a little bird told me

Why is the allegation that Dear Leader was wired (in more than his usual sense) during the debates not tinfoil hat territory? Because he's had advisors whispering sweet nothings in his ear before, as in this "unscripted" press conference. From Avedon Carol.

In the interest of multimedia fixation, the following is submitted for your review.

http://home.earthlink.net/~houval/gopconstrm.mov

And the award for best first debate wrap up goes to:

http://www.oddbits.com/audio/bush_mixtape1.mp3

I mean, it lets the man speak for himself.

There's hope! Does Kerry even need to campaign while Bush is making speeches like this?


Published on Tuesday, September 7, 2004 by Reuters

Bush: OB-GYNs Kept from 'Practicing Their Love'

 

POPLAR BLUFF, Mo. - President Bush offered an unexpected reason on Monday for cracking down on frivolous medical lawsuits: "Too many OB-GYNs aren't able to practice their love with women all across this country."

The Republican president, long known for verbal and grammatical lapses, included the anecdote about obstetrician gynecologists in his stump speech attacking Democratic presidential rival Sen. John Kerry and his running mate, Sen. John Edwards, a former trial lawyer.

At a rally of cheering supporters in Poplar Bluff, Missouri, Bush made his usual pitch for limiting "frivolous lawsuits" that he said drive up the cost of health care and run doctors out of business.

But then he added, "We've got an issue in America. Too many good docs are getting out of business. Too many OB-GYNs aren't able to practice their love with women all across this country."

Unfazed, Bush went on to deride his rivals as "pro-trial lawyer," and concluded, "I think you've got to make a choice. My opponent made his choice, and he put him on the ticket. I made my choice. I'm for medical liability reform now."

© Copyright 2004 Reuters Ltd

A couple weeks ago after a screening of Control Room, I was standing outside doing the smoking thing and ran into some folks from the local chapter of the international socialists. Well spoken, well informed - all of them (well all but one, but I guess every movement has their hanger-ons). The intriguing thing was that they were all dead set on a Nader candidacy. To a person, their vote is going to Nader this November. We did the back and forth, and all things considered, it was one of the best political conversations I've had in this otherwise somewhat slow and conservative town. It was also the most disappointing.

I'm not a party kind of guy (well at least political parties) but I can't dismiss their complaint that the left looks a hell of a lot like the right. I don't know personally how to fix it. I do know this however. Anyone, I mean absolutely anyone who thinks that a vote for Nader is somehow the right thing to do this November needs to realize that they are personally accountable for a Bush victory.

Yes, I agree that we need a third party. Actually, I think we need six or ten or twenty, however many it takes to split the moribund hegemony we've been in the midst of for so many decades. Yes, Democrats look a lot like Republicans. And maybe Kerry really is the lesser of two evils. But all things considered, I'm willing to take my chances as I don't see how it could possibly get any worse.

So, if the only right thing for you to do this November is cast (or write in) your vote for Nader, then do - for God's sake, at least your voting. But if the only time you lodge your protest is in the voting booth, if you're sole attempt to change the system is by throwing your vote to a candidate whose only real claim is that he's not them, then accept the unmitigated fact that it is you who puts GW in the White House for four more years. In that eventuality, you'll have to cross an ocean to talk to me, cause I'm leaving.

Wednesday Funnies

A coworker sent out a link to this New Yorker column, which made me happy.

I'm also fond of this page. I'd like to have a shirt with Bush on the front and Cheney on the back, although my depressing non-Orwell-reading blind date from a few weeks ago wouldn't understand it.

Sigh. My mother would say that that's why I'm a spinster: I'm an intellectual snob. Oh, well. I'd rather be a snob than be ordinary.

I don't know why this post, published 3 days ago by Christian, didn't take. So I'm re-posting it now.

Hersh: Children sodomized at Abu Ghraib, on tape 
 
Salon is carrying a piece today regarding a speech at the ACLU by New Yorker journalist Seymour Hersh. The headline above, pretty much sums it up.   More here and here. Original streaming video of the speech here. (Hersh begins at about 1:07.)

As of right now, I have nothing to say about this execept it sure as hell better not be true.

funny.
The temperature at which book paper burns.

point well made.
The President makes a strong argument here. I mean, Edwards is just a one-term senator from a relatively small state, with little prior political experience.

Of course, compared to a failed Texas business man who used family connections to wangle everything from posh jobs to avoiding military service in Vietnam, I'd say this Edwards chap is eminently qualified to be Commander-in-Chief.

proof, part the second.
Just when you thought that the story of Noah's flood (or, as our creation science friends call it, the Noachian Deluge) was a beautiful parable about man's responsibility to his planet and his fellow man, or perhaps just a bunch of superstitious hooey, finally there is an explanation that melds it and the fossil record:

Lecturing to a rapt audience of 20 like-minded Christians after a hard day in the field, Russ McGlenn, a self-styled amateur archaeologist and palaeontologist and head of Adventure Safaris, said: "Heavenly Father, we thank You for the evidence of a catastrophic flood event. We thank You for the time to study Your creation. Heavenly Father, we thank You for the evidence of a catastrophic flood event."

(Catch by Chris Mooney, science journalist extraordinaire.)

proof.
Did working for two successive Bush administrations suck all of the blackness out of Colin Powell's soul? You be the judge.
(Click on "Colin does YMCA" on right.)

They're about much more than oatmeal ...

I've gotta love those Friends. For one thing, I've learned that they were the primary movers who won me the right to vote against George Bush (and to vote for or against anything else I like, for that matter). In my travels out east last summer, I found that they have comfy meeting houses, brilliant tour guides, and quaint little cemetaries. And, one hundred years after they were instrumental in the abolition of slavery in the U.S., The American Friends Service Committee (also called the Quakers, of course) is still out there working to repair the stupid mistakes the U.S. tends to make. Here are some activities they'd like our help with, from their current email newsletter:

You can electronically sign a letter, apologizing to the Iraqi people for what we've done to their country, including the deaths, the tortures, the destruction of museums, libraries, and other infrastructures. The plan is to collect as many American signatures as possible by August 1, translate the letter into Arabic, and then broadcast it in as many Iraqi media outlets as possible.

You can also help Amnesty International in their campaign to free Staff Sergeant Camilo Mejia Castillo. After six months of combat service in Iraq, Sergeant Castillo, a National Gaurdsman, was so horrified by what he'd seen that he refused to return to the "illegal and immoral" (in his words) war in Iraq. Although he has filed for Conscientious Objector Status (a noble idea, I think, since it would still require him to serve, but in a civilian capacity), and that application has not been fully processed, he has already been given the maximum sentence (one year in prison) for "desertion."

Amnesty International makes it easy to send letters or emails in Sergeant Castillo's defense to Acting Secretary of the Army Les Brownlee and to Major General William G. Webster Jr. According to the Amnesty site, "A member of his defense team, former Attorney General Ramsey Clark, spoke of the 'incredible irony that we’re prosecuting soldiers in Iraq for violations of international law and we’re prosecuting a soldier here because he refused to do the same things.'"

And finally, you can visit the American Friends Service Committe's Web site to see the amazing things they're doing to help everyday Iraqis rebuild their lives. I really like those Quakers.

Ever wondered what an interview with Bush would be like with a reporter that detested him? Get your kicks here. The perverse thrill I got out of this was indescribable. AP has info on the interview here if you're bandwidth or streaming video challenged.

Meanwhile, from the Fahrenheit 9/11 front, our local theater sold out of tix for opening night. Earliest we could score tix was late afternoon, Saturday. I strongly encourage everyone to see it this weekend. In my view, the stronger the box office receipts, the quicker the media organizations will realize there's an untapped demographic of people who hate our fearless leader.

dude, where's my country?
I mean, seriously, it was right here just a little bit ago:

MSNBC: The Supreme Court ruled Monday that people do not have a constitutional right to refuse to tell police their names.

British Medical Journal: Bush plans to screen whole US population for mental illness (Admittedly, after reading the article it seems that the headline is a bit overblown & misleading, but still... "New Freedom Initiative???" Creepy.)

a few bad apples
Attorneys for several soldiers charged with abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib will be allowed to call the accuseds' commanding officers as witnesses, the New York Times reports. And Reuters is reporting today that the soldiers' lawyers will also try to get Dear Leader and Zen Master Donald Rumsfeld to testify as well.

By the way, the trials should start early this fall, NPR reported this morning.

And Seymour Hersh says of the prison torture scandal, "You haven't begun to see evil..." Because of Bush et al's assiduous efforts to keep information about Abu Ghraib from the public, we can expect a slow, steady trickle of increasingly more awful revelations--with the truly horrible stuff coming out probably this September and October.

Have a happy election season, you arrogant pricks.

I cannot fucking believe what a truth-immune asshole this guy is.

And Ansar al-Islam was based in Kurdistan--essentially a protectorate of the U.S. since 1991.

Update: Ditto what this guy said.

blech.
You probably shouldn't read this post from Billmon about our possible military junta future. It's too depressing:

It doesn't necessarily happen all at once, or as the result of a traditional military coup d'état. The story of the German army's entry into politics after World War I - first as a source of weapons and freelance talent for right-wing militias (the so-called "Freikorps") then as an actor in the parliamentary conspiracies that brought the Nazis to power, and finally as a key player in the "Night of the Long Knives," which consolidated Hitler's personal rule - may not be directly relevant to contemporary America, but its a powerful lesson in how gradualism can obscure some truly revolutionary institutional changes.

Also pretty depressing is this NY Times story about military recruiting in my hometown.

"You see, according to President Bush, he's going to hand power over in Iraq on June 30," Mr. Nelson explained, as he sat on his front porch. "I expect Iraq will be over before I even get out of boot camp."

A long, depressing article on our new American policies regarding the fundamental okay-ness of torture is here. A depressing analysis of such policies is here.

This, however, brightens the world considerably. As does this.

Now that you feel better, why don't you do something productive like tell your senators to oppose torture by supporting the Durbin Amendment to a defense appropriations bill now being considered. (And how creepy is it that "opposing torture" is enough of a political football that we actually have to call our elected officials to get them to do so?!?) You can look up your senators' phone numbers here. And if you live in Colorado, perhaps you'll also want to help collect petition signatures for this effort. (My former boss's generally lame response to having a state's electoral votes divvied up proportionally rather than winner-take-all, can be found here. Poor Mike! He's been so partisan for so long that now all he cares about is winning. He argues positions now that he never would have taken in his more reasoned past. Save us all from his fate.)

dj culture
"Now, what President Bush is thinking," a promo on my favorite commerical radio station begins. Then, over a very light and flowery instrumental, you hear a voice with a Southern twang intone things like, "I wonder why nobody ever told me that Condi is black. Not that there's anything wrong with that. I think people who are a different color than white can still have democracy...I wonder if Condi knows that Colin Powell guy. I've never met him, but I hear he's black, too." Meanwhile, Lazlo, the afternoon drive-time dj on this station (and the top-rated afternoon drive-time host in the Kansas City area), spends virtually every Friday listing that week's Bush administration atrocities. Lazlo, like Howard Stern, was set off on his extended anti-Bush tirade largely by the Michael Powell-led FCC's overzealous prosecution of their anti-obscenity mandate and their pandering to media giants like Clear Channel. I don't know if Lazlo's ranting is having any impact on swing-state Missouri's presidential politics, but it seems Howard Stern's is:

Nationwide, 17 percent of likely voters listen to Stern's radio show, according to the poll released Thursday by the New Democrat Network, a Washington-based group. They favor Kerry over Bush by 53 percent to 43 percent, and by 59 to 37 percent in 18 battleground states.
Of the likely voters who listen to Stern, 1 out of 4 is a swing voter who hasn't decided how to vote in November. That means that about 4 percent of the national swing vote up for grabs this fall listens to Stern, according to the poll.

So while Karl Rove has been advising Bush to suck up to the religious right ever more blatantly to get those 4 million fundamentalist Christians who didn't show up at the polls last time to show up this time, in doing so Bush may have alienated a much, much larger group of potential voters--who may not have voted in 2000, either, but certainly will this year. And not the way Uncle Karl would like them to.
Meanwhile, Colorado's oldest talk radio station, the Clear Channel-owned, strongly pro-Bush 850 KOA has dropped a precipitous 1.7 points in the last quarter--from a share of 6.4 to 4.7--in the latest Arbitron ratings, Advertising & Marketing Review reports (sorry, paper only, no link). Colorado, which went sharply for Bush in 2000, has now unexpectedly been predicted to be a swing state by many pollsters. And Howard Stern and Lazlo, with stable high ratings, rant on.

the cruciatus curse
The Wall Street Journal has
obtained one of the infamous Pentagon/Department of Justice memos on how you, too, can enjoy torturing another human being and avoid prosecution under the Geneva Conventions or any of the many U.S. laws banning torture, as I e-mailed yesterday. The fact that these memos make arguments that would rescind the Magna Carta, let alone the U.S. Constitution, naturally remains of little interest to the mainstream media. The blogosphere is all over it, though:

Digby at Hullabaloo reflects on what Hannah Arendt called "the banality of evil" and the torture memo:

it shocked me not because of its endorsement of torture, we knew something about that already, indeed we've seen pictures of it. No, strangely, it shocked me because it was the product of a bureaucratic "working group" and it was delivered in the dry prose of a government report on the legality of setting aside an executive order on train travel requirements. But this "working group," consisting of lawyers from throughout the executive branch, was tasked with something a little bit different than your average government project. Its job was defining the legal limits of the president's authority to order people to be tortured.
They had meetings at which I'm sure they all believed very sincerely that they were doing important work on the War on Terror. I'm sure they worked long hours and diligently analyzed the law and offered their advice to the president and secretary of defense with nothing but the good of the country in their minds. And they produced a 50+ page paper from which, I understand, only one person --- the state department representative -- dissented.
....
What was the process by which they came to these dry legalistic definition of when, how and where on is allowed to inflict terrible pain as long as it doesn't reach the level of intensity that would accompany serious physical injury or organ failure? Did they discuss this around a conference table over a take-out Chinese dinner? Did they all nod their heads and take notes and write memos and have conference calls and send e-mails on the subject of what exactly the definition of "severe pain" is? Did they take their kid to school on the way to the meeting in which they finalized a report that says the president of the United States has the unlimited authority to order the torture of anyone he wants? Did they tell jokes on the way out?

And Fred Clark at Slacktivist has an intersting anecdote about "moral relativism." It seems that, at least to one of Fred's coworkers, you're a shady "moral relativist" if you don't absolutely support the United States in its immoral actions:

In the same breath he both condemns and advocates a "moral relativism" -- the idea that to be "good" merely involves being better than the bad guys.
....
Scratch any complaint about "moral equivalence" and you will find, just below the surface, the advocacy of evil means -- of torture, murder and lawlessness -- in the supposed defense of the good.

And check out Fred's entry on Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire also. I'll add that there are, in the books, some spells that are never to be used by good witches and wizards--their very use makes their users bad people, practioners of the "dark arts," by definition. One of those is the cruciatus curse, the spell that inflicts pain for the purpose of torture.

Over the past week, while watching the love fest for the dearly departed unfold, I've been asking myself how much all this pomp is costing. Factoring in the time off for the national day of mourning, I've got a rough calculation of about half a billion (LA Times).

When ostentatious displays and honorific celebrations are proffered for dead leaders of dubious import, I am left with only one conclusion. We are the new Roman Empire.