible" to move to the Alabama unit Bush wanted - a squadron of postal handlers.

Nevertheless, Bush stayed in Alabama until his Texas commanders finally gave him written authorization five months later to train there.
UNQUOTE


Bush's records were altered and "cleansed" illegally.

QUOTE

WASHINGTON — As Texas Gov. George W. Bush prepared to run for president in the late 1990s, top-ranking Texas National Guard officers and Bush advisers discussed ways to limit the release of potentially embarrassing details from Bush's military records, a former senior officer of the Texas Guard said Wednesday.

A second former Texas Guard official, who spoke only on condition of anonymity, was told by a participant that commanders and Bush advisers were particularly worried about mentions in the records of arrests of Bush before he joined the National Guard in 1968, the second official said.

Bill Burkett, then a top adviser to the state Guard commander, said he overheard conversations in which superiors discussed "cleansing" the file of damaging information.

The White House dismissed Burkett's charge Wednesday. It is an "outrageously false statement," said White House communications director Dan Bartlett, who handled the records in the late 1990s as an aide to Gov. Bush. Administration officials dismiss Burkett as a disgruntled former Guardsman who had a falling-out with his superiors.

Two forms in Bush's publicly released military files — his enlistment application and a background check — contain blacked-out entries in response to questions about arrests or convictions. Bush acknowledged in biographies published in 1999 that he was arrested twice before he enlisted in the Air National Guard: once for stealing a wreath and another time for rowdiness at a Yale-Princeton football game.

The nature of what was blacked out in Bush's records is important because certain legal problems, such as drug or alcohol violations, could have been a basis for denying an applicant entry into the Guard or pilot training. Admission to the Guard and to pilot school was highly competitive at that time, the height of the Vietnam War.

The National Guard cited privacy as the reason for blacking out answers. The full, unmarked records have never been released. Bartlett did not respond Wednesday to a request to release the records with nothing blacked out, which Bush could do as the subject of the records.

Burkett says that the state Guard commander, Maj. Gen. Daniel James III, discussed "cleansing" Bush's military files of embarrassing or incriminating documents in the summer of 1997. At the time, Burkett was a lieutenant colonel and a chief adviser to James. He says he was just outside James' open office door when his boss discussed the records on a speakerphone with Joe Allbaugh, who was then Gov. Bush's chief of staff. [Bush has since elevated James to be director of the Air National Guard for the entire country.]

In Burkett's account, Allbaugh told James that Bush's press secretary, Karen Hughes, was preparing a biography and needed information on Bush's military service.

In an interview, Burkett said he recalled Allbaugh's words: "We certainly don't want anything that is embarrassing in there." Burkett said he immediately told two other officers about the conversation and noted it in a daily journal he kept. The two officers, George Conn and Dennis Adams, confirmed to USA TODAY in 2002 that Burkett told them of the conversation within days.

UNQUOTE

A comment from letters on Salon.com:

Bush and the Republicans in general are masters at using language and intimidating the press corps.

Last night on NPR a linguist from UC-Berkeley was discussing how adept the far right is at phrasing things to benefit themselves and sell people on what they want. One point he made is that people don't vote in their best interest. They vote for the person who uses language best to frame an issue in a favorable light.


Death Tax, partial-birth abortion, Why do you hate America?

UT2004 Demo released.

Happiness is a warm flak cannon.

via Slashdot... Simpsons, The Movie!

Don't get too excited quite yet... they're only "in the very early stages of developing an idea for the movie".

Cursor found a back door link to the Time article on Bush's credibility problem. I think they mean the constant pathological lying of his entire administration.

Talk of the Nation celebrates the 100th birthday of Dr. Suess.

Seeing the headlines, I had thought this was the attack from yesterday. It isn't. More than 100 dead in 24 hours in Iraq.

Salon has a good article on the crackdown on freedom of assembly and speech.

via Eschaton, far more detail on the 9-11 highjackings, and some insight on how well the coverup is going.

Panel begins space exploration hearings.

Interesting theory on why pyramids were built. The Stargate idea is more fun.

Oldest known insect fossil.

AWOL had his documents destroyed?

Stephanie points out the frightening rate at which OB/GYNs are getting driven out of the practice by a huge rise in malpractice premiums. It's a problem all over the country. OB/GYNS are paying ten times as much premium as a percentage of gross income as are other specialists - sometimes 10 to 15% of their gross income goes to malpractice insurance, and the rates are rising at up to 100% per year.
(another conversation started in the comments)

Compare:

Malpractice insurance premiums were slightly under 1% of health care costs and malpractice payouts were less than 0.38% of health care costs in 2002. In the insurance world, assuming an insanely high allocated loss adjustment expense of 40%, that would be a combined ratio of around 78%, for a profit margin of around 25 to 30% (including investment income on the marginal float and ceding commissions on reinsurance) Making medical malpractice insurance an incredibly profitable business. This isn't including agency commissions, since professional liability insurance is usually direct.

At a rate of around 98,000 per year, medical mistakes are the third leading cause of death in the US. As almost happened to Dana Carvey when they bypassed the wrong artery.

That doesn't include the 90,000 deaths in the US each year from infections contracted inside a hospital.

Nor does it include the 100,000 killed by adverse drug reactions each year. A 1992 study in US hospitals showed more than 5% of prescriptions contained errors. Hopefully that's going to improve with the obvious solution of computerizing drug dispensation.

Here are some statistics from everyone's favorite Nader on the issue.

Autopsies have shown 20% to 40% rate of potentially fatal misdiagnosis.

Caps on malpractice damages have already been used in some states... malpractice premiums continued to skyrocket.

So is it greedy victims who are the issue? Or is it insurance gouging, taking advantage of crappy training, resistance to sterilization procedures, resistance to ubiquitous computerization of drug dispensation, and the totally insane work hours of residents that is the problem?

Clark is dropping out of the race.

Secretary of Defense, anyone?

Rumsfeld is insane.

I usually don't post stories I assume everyone has seen, but this whole "sending American jobs overseas is good for the economy" talk by Bush merits discussion. It's being treated as a big thing, but I don't see it as out of character with Bush's whole attitude. I guess the fact that he came out and said it is something.

Counterspin points out that one would expect since our current President is in bed with OPEC, we should get better treatment from them. (see, his permalinks work, dammit!)

Ok, I give up. I can't find anywhere on the web how to fix the problem with my permalinks on this blog not working right, but find everywhere people complaining about the issue as common to blogger. It just seems like some sites it works on, some sites it doesn't.

If anyone has a solution, please let me know. Otherwise, sorry - I know it's a pain especially because I do science posts as well as vitriolic political ones, and some interested in the science may be put off by my particular politics and not want to hunt through the political posts.

There's a debate about religion going on over on the Cincinnati Blog, and it spurred me to trying to remember exactly what C.A. Coulson had to say about religion and science... though my undergrad was focused on the history and philosophy of science, I glossed over the religious issue because I am unsympathetic to it.

I thought it might spark some conversation here, and perhaps those with a deeper study of the issue (*cough* Mark *cough*) might correct me if I am wrong about what I wrote about Coulson:

A friend once said he believes in the "God of the Gaps" meaning he saw the supernatural everywhere we don't yet have an accepted scientific consensus theory. The funny thing was, he was training to become a scientist (albeit an anthropologist... not in any way degrading anthropology, but that attitude is far more understandable there than in physics.)

He didn't realize that the "god of the gaps" phrase was originated by Coulson as mockery of an unscientific mind set whose perception of a god was doomed to diminish with each scientific advance, as the gaps are filled by scientists seeking truth. Coulson was deeply religious, but as a physicist-mathematician, he realized that any religious faith that seeks to compete with science is doomed, so he advocated embracing science as the only true way to understand god - for him the Word wasn't written in a book by half-literate political revolutionaries, it was written by the deity in the universe itself, so the scientific method is the only true path to religious illumination. Religionists believe they have the truth by unverifiable gut feeling. That's a personal choice that many people make, but it isn't compatible with the scientific method.

Strangely enough, Newton himself kept slipping back to mystic explanations... which is why as much respect as he deserves, most scientists credit Liebnitz with really founding the calculus of reasoning.

Judge rejects Ashcroft's subpoena for the medical records of 40 women who received abortions in Chicago.

Bush kills Amtrack.

This should make some people wonder about the Atkins Diet - he died obese, and had advanced heart disease.

It looks like the X-Prize will be won this year.

Browsing the Freepers...

Why anti-abortionistas must also be anti-contraception.

The freepers turn on O'Reilly for daring to question Dear Leader.

Mel Gibson says his wife is going to hell.

Salon excerpts Paul Waldman's Fraud: The Strategy Behind Bush's Lies and Why the Media Didn't Tell You.

QUOTE

In order to sustain a fear of intellectuals, the conservative media apparatus conducts a coordinated effort to elevate any perceived transgression by any liberal -- particularly one associated with education -- to the status of a major news event. So when one stupid professor in New Mexico says to his class on Sept. 11, 2001, "Anyone who can blow up the Pentagon has my vote," the incident receives a torrent of news coverage, spurred on by conservative talk radio, as though the speaker in question were someone of national importance. When the National Education Association puts up a Web site to help teachers find ways to discuss Sept. 11 with their students, the Washington Times writes an appallingly dishonest story distorting the NEA's suggestion to avoid scapegoating all American Muslims into an instruction to avoid blaming al-Qaida for the attacks; the false charge is then picked up by conservative commentators and columnists who push it onto editorial pages all over the country.

And it needn't only be professors -- even lowly college students can be manipulated into providing fodder for the right-wing spin machine. The polemicist David Horowitz, for example, is provided with a steady stream of conservative foundation money essentially to devise ways to outwit 19-year-olds. So Horowitz will attempt to place insulting ads in college newspapers -- arguing, for example, that African-Americans should be thankful for slavery -- and then, when some of the newspapers refuse to run the ads, pose as an aggrieved hero of the First Amendment.


The conservative media apparatus is an integrated system in which stories circulate between talk radio, conservative magazines and newspapers and the Fox News Channel, generating momentum and pushing their way into more mainstream news outlets. The most enthusiastic goal of this media machine is locating and publicizing foolish things said by liberals, no matter how obscure or inconsequential the speaker may be, to inspire mainstream contempt for liberals. The idea that the words of some random professor or student are more important than the actions of the country's leaders may be farcical, but by giving endless attention to these alleged outrages, conservatives sustain the image of liberals as powerful and elitist and conservatives as persecuted and victimized. Were they so inclined, liberals could no doubt find conservative citizens who say stupid things too. But no one is paying them to undertake the search.

When ordinary people, told endlessly to be suspicious if not contemptuous of those with too much education, hear people snicker at George W. Bush's inability to put together a grammatical sentence, they sympathize. Far from being damaging, jokes about the president's intelligence and ineloquence serve to distract from his status within the aristocracy, providing evidence that Bush is not one of the elite, indeed is scorned by them. Presidential elections are won and lost over a variety of factors, but which candidate seems the smartest is not one of them. When liberals make jokes about the bizarre tangle of words that sometimes emerges from Bush's mouth, he is only too pleased since it serves the end of separating him from the elite.


UNQUOTE

via A Voyage to Arcturus, a nice reality check on our incomes.

Quite a challenge to our perspective, huh?

Things in Iraq are getting even worse. It looks like up to 50 were killed in this morning's car bombing.

Religion is not patriotism, Part 4,432,456.

As some of you know, my email at work is flooded every day with religious, right wing, and often racist babble. Today's special treat is that stupid bullshit flag-folding myth. It's a hoax, of course.

But it's an interesting example of a meme specifically designed to further convince people that religion=patriotism. Interesting technique. How can we use it to say democracy=patriotism?

Here comes progressive talk radio.

In the next day or two, I'll find links to what streams are available now, and add them to the sidebar.

Wes F. at A Walk in the Brain sends us, via Tom Tomorrow, a NYTimes story about an American Airlines flight from Boston to LA, on which the pilot instructed all christians to identify themselves and to use the flight to convert non-christians.

The BBC story:

QUOTE

Christian question alarms flight

Terrified passengers tried to call relatives on their mobile phones
An American Airlines pilot terrified passengers on his flight when he asked Christians to identify themselves and went on to call non-Christians "crazy".

Some passengers on the flight from Los Angeles to New York were so worried they tried to call relatives on their mobile phones.

The pilot, whose name was not released, asked Christians on Friday's flight to raise their hands.

He then suggested non-Christians talk to the Christians about their faith.

He went on to say that "everyone who doesn't have their hand raised is crazy", passenger Amanda Nelligan told CBS news.

"He continued to say, 'Well, you have a choice: you can make this trip worthwhile, or you can sit back, read a book and watch the movie'," she said.

The pilot also told passengers he would be available for discussion at the end of the flight.

'Bizarre'

Ms Nelligan said passengers had thought the pilot's behaviour was "bizarre" and wondered whether his comments were a threat.

Flight attendants notified ground control.

American Airlines spokesman Tim Wagner said the incident was being investigated.

"It falls along the lines of a personal level of sharing that may not be appropriate for one of our employees to do while on the job," he added.

UNQUOTE

Aaron sends us a preview of the GOP attack line on Kerry for the fall campaign. Buckle your seatblets, we've got nine months of lies, slander, fraud, and bullshit ahead of us, before we finally get to unpack out October surprises.

Putin's political rivals are dying like flies.

Update via Counterspin - he's alive.

via Slashdot, very cool microscopy of liquor.

And a bonus... see what easter eggs mask designers have been hiding on chips. Remember that a micron is 1/1000000 meters when thinking about the scale of these.

More on the AWOL issue.

Even the Pentagon is taking climate change very seriously.

via Eschaton, more on the Stalinist crackdown on dissent.

"[C]able and broadcast news networks aired Dean's Iowa exclamation 633 times — and that doesn't include local news or talk shows — in the four days after it was made, according to the Hotline, a Washington-based newsletter."

Please be bullshit, please be bullshit.

The Haaretz is reporting that al Qaeda has nukes.

So this is what happens when we spend our limited resources on a war of choice on an enemy orthogonal to the real threat.

Where should Dean go from here?

I think he's out of the race - the media will murder him even if he gets his organization back together. I was hoping he would run for senate - but the Vermont senators are Leahy and Jeffords. So I thought, ok, then the House. But the Congressman from Vermont is Bernie Sanders, one of the few independents in Congress, and as much hell as I give the Greens, I really do want more independents, especially if they lean moderate or left.

So what do you think Dean should/will do next, with the grassroots organization he has?

Mark starts his new blog with a discussion of the bottom-feeders in children's animation. I suspect he limited it to animation so he wouldn't have to address the TeleTubbies.

Very interesting article about the wisdom outgoing troops are giving the incoming soldiers on how to survive Iraq.

Capt. Ken Braeger, a company commander in the 4th Division, which is headquartered in Tikrit, in the middle of the Sunni Triangle, states that "what they have to understand is that most of the people here want us dead, they hate us and everything we stand for, and will take any opportunity to cause us harm."

However, the army is also inhibiting the passing on of information that could save American lives, if it in any way doesn't reflect the party line:

"It is true that the 'meaner' and more prepared you look that you can return immediate fire, the more likely they'll think twice about attacking," writes Wrann. He writes that some National Guard troops were so slovenly that they invited attack: "We've noticed the convoys that get hit more often are one with soldiers out of uniform -- the Guard guys usually travel in flak vest and t-shirt -- and do not pull security when they stop."(Wrann's comments were removed from the Company Command Web site late Friday after this newspaper sought elaboration from him.)

The transcript of Bush on Meet the Press.

Most interesting part? He swore to release ALL his military file. Of course, he also claimed he already did.

He also claimed Iraq might have some day produced a weapon.

Dude, I could go sharpen a stick right now. Is that what he means?

Still, the White House is stonewalling the 9-11 investigation.

I've said it before... the members of that panel were chosen because they have the highest security clearances possible in our government. The White House has neither the right, nor the authority, to deny them access to anything at all.

We live in a democracy - our elected officials have no right to govern in secret. But what these neofascists in Cheney's White House think they can create is a cryptocracy.

This isn't good: Dean's campaign spent $7.2 million through his campaign manager's company.

How could they not realize the ethical problem with that? How could they possibly think that wouldn't have been the end of the campaign, and our chance to oust Bush, when it came out had Dean become the nominee? How fucking irresponsible.

Did Dean know?

What a piece of work this bastard is, who we're supposed to trust to investigate Bush's Lies.

And his little dog, too.

The new McCarthys.

I hadn't been following this closely, but Mark points out that our lovely local land swindlers the Erpenbecks have as sordid and twisted a tale as the Sopranos.

Update: Today's story

Not the typical post for this blog, but I'm finding this useful - User reviews of handguns.

Bush announces the WMD panel.

Wes F. at A Walk in the Brain calls attention to this letter from a father who lost his son in the war. (the link takes a while to open - I think it is getting flooded.)

This is a really interesting idea for fighting spam.

Bush isn't a popular president, and he's not getting a second term unless there's another Nadering.

Cheney's staff outed Joe Wilson's CIA agent wife.

Tim Russert is interviewing Bush for the entire hour of Meet the Press this Sunday. Joe Conason, among others, is trying to get Russert to abandon his worshipful treatment of Bush and ask the hard questions. Save your breath, Joe. It isn't within the realm of possibility - Russert has been giving Cheney and Bush alternating rim jobs for the last 4 years, and Bush doesn't do real interviews. The questions have been prescreened and Bush has been coached on how to answer them. I'll still be watching anyway. But I'll be shocked if we get anything other than Russert prompting Bush to give scripted answers.

More on Bush's betrayal of veterans. via Eschaton.

Ah yes, Pakistan, our wonderful, loyal ally, has pardoned the man who gave nuclear weapons technology to Iran, Libya and North Korea.

Very nice galaxy shot from the (murdered by Bush) Hubble.

Creative strategies

The comments have turned to tactical talk, so I thought I'd post the relevant portion of the last exchange of a conversation Stephanie, Gregory and I had last night, to spark a general brainstorming of creative strategies:


I was thinking about trolling and guerrilla marketing to the middle-right set... I think trolling web conversations would have two problems 1) it would be personally deeply angering and depressing. I read freerepublic occasionally, and it always leaves me horrified and depressed. 2) They are not amenable to argument. Those people are voting Bush. In fact, I'd say the political discussion boards as they exist are self-selective for people on the right who are voting Bush, and on the left are mostly Anybody-But-Bush, but partly petulantly holding out for punishing the Dems for not being doctrinaire enough about their leftism.

And therein lies the crux of the issue - to defeat the Bush cabal we need to reseal the left and split the right. The right wing will vote for a candidate that only agrees with some of their issues. There are many on the left who have come to the conclusion that unless it becomes the age of Aquarius it isn't worth giving a shit.

Anyway, so how to target vulnerable segments of the right coalition? First, identify them by the issues on which Bush has totally betrayed them. There are plenty of those - most obviously libertarians because he let Ashcroft create a surveillance society, and fiscal conservatives because he destroyed the budget.

And for anything to work, we have to perform a little judo on the patriotism issue - as usual, the right tries to define anyone against them as unpatriotic. So the tag line should not be - Bush betrayed you because you are conservative, it's Bush betrayed America.

So how to wedge the cracks open?

One example I thought of is old fashioned pamphleteering - put an american flag on one side and
the bill of rights on the other, with a quote by a founding father supporting and a quote by a
Bushy countering each one. Electronic versions could be emailed and posted.

Another would be the best condensed set of figures and charts to show what he's done to the budget
and to the economy.

There's a book... I think it is called something like "Graphical Representation of Statistical
Data"... that has extremely interesting and creative ways to play with that kind of information -
maybe art that puts actual factual data across would be more catchy.

New York City decides to stop complying with Aschcroft's martial law.

Some Christians See 'Passion' as Evangelism Tool

If they're buying tickets for the "unsaved" because Mel Gibson is the second coming, perhaps those who don't worship the tooth fairy should do something... taking a page from the Gideons, maybe I should start leaving math and science books in hotel rooms in the South. Or maybe the math books would be better spent on corporate boardrooms.

Perhaps there are other ways to reach out... "Fuck an evangelist's wife for freedom" - I'm certain the only reason that abstinence programs are so popular in the South is that the religiously uptight are so terrible in bed.

Pay attention to ME! Pay attention to ME! Pay attention to ME! Pay attention to ME! Pay attention to ME! Pay attention to ME! Pay attention to ME! Pay attention to ME! Pay attention to ME! Pay attention to ME! Pay attention to ME! Pay attention to ME! Pay attention to ME! Pay attention to ME! Pay attention to ME! Pay attention to ME!

This guy is worse than my fucking cats.

The Nation says don't...

Press Action says do...

Karl Rove says, OH god PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE let Ralph elect Cheney again! And the Bush cultists at the freerepublic.com are already volunteering.

Cursor points to this discussion on Hullaballoo....

QUOTE

Well next month we have yet another book to digest -- from the inside of the Bush White House. Richard Clarke, the former NSC counterterrorism expert from Bush I, Clinton and 2 years plus of Bush II is publishing his insider book that takes no prisnors. Word is that Rove is very afraid of what Clarke has to say -- particularly because Clarke was the August 6 2001 briefer of Bush, and there is a good deal about how he got told never to raise such matters again with Bush. Book will get big play. Richard Clarke knows where all the bodies are buried.

UNQUOTE

The proof - a database of the 19,000 documents that form the basis of "The Price of Loyalty" are beginning to be available online.

CIA director Tenet says that the CIA analysts NEVER called Iraq an imminent threat.

Nathan points out a new example of martial law in the US.

Imagine if we still had a Consititution... wouldn't that be nice?

Which Republican media guy, and consultant for the Bush-Cheney 2004 campaign, is going to take a 15% commission for placing $9.5 million in Medicare ads?

The real campaign has begun. via Eschaton.

via Calpundit, there are more records out there that could show once and for all that Bush was AWOL from the National Guard. Or actually, it's the lack of those records that shows it.

Tomorrow will mark 2 months since my first real post on this blog. Thanks for reading, and especially thanks for commenting - that's where the real value for me comes in - this is all part of the Conversation. I have no idea how some of the readers found it, though others said it was from my comments on other blogs. In any event, welcome one and all.

A couple of people have asked me what's involved in setting this up - it couldn't be much easier...

www.blogger.com for the blog

www.haloscan.com for the comments (I paid the extra $10 to get rid of character limits)

www.sitemeter.com to see if anyone from homeland security is monitoring.

Cybercafes in Garden Grove required to install videocameras? via Calpundit.

I REALLY hope this gets taped. It's from Drudge, so I have to reprint it:

QUOTE
XXXXX DRUDGE REPORT XXXXX WED FEB 04, 2004 12:28:35 ET XXXXX

IN HIS OWN DEFENSE: CIA CHIEF PREPARES SPEECH

The Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet is planning to deliver a high-impact speech at Georgetown University tomorrow morning -- defending his agency's work on analyzing Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs!

MORE

Tenet is going public as the Senate Intelligence Committee finishes its draft report on what went wrong -- without giving Tenet a chance to testify.

The event, to be held in Gaston Hall on the Georgetown University campus in Washington D.C., is open to broadcast and print media.

The CIA director's speech will be given on the anniversary of Powell (and Tenet's) Feb 5th 2003 UN presentation.
UNQUOTE

There is a wave of attacks on the anonymity of some bloggers. Many people who read this blog are friends of mine, but others are interested in this little corner of the Conversation, and stumbled on what started as a personal blog to relieve my friends of my constant spamming.

It's as simple as this - what I'm putting here are links to information and ideas. My identity is irrelevant to the material. There would only be two uses for my identity in this context - if people think the information has merit, they'd divert attention from the information to me, undermining the point. If people think the information is threatening to their political ideology, they could threaten my family, and/or my livelihood, as has happened to several progressives who came under fire by the extremists on freerepublic.com. By way of example, some years ago I got snail-mail threats after the Enquirer published a letter of mine critical of a column of Pat Buchanan's. I'm interested in neither result.

When I get another job, for a company that is less politically active on the part of the right wing, I'll probably drop the anonymity. But it will still be a tough decision - my surname is quite rare, so by being outspoken in this day and age, I'd be making my family a target, when they don't even agree with me on most issues.

As for whether anonymity undermines political discussion, ask Ben Franklin and Tom Paine.

CBS to air Bush campaign ads paid for by $9.5 million in federal Health and Human Services funds. I'm too disgusted to say more.

And last from today's Cursor, the best review to date of Perle and Frum's An End to Evil:

QUOTE

Where as the nerdoids in Lords of Chaos were vainly trying to recapture the lost, centuries-old glory of their Viking ancestors in a diminished modern Norway, uber-nerdoids Richard Perle and David Frum seem hell bent on destroying contemporary America’s glorious imperial war machine right at the very peak of its power. Their plan for leading America, lemming-like, over the cliff of self-destruction is laid out in their sparsely-worded manifesto, An End to Evil. The title alone shows how very Black Metal these grown-up war nerds are.

Let me just say here that I had always thought that draft-dodgers like Perle (who snagglepussed from the Vietnam War, exit stage left) and Frum (who, as a Canadian, was born a draft-dodger) were just your run-of-the-mill corporate fags, but after reading An End to Evil…dude. No seriously, du-hu-hude. Dude, I’m telling you, these chickenhawks fuckiiiiiiiiiin’ rock!

[...]

Indeed, every sad word of An End to Evil oozes Perle’s and Frum’s pained, wasted 60s youths: wasted in yellow sheet stains, wasted studying maps color-coded with spheres-of-influence, wasted memorizing German armaments, and college years wasted playing Risk in their dorms while the socially successful hippies frolicked and fucked all around them. Perle and Frum will never forgive America for this humiliation and therefore they want to egg it on to its suicide by prodding it into a multi-front apocalyptic world war.
UNQUOTE

They review it along with Lords of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Metal Underground
By Michael Moynihan and Didrik Søderlind

Winning those Iraqi hearts and minds. via Cursor

Also via Cursor, a bill to embed CIA agents in our local police departments.

Why didn't Bush allow disclosure of the previous mailing of ricin to the White House?

Because it was home-grown terrorism, apparantly mailed by a southern "red state" truck driver or trucking company owner angry about regulations that force truckers to sleep once in a while. It would have disrupted the talking points - that despite Steven Hatfill, Theodore Kaczynski, Tim McVeigh, Terry Nichols, the Texas militia, Eric Rudolph, James C. Kopp, Clayton Waagner, the KKK, etc., terrorism is somehow an islamic phenomenon - that if we could only kill or control all the muslims, terror would no longer be part of the 21st century.

Salon hopes for a replay of the Nader vote among Dean supporters. It isn't possible that even a small minority of Dean supporters are as criminally stupid as Salon tries to portray them... they're just sad and pissed right now.

Sharon is moving to expel Israeli arabs.

Water services manager in DC was fired in 1999 for revealing lead contamination to the federal EPA.

Aaron sends us a Rolling Stone article about the freaky-deaky Tim LaHaye.

If you have any doubt about this rabid idiot's influence, you haven't been paying much attention to this country for the past few years.

Watch the water in the Mideast. I'm surprised and pleased that Sharon is talking about pulling some colonies out of the Gaza Strip. But the path of the security wall is lurching into Palestine every time it comes near a water source.

QUOTE

Most of this water is consumed for agricultural purposes. The agricultural sector represents 2 percent to 3 percent of the Israeli gross domestic product but 24 percent to 30 percent of the Palestinian GDP. A critical natural resource that is both scarce and unfairly distributed is a catalyst for conflict. And while the root of the conflict here has been over land, water is playing a growing role. The establishment of the Joint Water Committee (JWC) between Palestinian and Israeli technicians under the Oslo Accords seemed a step toward cooperation. But the power asymmetries between the two sides reflected in the JWC's structure contributed to the ineffectiveness of the JWC, and well before the Oslo Accords were dead, unregulated pumping and crippling destruction of the aquifers were underway. The "separation barrier" being built inside the West Bank is testament to just how bad things have become. The wall's effective annexation of the land in this prime water territory has put at least 50 wells out of service, so that about a third of the water once available to Palestinians from the Western Aquifer is now in Israeli hands. The result is felt both by the farmers who lose their crops and by all concerned about the viability of a future Palestinian state.

The illegal settlements, so costly to maintain and scorned by the mainstream Israeli public, make things worse. The construction of settlements and the deep wells necessary to sustain them continues. Private (Palestinian) water-tankers lumber up to the settlements every summer, looking for water to take back to villagers who are immobile in their sealed-off villages -- and thirsty. At a price between five and 15 times that charged by the Israeli government, there is always a settler willing to make the deal. The irony of this lucrative, illegal business is not lost on the Palestinian farmer: Not only is the water "stolen" from under his feet, he is then actually forced to buy it back from the "thief." Many farmers have reverted, in turn, to digging their own unregulated shallow wells. The end result: The aquifers are being pierced and overpumped at rates unparalleled in history. Meanwhile, Palestinian water infrastructure continues to suffer targeted destruction in various Israeli military operations.

UNQUOTE

YES! Lieberman is leaving the race!

A momentary aside from political ranting...

For those in the Cincinnati area, tonight's Simpsons rerun on WXIX at 11 is the medical marijuana one, in which the(temporarily) lifeless body of Mr. Burns is used as a marionette in a bizarre dance number - gotta love the weird ones.

So - what's the best Simpsons episode ever?

Quote of the Day: “There's nary an animal alive can outrun a greased Scotsman.”

Edwards won South Carolina.

Yes, Limbaugh, Bush really was AWOL and he got the National Guard gig after scoring only 25% on the pilot aptitude test.

And it matters.

I've been waiting for a more detailed article about the budget cuts Bush is proposing, but nothing is there yet but the same damn Reuter's article every news site is reprinting. Serious analysis has just begun.

Most newspapers are running only the main story - Bush's absolute lies about the deficit.


Specific cuts are getting attention from the affected groups:

Community Policing slashed by nearly $400 million

Small business loans slashed

Disabled Veterans ignored

Environmental Enforcement cut by 7%

150,000 impoverished families with children will be denied Section 8 housing aid.

The AMT insanity continues

Nuclear (oops, sorry - NOOCULAR) waste cleanup cut

Iraq and Afghanistan costs specifically NOT included

Clean energy cut

And cut some more

HIV/AIDS prevention cut

Endangered Species protection cut

Clean water for rural development programs cut


But missile defense gets the jackpot. Or what's left over after the tax-cuts for the billionaires.

Powell take a moment out from kissing, I mean covering Bush's ass to pretend he still has some integrity left.

I don't know what the hell this is supposed to mean:


Thus, with U.N. inspectors absent from Iraq for four years, "I think the assumption to make and the assumption we came to, based on what the intelligence community gave to us, was that there were stockpiles present."

Ummm, anyone remember a fella named Hans Blix? Who led a UN inspection team with access to ALL sites in Iraq, and who was booted from Iraq by the US in order to clear the way for Halliburton? Hmmm? All the arguments that the UN shouldn't be given more time, because Bush was dancing around like a 4-year-old needing to piss, he wanted to invade so bad?

Bush looking to bring back some of that old "horrendous atrocity magic" by replacing Cheney with Giuliani? via Fark

Peace on Mars.

Slate summarizes some of the intelligence frauds/blunders in American history, include this one of which I was unaware:

QUOTE

World War I and the Zimmerman Telegram, 1917: U.S. public sentiment had been running against Germany since the sinking of the Lusitania by a submarine in 1915, but such losses at sea were not quite enough to bring isolationist America to the point of entry into a European war. The tide shifted in January 1917, when the British turned over a telegram their intelligence service had intercepted, sent by Germany to Mexico.

The Zimmerman telegram promised a return of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona to Mexico upon successful "joint conduct of the war." In other words, Mexico was being encouraged to invade the United States in coordination with a German declaration of war. The telegram was leaked to the American press on March 1, and the subsequent public outcry lead in part to the U.S. declaration of war on April 2.

There was one problem: The telegram was the 1917 version of uranium from Niger. While never definitively proved to be a forgery, no evidence was found after the war that Germany ever sent such a telegram. Mexican officials, already concerned about the invasion of northern Mexico by U.S. troops in 1916 to pursue Pancho Villa, declared vehemently that they had never received such a telegram. Some historians have theorized the telegram was in fact a fabrication by British Intelligence designed to goad the United States into the war.
UNQUOTE

via Eschaton, a pharmacy in Denton, Texas refused to fill a rape-victim's prescription for the morning-after pill.

Wrong decision - the hacker who compromised Fermilab is getting off with community service. via Slashdot.

And a big congratulations to Times New Roman 14, the new official font of the US government. I was rooting for Arial 12, but I'm willing to concede the issue in favor of bipartisanship. Condolences to Courier New 12, who after a long career in public service will retire to live on in forged Nigerian documents and retro-looking web site designs. via Slashdot.

Punk the National Review.

When Joe Lieberman brought out the Crisco, I thought he was going to annoint me for our Holy Crusade against Evil. Then he put "Closer" by Nine Inch Nails on the stereo, and called me the chosen one...

The first author review of A Prayer for Dawn

"With A Prayer for Dawn, Nathan Singer announces himself as the hip new grandmaster of America’s literate underbelly. This book is crazy and hilarious and brilliant and, because the voices in it speak so dead-on true about the crippled ways we live, thoroughly appalling. This book, no question of it, is a fully realized nightmare, and I can honestly say it’s one of the best ones I’ve ever had. In a word, A Prayer for Dawn kicks ass."
-- Mike Magnuson, Lummox and The Right Man for the Job

Congratulations, Nathan!

I say we take a road trip to the first town that bans it.

Europe joins the race for Mars.

Spam on the cell phone.

Salon also makes the case that John Kerry would be too honest, serious and committed a leader for their taste.

The really fun part is that we can speculate how low journalism will go - right now they have an illegal invasion to write about, and all the policy differences you can imagine. This is what they give us. They're somehow ill at ease with a man BECAUSE he both showed courage and valor on the battlefield, AND came back and called the war illegal and immoral.

QUOTE
In this aspect, Sealords was a manifestly stupid operation, the pet of a gung-ho regional commander who was keen to make admiral. In a way, it was a quintessential Vietnam War operation: a highly dangerous endeavor serving no reasonable purpose with no measurable or meaningful goal. To his credit, Kerry repeatedly tried to explain this to his superiors, even when he was sent back to the U.S. after being wounded for the third time in four months. He also fought bravely and conscientiously, despite having doubts about the war even before he decided he was duty-bound to enlist. His crew respected and trusted him, and by all accounts still do; most have turned up to endorse his campaign. Recently, Kerry was publicly reunited in Iowa with an Army officer (a Republican) whose life he saved. A wounded Kerry had pulled the man out of the water under a hail of bullets.
UNQUOTE

There's a bizarre disconnect in different sections of the review - reporting like that, then snarky editorial asides that imply Kerry has done nothing important that doesn't involve Vietnam. Like, oh, spending his entire adult life in politics, as a member of every major and important Senate committee.

They end the piece with this:

QUOTE A significant percentage of voters seem to pick the candidate they'd most want to have over for a backyard barbecue. On that score, John Kerry still has a long way to go.UNQUOTE


"How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?" Kerry asked the Senate in his testimony when he was a 27 year old with 3 purple hearts, a silver star and a bronze star. If you don't get the seriousness of that question in context, let me lay it out for you. It was being asked by a man who had demonstrated that he was willing to give his life, KNOWING it was a mistake. In war you don't fight for your country, you fight for the men in your platoon who rely on you. Kerry did that, and earned the privilege of chastising senators for sending his men to die.

I may be in the minority in this nation, but that looks like strength to me.

Continuing their week of bottom-feeding, Salon hopes Kerry's sons and daughters will be wild.

QUOTE

Kerry's wife Teresa has become a staple on the stump, along with two of her three hot sons with late husband John Heinz -- banker-heartthrob Chris and environmentalist-hambone Andre -- and Kerry's Snow White/Rose Red daughters from his first marriage, filmmaker Alexandra and medical student Vanessa. The past week has seen the Heinz-Kerrys caught up in a gossip whirlwind over whether he got Botox injections, hot on the heels of the campaign-advisor-being-edged-out-by-Teresa story line, which followed the Kerry-saying-"fuck"-in-Rolling-Stone plot, which followed the Teresa-saying-"shit"-in-Elle arc, which followed that time when Chris dated Gwyneth. I, for one, am eating it up.

UNQUOTE

I'm guessing no one told these writers that the name of the magazine refers to philosophical discussion clubs in the the 19th century, not to hair salons.

Ricin in one of the Senate office buildings.

I was wrong about the South.

Bush only won most confederate states by a few percentage points. A majority of southerners understand that slavery was an historic atrocity, the civil rights movement freed us all, Martin Luther King was a hero, not a demon, and their children shouldn't grow up crippled by humiliating ignorance because the school boards were taken over by a christian taliban.

The peckerwood brand of southerners have been the loudest, and for too long they've dominated both southern and national politics. It IS time for the Democratic Party to stop the condescending catering to a caricature of the south that demands knee-jerk "praise jeebus" pandering and instead, be proud of our honest support of policies that restore hope, opportunity, justice, fairness and responsibility to the entire nation.

Kerry beats Bush 53% to 46% if the election were today.

Now that I'm thinking about it, I wonder if perhaps Janet Jackson got an endorsement deal with TIVO.

Hubble (which Bush has killed) detected oxygen and carbon in the atmosphere of a planet circling a star 150 light years from Earth.

Give credit where credit is due.

QUOTE

David Hasselhoff has complained to museum curators after finding his photo absent in a collection of memorabilia about the fall of the Berlin Wall.

UNQUOTE

The budget shoe drops. Bush is calling for cuts in 125 major programs, including complete termination of 65 programs.

He's also already spending the money they expect to raise by allowing oil-drilling in the remaining unpolluted sections of the ANWR.

The Bush Administration won't allow members of the 9-11 commission to view even their own handwritten notes.

The members of this commission have the highest security clearances in government. There is no legal basis for withholding information from them. There is no excuse for letting this continue.

The, um, invisible hand... I assume everyone noticed that half the ads during the Superbowl were for boner pills. Viagra, Levitra (is that a Henry Miller reference?) and Cialis have all determined that, despite the incredible cost of Superbowl ad time, there is no other event that is more appealing to impotent guys than the Superbowl.

Dudes, you think a large portion of Superbowl fans are limply compensating for shortcomings, you should check out NASCAR! Oh wait... you did.

Is Bush comparing his DUI with political imprisonment under dictators? Or did he slip and admit to the cocaine arrest?

Nathan sends another example of the new McCarthyism.

Spalding Gray is still missing.

An "independent commission" made up of cronies and stooges hand-picked by Cheney, of course.

Nathan points out a note in the Nation that Richard Perle is, as usual, supporting terrorists.

Salon looks at Zero Tolerance policies in schools, and gives the usual litany of horrors as kids commit suicide after being unfairly expelled, etc.

Sharon claims he's pulling his colonists out of Gaza.

In a new low for campaign journalism, Salon examines whether Gen. Clark has too steady a gaze. It seems Salon writers and editors don't trust a candidate who isn't shifty-eyed.

Two new elements have been produced and added to the periodic table.

The magic bullet - a virus that kills only tumorous cells.