It seems that the people with money (rich, white men) are once again taking advantage of African-Americans. The right-wing hate preachers like Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council (FRC) are finding a welcoming audience in black ministers and their churches. Why would that be? Is it because, like the GOP, those ministers find it easer to blame others and use redirection to cover up their own failures than own up to them? Is it easier to say the Gays are co-opting the equal rights movement to the detriment of blacks than it is to explain why the movement has stagnated?
September 11, 2007
Iraq – Friends on the Front Line
One of my friends recently returned from Iraq. All of us here who know and love him were very pleased he came back, pretty much, in one piece. He was deployed for only a few weeks to the “Green Zone” in Baghdad. His mission was very limited and specialized. Unfortunately the repercussions were not so limited.
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Bush’s Executive Branch and Iraqi Government Both Dysfunctional
Ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker, testified today before Congress and described the Iraqi government as being “dysfunctional.” However, he indicated that the fact that Iraqi leaders recognized that their government is dysfunctional is a sign of progress. So as long as you know you’re fucked up it doesn’t matter if you fix things or not. If you take what Crocker said literally and that is apparently how he meant it, there is no possible way that a dysfunctional Iraqi government could have reached any of the benchmarks set by the Bush administration.
The benchmarks were supposed to determine whether US troops would stay in Iraq. So far Iraq has only marginally met a few benchmarks according to non-government agencies that have been evaluating the situation on the ground. Yesterday, during his testimony, General Petraeus indicated that the Iraqi government and military had met significant benchmarks, but had little or no proof to substantiate his claim. What is truyly interesting about the tesimonies is that Crocker’s testimony of a dysfunctional Iraq is completely the opposite of what Petraeus has been saying during his testimony.
Today with all this contradictory testimony, President Bush (R-Liar) apparently is set to announce that the surge of troops, some 30,000 soldiers, would be pulled out by next summer. Bush suddenly wanting to bring troops home is very interesting. There certainly hasn’t been enough progress in Iraq to warrant a withdrawal according to Bush’s own guidelines. Also, Bush has repeatedly said that announcing withdrawals would only help our enemies on the ground in Iraq. So why now? Why suddenly contradict everything you have said about troop strength including comments the president made yesterday? Your guess is as good as mine, but what is very clear is that the executive branch of the Untied States government is just as dysfunctional as its Iraqi counterparts.
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September 10, 2007
Paul Krugman: Where’s My Trickle?
Paul Krugman, The New York Times, September 10, 2007
Four years ago the Bush administration, exploiting the political bounce it got from the illusion of success in Iraq, pushed a cut in capital-gains and dividend taxes through Congress. It was an extremely elitist tax cut even by Bush-era standards: the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center says that more than half of the tax breaks went to Americans with incomes of more than $1 million a year.
Needless to say, administration economists produced various misleading statistics designed to convey the opposite impression, that the tax cut mainly went to ordinary, middle-class Americans. But they also insisted that the benefits of the tax cut would trickle down – that lower tax rates on the rich would do great things for the economy, helping everyone.
Well, Friday’s dismal jobs report showed that the Bush boom, such as it was, has run its course. And working Americans have a right to ask, “Where’s my trickle?”
It’s true, as the Bushies never tire of reminding us, that the U.S. economy has added eight million jobs since that 2003 tax cut. That sounds impressive, unless you happen to know that a good part of that gain was simply a recovery from large job losses earlier in the administration’s tenure – and that the United States added no fewer than 21 million jobs after Bill Clinton raised taxes on the rich, a move that had conservative pundits predicting economic disaster.
What’s really remarkable, however, is that four years of economic growth have produced essentially no gains for ordinary American workers.
Wages, adjusted for inflation, have stagnated: the real hourly earnings of nonsupervisory workers, the most widely used measure of how typical workers are faring, were no higher in July 2007 than they were in July 2003.
Delightful Prison. – Grimgold
One of the problems with our prison system is the emphasis on incarceration and punishment, and the almost complete lack of rehabilitation and “correction.”
As a result, a great many people become repeat offenders. They get out on probation, because they have “served their time,” then end up right back in the system.
Why?
Because they haven’t changed, haven’t grown. What is needed is psycho-therapy and attention that will get results, create cures.
The more atheistic psychologists among us will say this is impossible, especially concerning psychopaths and sociopaths. They claim there is no depth to consciousness that if evoked would cause life changes to occur. And I’m sure you’ve heard it from smart ass cynics; “people don’t change.”
Wrong.
Never mind that the Christians have had striking success in this regard. The silent consensus of opinion is once a criminal always a criminal.
However, in the Philippines, something new is being tried that has been so successful in one large prison they haven’t had one fight in over a year!
This is exciting in that it moves prison populations en mass in the direction of cure, not just incarceration.
I understand this is just a beginning, but I hope you find the following as delightful as I do. Grimgold
Philippine jailhouse rocks to Thriller
click here for article
An unusual physical fitness regime at a jail in the Philippines has attracted worldwide attention on the video sharing website, YouTube.
A clip of hundreds of prisoners in orange uniforms dancing to Michael Jackson’s song Thriller has been watched more than 1.3 million times.
The routine is the brainchild of Byron Garcia, a security consultant for the Cebu provincial government.
He said it had helped “drastically” improve inmate behaviour.
And two former inmates have since become dancers.
‘Discipline in action’
The dancing is compulsory for all 1,600 inmates at the prison in the Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Centre, except the elderly and infirm.
Prisoners have also performed to songs by local artists, Queen and from the film Sister Act, clips of which have been watched on YouTube tens of thousands of times.
“Using music, you can involve the body and the mind. The inmates have to count, memorise steps and follow the music,” Mr Garcia told the BBC news website.
“Inmates say to me: ‘You have put my mind off revenge, foolishness, or thinking how to escape from jail, or joining a gang’,” he said.
The routines developed last year after Mr. Garcia started making inmates march to music, such as Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in the Wall, in a bid to increase participation in exercise.
The inmates are very happy at the interest, they are always talking about it
Byron Garcia
Other early choices included In the Navy and YMCA by the Village People, which were chosen so that macho inmates “wouldn’t be offended by being asked to dance”.
Mr. Garcia has been taken back by the worldwide popularity of the clips, which he originally posted in order to share his work with other members of the penal community.
“I wanted to show them that I am doing something here that has been a success, to show discipline in action,” he said.
But the videos have now become a source of great pride for the prisoners.
“The inmates are very happy at the interest, they are always talking about it, and they ask how many people have watched it on YouTube,” Mr. Garcia said.
And fans of his work can look forward to another three routines in the pipeline, including one set to the Vanilla Ice classic, Ice Ice Baby.
Petraeus Gives Bogus Report, Now Democrats Must Force End To War
Does anyone believe anything that General Petraeus said today is to be believed? It seemed to me, and unfortunately I actually watched it, that the general gave testimony that was exactly the same lines we have been hearing from the Bush administration for weeks, months, and years. Petraeus is now Bush’s top lap dog after previous commanders refused to paint a rosy picture of Bush’s bloody mistake. Regardless of who is delivery the lies, the only people that seem to believe there has been any progress in Iraq in years are those in the Bush Administration bubble.
From progress on the streets of Baghdad to troop morale, Petraeus painted a rather positive account of how things were progressing in Iraq. Contrary to reports from a multitude of organizations that see the the situation in Iraq as dire, Petraeus claims that the security situation has improved extensively in Baghdad and what appeared to be an impending civil war is no longer happening. This is all very hard to believe including his comments that troop morale was good. We have heard many many accounts from soldiers on the ground and those that have returned, that morale in Iraq is dismal. So where does Petraeus find good morale? Maybe in the protected Green Zone.
Today Petraeus echoed the President’s comments that the surge would need to continue and said it will need to be in place until at least July of 2008. It seems interesting to me that Bush and Petraeus believe we can start to withdraw troops right before the 2008 presidential election. Excellent timing don’t you think?
Apparently we are also now expected to accept another year of our soldiers being in a country where over 50% of the population believes attacks on them are okay. And why stay in Iraq? Well… because….. Iraq will be better for it and the oil companies will get rich. The entire world watches the nightmare in Iraq wondering why Bush still insists on sacrificing American lives after years of failure, and wondering why the American people let it happen.
The Democrats claimed that if the situation in Iraq had not changed dramatically, and the report from Petraeus and others on the ground was not significant, they would force the President to change policy So now they have Petraeus testimony and it is still a load of unsubstantiated nonsense. With most Americans wanting an end to the war and our troops brought home and the situation in Iraq continuing to decline in spite of Petraeus’ bogus progress report, the Democratic leadership must now confront Bush or face a backlash from those that gave them the power in 2006. Now is the time for the Democratic leadership in the House and the Senate to force the president to end this nightmare.
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Marty Kaplan: This Is The Week When Nothing Will Happen
Marty Kaplan, The Huffington Post, September 9, 2007
“Watershed”? “Pivotal”? “D-Day for Iraq Policy”? Oh, puhleez. President Bush’s prime time stay-the-course speech has already been written. Public opinion has already concluded that the Petraeus report will sugarcoat the statistics, that the Crocker report will move the goalposts, and that “victory” in Iraq will be no less absurd an American mission at the end of the week than at the beginning. Magical September will make Republicans no less likely to wag their lapdog tails at the White House, or to rattle their cut-and-run sabers at the Democrats, than will Magical March, the probable next location of the turning-point mirage. Democrats, for their part, will seize on the possible January withdrawal of one brigade of the surge as a bipartisan triumph, and their fear of being branded anti-troop and pro-terrorist by a bunch of chickenhawk demagogues will lead them to hail a non-binding non-deadline nonconditional footnote to the next defense appropriation as though they had drawn some heroic line in the sand.
This doesn’t mean there will be any lack of yammering this week. The media will cover it with all the fanfare and ersatz sobriety that they afford to other pseudo-events, like State of the Union addresses. We will be told over and over how Very Serious these reports are, just as we were told how Terribly Important the report of the Iraq Study Group was. Experts and editorialists will announce how very crucial The Next Six Months — the blogosphere’s beloved Friedman Unit — will be, despite the abundant, Googleable carcasses of previous and equally useless Next Six Months punditry stretching back to Mission Accomplished. There may even be some chatter about the virtues of our system of separation of powers, as though these hearings actually constitute Congressional oversight, as though they were not simply a stage show whose outcome is as foregone as any performance of kabuki.
Sometime during this week, the president is likely to nominate a new attorney general. Chances are, he will choose someone just as willing to sign on to the Cheney doctrine of the unitary (i.e., unconstitutional) executive, and just as amenable to politicizing justice and subverting elections, as Alberto Gonzales. And chances are, despite an insulting in-your-face nomination, Senate Democrats will settle for a little show trial as the only price of confirming the president’s choice, as though tough questioning will make David Addington think twice before issuing a fresh round of thuggish directives to the pliant new AG.
Sometime during this week, the bomb-Iran cabal in the White House will take one unnoticed step closer to its target. It will be a couple of years before we learn the inside dope on what looms as the crowning fiasco of the Bush administration; it will take a few inside dopes covering their asses to Bob Woodward before we discover, too late for it to do any good to the nation, how relentless was the runup to the widening of the war. For the neocons charged with ensuring that a Democratic president will have no choice but to inherit the whirlwind, the Petraeus/Crocker hearings are merely a caesura in their poem to war. Or who knows: maybe the lack of Congressional consequences for the administration’s failure to state and stick to a clear, cogent and achievable mission in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Middle East will be retroactively cited as just the legislative cover that the White House needed to chase Al Qaeda in Iraq into Iran.
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The Chaos Hawks
Kevin Drum, The Washington Monthly, September 9, 2007
In the beginning were the War Hawks, and much did they counsel the powerful to do battle against the evildoer Saddam. Then came the war, and the looting, and the Heritage Foundation hordes, and the hawks lamented exceeding loud and many soon repented of their ways. Yea, verily, they presently transformed themselves into Pottery Barn Hawks, eager to fix the disaster they had helped create and thus redeem themselves in the eyes of the faithful. In the fullness of time, though, the disaster ripened and flowered and became impossible of resolution, and the hawks despaired. Success had become unachievable, yea unto their own generation and the generation to come after them. In short, life sucked.
So what’s a Pottery Barn hawk to do? The answer, lately, is: become a Chaos Hawk. First, admit that Iraq is hopeless, thus demonstrating that you’re not completely out to lunch. After all, the surge has produced only tiny gains in a few highly localized areas and has no chance of replicating those successes on a wide scale. The Iraqi government is dysfunctional, the police forces are dysfunctional, the army is years away from competence, militias are engaged in a ruthless campaign of sectarian cleansing, infrastructure is declining, and refugees are fleeing the country at a rate of thousands per day.
Having admitted, however, that the odds of a military success in Iraq are almost impossibly long, Chaos Hawks nonetheless insist that the U.S. military needs to stay in Iraq for the foreseeable future. Why? Because if we leave the entire Middle East will become a bloodbath. Sunni and Shiite will engage in mutual genocide, oil fields will go up in flames, fundamentalist parties will take over, and al-Qaeda will have a safe haven bigger than the entire continent of Europe.
Needless to say, this is nonsense. Israel has fought war after war in the Middle East. Result: no regional conflagration. Iran and Iraq fought one of the bloodiest wars of the second half the 20th century. Result: no regional conflagration. The Soviets fought in Afghanistan and then withdrew. No regional conflagration. The U.S. fought the Gulf War and then left. No regional conflagration. Algeria fought an internal civil war for a decade. No regional conflagration.
September 9, 2007
Southwest Airlines Wants to Tell Their Customers How To Dress
MSNBC, September 9, 2007
SAN DIEGO – Kyla Ebbert says she wants an apology from Southwest Airlines after being told to get off a plane and change her clothes because what she was wearing was too revealing.
Ebbert, 23, told the Today Show’s Matt Lauer that an airline employee asked her to come up to the front of the plane just before the crew closed the plane’s doors.
“He told me, ‘I’m sorry but you’re going to have to catch a later flight because you are dressed inappropriately, this is a family airline and you are too provocative to fly on this flight’,” Ebbert said. “I said, ‘What part is it? The shirt? The skirt? Which part?’ He said, ‘the whole thing.’”
Ebbert said she was on a day trip from San Diego to Tucson for a doctor’s appointment and had no luggage, so she had nothing to change into. She was allowed to stay on the flight, she said, after agreeing to pull up her tank top and pull down her skirt.
Ebbert wore the same outfit on the Today Show that she was wearing at the time of the incident, she said.
Frank Rich: As the Iraqis Stand Down, We’ll Stand Up
Frank Rich, The New York Times, September 9, 2007
It will be all 9/11 all the time this week, as the White House yet again synchronizes its drumbeating for the Iraq war with the anniversary of an attack that had nothing to do with Iraq. Ignore that fog and focus instead on another date whose anniversary passed yesterday without notice: Sept. 8, 2002. What happened on that Sunday five years ago is the Rosetta Stone for the administration’s latest scam.
That was the morning when the Bush White House officially rolled out its fraudulent case for the war. The four horsemen of the apocalypse — Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell and Rice — were dispatched en masse to the Washington talk shows, where they eagerly pointed to a front-page New York Times article amplifying subsequently debunked administration claims that Saddam had sought to buy aluminum tubes meant for nuclear weapons. “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud,” said Condoleezza Rice on CNN, introducing a sales pitch concocted by a White House speechwriter.
What followed was an epic propaganda onslaught of distorted intelligence, fake news, credulous and erroneous reporting by bona fide journalists, presidential playacting and Congressional fecklessness. Much of it had been plotted that summer of 2002 by the then-secret White House Iraq Group (WHIG), a small task force of administration brass charged with the Iraq con job.
Today the spirit of WHIG lives. In the stay-the-surge propaganda offensive that crests with this week’s Congressional testimony of Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, history is repeating itself in almost every particular. Even the specter of imminent “nuclear holocaust” has been rebooted in President Bush’s arsenal of rhetorical scare tactics.
The new WHIG is a 24/7 Pentagon information “war room” conceived in the last throes of the Rumsfeld regime and run by a former ABC News producer. White House “facts” about the surge’s triumph are turning up unsubstantiated in newspapers and on TV. Instead of being bombarded with dire cherry-picked intelligence about W.M.D., this time we’re being serenaded with feel-good cherry-picked statistics offering hope. Once again the fix is in. Mr. Bush’s pretense that he has been waiting for the Petraeus-Crocker report before setting his policy is as bogus as his U.N. charade before the war. And once again a narrowly Democratic Senate lacks the votes to stop him.
September 7, 2007
Ye Olde Scribe Presents: Sci Fry and What Does One DO With a Dead President?
Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam…
“Putting a little occasional laughter into the almost always annoying.”
I rear-ended another car this morning. I tell you, I knew right then and there that it was going to be a REALLY bad day! The driver got out of the other car, and wouldn’t you know it! He was a DWARF!! He looked up at me and said… “I am NOT ‘Happy!’” So I said, “Well, then, which one ARE you?”
That’s how the fight started.
“Another” car? Did you “Sneezy” again, or are you driving like Santa’s unmentioned dwarf, Sleazy, drives… shifting the wrong, long, hard “stick?”
It’s backwards week here at Ye Olde Scribe, so Scribe will start with the last one first…
What Does One DO with a Dead President?
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Paul Krugman: Time to Take a Stand
Paul Krugman, The New York Times, September 6, 2007
Here’s what will definitely happen when Gen. David Petraeus testifies before Congress next week: he’ll assert that the surge has reduced violence in Iraq — as long as you don’t count Sunnis killed by Sunnis, Shiites killed by Shiites, Iraqis killed by car bombs and people shot in the front of the head.
Here’s what I’m afraid will happen: Democrats will look at Gen. Petraeus’s uniform and medals and fall into their usual cringe. They won’t ask hard questions out of fear that someone might accuse them of attacking the military. After the testimony, they’ll desperately try to get Republicans to agree to a resolution that politely asks President Bush to maybe, possibly, withdraw some troops, if he feels like it.
There are five things I hope Democrats in Congress will remember.
First, no independent assessment has concluded that violence in Iraq is down. On the contrary, estimates based on morgue, hospital and police records suggest that the daily number of civilian deaths is almost twice its average pace from last year. And a recent assessment by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office found no decline in the average number of daily attacks.
So how can the military be claiming otherwise? Apparently, the Pentagon has a double super secret formula that it uses to distinguish sectarian killings (bad) from other deaths (not important); according to press reports, all deaths from car bombs are excluded, and one intelligence analyst told The Washington Post that “if a bullet went through the back of the head, it’s sectarian. If it went through the front, it’s criminal.” So the number of dead is down, as long as you only count certain kinds of dead people.
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September 6, 2007
Thompson Nothing But A Chicken Hawk
It appears to the average person (re: New Hampshire voters) that former Senator Fred Thompson was scared to join in with the rest of the GOP presidential candidates at last night’s debate in New Hampshire. Thompson, after months of saying he was running for president, finally announced he was running on his website and then on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. Apparently, Thompson still believes he is still the bad actor he was kukking it up with Leno, instead of a serious contender for the most important job on earth.
For my money Thompson is a chicken. He could have announced much sooner than he did, especially with a debate coming up in the critical state of New Hampshire. The general consensus in the state is that Thompson snubbed them by not showing up. I agree. If Thompson is the great candidate he says he is then why didn’t he confront the rest of the candidates last night. A Thompson spokesperson stated the candidate did not have enough time to prepare for the debate. If that was the case what the hell has he been doing for the last three months.
Many people in the GOP have looked to Thompson as a savior is an election cycle that has no true conservative. Whether Thompson is a true conservative remains to be seen. What is apparent is that Thompson is not prepared to be a candidate let alone president. He also seems to be getting some bad advice, in particular skipping last nights debate. Being a chicken hawk like our current president is certainly not what this country needs, and if anyone in the GOP has any brains they will kick Thompson to the curb before he does them any damage. Personally I hope he stays in so we can watch the GOP further implode.
Craig Supporters Call for Boycott of Minneapolis Airport
The Columbian, September 5, 2007
BATTLE GROUND, Wash. — Supporters of Sen. Larry Craig with the American Land Rights Association are calling for a boycott of the Minneapolis-Saint Paul Airport.
The Battle Ground (Washington) based association says airport police who arrested the senator in a men’s room sex sting are responsible for weakening private property rights in the West. Craig is a Republican member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.
The American Land Rights Association, which has an office in Washington, D-C, advocates for the use of federal lands and against what it calls federal “land grabs.”
The association says the airport should apologize to Craig for what it calls “ambushing” the senator.