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Way Beyond “Republican”…

Way Beyond “Republican”…

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Some people want to argue with me about the effects of this administration on this country. I say words are cheap, propaganda is more effective than it should be, and I judge by actions and evidence. What we are seeing is not a Republican agenda, but a wholesale reorganization of what America is all about. A must-read is Howard Zinn’s article in the Guardian, “It is not only Iraq that is occupied. America is too.”

I wake up thinking: the US is in the grip of a president surrounded by thugs in suits who care nothing about human life abroad or here, who care nothing about freedom abroad or here, who care nothing about what happens to the earth, the water or the air, or what kind of world will be inherited by our children and grandchildren.

More Americans are beginning to feel, like the soldiers in Iraq, that something is terribly wrong.

Starting a new category today called Alien-nation (from “American Idiot” by Green Day). If I have some extra time, I’ll go back and add the category to some archived posts. Meanwhile, here are the Alien-nation examples for today.

Depleted uranium – a weapon of mass destruction for all.

The KBR division of Halliburton, which is responsible for carrying out the no-bid Pentagon contracts, experienced a 284 percent increase in operating profits during the second quarter of this year, including $70 million in “award” fees. Although government auditors have repeatedly cited the company for apparent fraud, improper billing, bribery, and gross overcharging for services there, the administration (and our representatives) have ignored even the auditors’ requests to withhold a portion of payments to the company.

The Christian right was saved from dying out with the Bush administration’s tens of millions of taxpayer dollars to their grassroots organizations – while they starved out family planning and AIDS-related organizations. So much for separation of church and state.

From the Progress Report

D’OH FOR JOHN DOE: ” …playing to the interests of John Doe — belies a reality that Treasury Secretary John Snow recently acknowledged, “the fruits of strong economic growth are not spreading equally to less educated Americans.” A notable characteristic of  the recent economic growth is the “unusually uneven“ economic gains distribution: ”exceptionally fast growth in corporate profits [has been] coupled with exceptionally slow growth in wages and salaries.” In what Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan referred to as “a very disturbing trend,” the income gap has widened to a chasm that “by some measures is the biggest in the United States since the Roaring ’20s.” Though infamous for his belief in the free-market, Greenspan testified to Congress that “a free market, democratic society is ill-served by an economy in which the rewards are distributed in a way” that excludes the majority. How much of the majority? According to the Labor Department, “the nearly 80 percent of Americans who rely mostly on hourly wages [have] barely maintained their purchasing power.” Unfortunately, President Bush continues to champion his 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, despite the fact that they “were too slanted toward upper earners to be particularly effective economic medicine.”

By their words

By their words

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“Not that I have anything against lawyers. Looking around the room, I’d guess that a year ago, about half of you were down in Florida.”
Dick Cheney, Nov 2001, to The Federalist Society

“You can fool some of the people all the time, and those are the ones you want to concentrate on.”
George W. Bush, speech at a Washington dinner, 3/2001

“I am the federal government. I am not a federal employee. I am a constitutional officer. My job is the Constitution of the United States, I am not a government employee. I am the Constitution.”
Tom DeLay responding to a government employee who tried to prevent him from smoking on government property, 1995

“I appreciate people’s opinions, but I’m more interested in news. And the best way to get the news is from objective sources, and the most objective sources I have are people on my staff who tell me what’s happening in the world.”
George W. Bush

“Given the outcome of our work in Florida and with a new president in place, we think our services will expand across the country.”
Martin L. Fagan, ChoicePoint Vice-President, speaking of expunging voters from the rolls

“God told me to strike at Al-Qaeda and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East.”
George W. Bush, to former Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, 6/2003

Unable to Mourn, Unable to Care

Unable to Mourn, Unable to Care

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Now that more than two thousand of our side, and who knows, really, how many thousands of the other side (the ones who start counting seem to end up dead fairly often), it’s a good time to review a basic lack in the President, who was put into office through the judicial activism he claims to deplore. This President, simply, doesn’t care.

Bush stole the 2004 election – E L Doctorow’s statement

Ringing even more truthfully today than it did then, these words from the political novelist’s statement pinpoint the character of this President. As he enjoys his record-breaking vacation, avoiding all funerals and other such unpleasantries, it is clear that the families of the fallen will get no comfort from him. Of the ones not counted – the ones who died on the way to a hospital elsewhere, or who died after their return, or who had psychological breakdowns – there is still not a word. You have to die in Iraq to be counted.

“He does not suffer the death of our twenty one year olds who wanted to be what they could be. On the eve of D-day in 1944 General Eisenhower prayed to God for the lives of the young soldiers he knew were going to die. He knew what death was. Even in a justifiable war, a war not of choice but of necessity, a war of survival, the cost was almost more than Eisenhower could bear.

But this president does not know what death is. He hasn’t the mind for it. You see him joking with the press, peering under the table for the WMDs he can’t seem to find, you see him at rallies strutting up to the stage in shirt sleeves to the roar of the carefully screened crowd, smiling and waving, triumphal, a he-man. He does not mourn. He doesn’t understand why he should mourn. He is satisfied during the course of a speech written for him to look solemn for a moment and speak of the brave young Americans who made the ultimate sacrifice for their country. But you study him, you look into his eyes and know he dissembles an emotion which he does not feel in the depths of his being because he has no capacity for it. He does not feel a personal responsibility for the thousand dead young men and women who wanted be what they could be. They come to his desk not as youngsters with mothers and father or wives and children who will suffer to the end of their days a terribly torn fabric of familial relationships and the inconsolable remembrance of aborted life…. they come to his desk as a political liability which is why the press is not permitted to photograph the arrival of their coffins from Iraq. How then can he mourn? To mourn is to express regret and he regrets nothing. He does not regret that his reason for going to war was, as he knew, unsubstantiated by the facts. He does not regret that his bungled plan for the war’s aftermath has made of his mission-accomplished a disaster. He does not regret that rather than controlling terrorism his war in Iraq has licensed it. So he never mourns for the dead and crippled youngsters who have fought this war of his choice. He wanted to go to war and he did. He had not the mind to perceive the costs of war, or to listen to those who knew those costs. He did not understand that you do not go to war when it is one of the options but when it is the only option; you go not because you want to but because you have to.

…
How can we sustain ourselves as the United States of America given the stupid and ineffective warmaking, the constitutionally insensitive lawgiving, and the monarchal economics of this president? He cannot mourn but is a figure of such moral vacancy as to make us mourn for ourselves.”

Intelligent Design a Boondoggle

Intelligent Design a Boondoggle

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In a roundtable interview with reporters from five Texas newspapers President Bush said yesterday that he believes schools should discuss “intelligent design” alongside evolution when teaching students about the creation of life.

No problem. Just don’t ask science teachers to teach it. Teach it in religion classes, not alongside evolutionary theories in biology class. The principle of selection: what lives to reproduce passes on its genes. There are discussions about different theories within the science of evolution – debate about catastrophic events, punctuated and gradual evolution, the big bang. Much of science has latent mysterious content – read up on string theory or strange attractors, for example. However, renaming “creationism” as “intelligent design” doesn’t make it science. What are you going to teach? Bible verses? In any case, there are lots of creation stories – you’d then have to teach them all, not just the Genesis account. Wouldn’t it be better to leave that to families and the worship centers of the different religions? Why would the public school system be teaching Judeo-Christianity?

Intelligent design refers to the theory that “unspecified intelligent causes” (i.e. God the Father) are responsible for the origin of the universe and of life in all its diversity – well anyway, the life we know, which is based on carbon.

Don’t laugh – these pseudochristics are serious! They are already anti-intellectual, anti-science. They want followers, not thinkers.

The House Subcommittee on Basic Education in Pennsylvania heard testimony Monday on a bill that would allow local school boards to mandate that science lessons include intelligent design. The legislation is sponsored by only a dozen lawmakers. A federal judge will consider the issue this fall, when a lawsuit against the Dover Area School District is scheduled to go to trial. The suit alleges that the school board violated the constitutional separation of church and state when it voted in October to require ninth-grade students to hear about intelligent design during biology class.

Of course, here in Georgia, the infamous Cobb Country had big stickers in all the science textbooks proclaiming that evolution is just a theory until a federal judge in Atlanta finally put the nix on it in January saying the disclaimers are an unconstitutional endorsement of religion. The stickers were added after more than 2,000 parents complained that the textbooks presented evolution as fact, without mentioning rival ideas about the beginnings of life, such as the biblical story of creation. Six parents and the American Civil Liberties Union then sued, contending the disclaimers violated the separation of church and state and unfairly singled out evolution from thousands of other scientific theories as suspect. The judge ruled that “While evolution is subject to criticism, particularly with respect to the mechanism by which it occurred, the sticker misleads students regarding the significance and value of evolution in the scientific community.” “By denigrating evolution, the school board appears to be endorsing the well-known prevailing alternative theory, creationism or variations thereof.” Last year, Georgia’s education chief proposed a science curriculum that dropped the word “evolution” in favor of “changes over time.” The idea was dropped amid protests from teachers.

This focus on the new creationism is very clever. If they get religion taught as science they gain more control over the children (get ’em while they’re young). Such children will be unable to distinguish between science and religion, but as Bush himself shows, many of our kids are impervious to the very best education. We may lose out in the science and technology wars of the future, but hey, we’re going down anyway with the gradual destruction of the public school system that helped us rise. If the fight fails, they still motivate their fearful, hateful base -energizing them with that ole God is on our side bull at a time when people are getting less enthused about Iraq, oil/gas prices, and so on. Now that’s strategic politics.

One question, though – if you believe in creationism (and that’s what this is), then you probably also believe that God placed humans in the position of the stewards of the earth. How is it that the same group of people who advocate for creationism are first in line to let corporations pollute? Where are their environmental concerns? Some stewards.

What possible joint interest could a real Christian have with the death and power policies of this administration? Believers are so easily manipulated – don’t you remember that warning about false prophets?

No right to torture

No right to torture

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Torture is a contradiction of our historical national values. In addition, we undermine our national security and are in violation of our own laws when we allow it. Informants will not come forward if they cannot trust us not to treat them fairly under international law. We do not get accurate information with torture – ample historical precedent teaches us that those who are tortured will say anything to make it stop. After a couple of years of imprisonment, what useful information could they still have in any case? We rely on torture now because this administration does not value on-the-ground intelligence. They have not bothered to understand the language and context and history, to make the appropriate contacts that would enable them to infiltrate and get intelligence. The case of Plame shows that they are also less concerned with actual intelligence operations than with political ambitions. What appears to matter to them is the profit margin – Guantanamo, instead of being closed or moved onshore where it would have to abide by US laws, will soon have a shiny new prison – a torture profit center. If you think that the administration has to be told that we do not approve of this, please sign the form below.

There is a strong bipartisan move afoot in Congress to limit the power of the president to torture detainees in our name, specifically to bar the U.S. Military from engaging in “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment”. Does it surprise anyone that this out of control administration is threatening to veto the whole defense bill if can’t continue to commit war crimes? If we do not speak out they are our crimes as well.

This is especially meaningful in the context of the hearings Friday where seasoned intelligence operatives stepped forward to testify that good intelligence comes from building relationships over decades with foreign sources on a trust basis, not by pulling off the people’s fingernails.

Please tell Congress to demand that the torture must STOP.

http://www.usalone.com/guantanamo.htm

Dirty politics

Dirty politics

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Sheesh, what next?

Charles Babington, The Washington Post:

“In bitingly partisan exchanges yesterday, lawmakers plunged into the dispute over Karl Rove’s hand in leaking a covert CIA operative’s identity.”

Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) proposed an amendment aimed at Rove “to deny access to classified information to any federal employee who discloses a covert CIA agent’s identity.”

Then Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) retaliated by offering an amendment designed to strip the security clearances of the chamber’s top two Democrats, Reid and Democratic Whip Richard J. Durbin (Ill.).

Reid’s amendment fell by a party-line vote. Twenty Republicans joined all present Democrats in voting against Frist’s.

Yeah, and “several Republicans did not vote nay until it was clear the measure would fail.”

Meanwhile, they were supposed to working on funding issues for homeland security.

The outing of Plame not only punished Wilson for telling the truth, but put others in danger and messed up a fairly important project vital to our national security. Oh, anyone else curious about the Plame, Aramco, dirty bomb, Brewster Jennings, Bush/terrorism money trail constellation – or is it just me…

How do these people have the time to become so completely corrupt?