Happy Hour Discurso

Today's opining on the public discourse.

Someone needs to give the Cons in Congress a good, sharp slap across the face. Isn't that what's typically done to calm hysterical screaming ninnies? Or do they just need their noses shoved deep in some reality? I myself believe they need some quiet time in a padded room while the anti-psychotic medication kicks in, but maybe some tough love by governors in their own party could snap them out of their delusions and make them functioning members of society again:

Congressional Republicans oppose the Obama administration's economic stimulus package. Media Republicans oppose the Obama administration's economic stimulus package. But then there are those other Republicans who actually have to govern during this economic crisis.

Most Republican governors have broken with their GOP colleagues in Congress and are pushing for passage of President Barack Obama's economic aid plan that would send billions to states for education, public works and health care.

Their state treasuries drained by the financial crisis, governors would welcome the money from Capitol Hill, where GOP lawmakers are more skeptical of Obama's spending priorities.

The 2008 GOP vice presidential nominee, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, planned to meet in Washington this weekend with Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and other senators to press for her state's share of the package.

Florida Gov. Charlie Crist worked the phones last week with members of his state's congressional delegation, including House Republicans. Vermont Gov. Jim Douglas, the Republican vice chairman of the National Governors Association, planned to be in Washington on Monday to urge the Senate to approve the plan.

"As the executive of a state experiencing budget challenges, Gov. Douglas has a different perspective on the situation than congressional Republicans," said Douglas' deputy chief of staff, Dennise Casey.

You don't say. States facing unprecedented budget crunches and mounting healthcare, education, and transportation costs support the idea of a federal rescue package. Who knew?

Funny how that tax-cuts mantra and the "whatever Dems want, we don't want" approach to governance get less and less attractive the more one has to deal with the actual consequences of such decisions. If the Cons in Congress were reduced to eating nothing but Spam and off-brand elbow macaroni whenever their states suffered a budget shortfall, I think we'd be seeing a little less obstruction.

Then again, maybe not. After all, that would probably feed right in to their delusions of heroism:

Michael Steele addressed the House Republican Retreat today, his first interaction with the Congressional GOP since he was election RNC chairman yesterday. Steele praised the caucus for voting against the economic stimulus package: "I thought it was very important to send a signal, and you sent it loudly, very clearly, that this party, the leadership of this caucus, would stand first and foremost with the American people. You made it very clear that in order to grow through this recession that you not redistribute the wealth of the people of this nation."

Someone may want to remind Chairman Steele that Con fantasies about what the American people want are what caused the Cons to lose the last two elections. The American people don't want Cons standing with them. It's rather like having the doctor who amputated the wrong limb loudly proclaiming he won't give up on your case until the proper amputation is done, and insisting on performing your next surgery after you've fired him and hired a new surgeon.

And you know what else? That "redistribution" of wealth is more of a reclamation, and starts to look damned attractive when faced with numbers like this:

Bloomberg reports that, according to recently released IRS data, “the average tax rate paid by the richest 400 Americans fell by a third to 17.2 percent through the first six years of the Bush administration and their average income doubled to $263.3 million.” Much of their income came from capital gains resulting from the Bush tax cuts:

The drop from 2001’s tax rate of 22.9 percent was due largely to ex-President George W. Bush’s push to cut tax rates on most capital gains to 15 percent in 2003.

[snip]

The Wonk Room has noted how “the conservative approach of putting big corporations and the very wealthy ahead of the middle class has failed to create prosperity that can be shared by all Americans.”

Something tells me it's high time for a little wealth redistribution. There's something very wrong with people who make that much money contributing so little tax revenue to our country, and then bitching about how poor they feel.

And there's something extremely wrong with Wall Street execs screaming for ginormous government handouts calling the taxpayers who fund their extravagance socialists:

On Wall Street these days, being denied bonuses when you've lost money for your clients and shareholders (now taxpayers, of course) is ... socialism:

“I think President Obama painted everyone with a broad stroke,” said Brian McCaffrey, 55, a Wall Street lawyer who was on his way to see a client. “The way we pay our taxes is bonuses. The only way that we’ll get any of our bailout money back is from taxes on bonuses. I think bonuses should be looked at on a case by case basis, or you turn into a socialist.”

Listen, you stupid fuckwits: you and your Con friends in Washington dumped the economy in the shitter. Now you're asking for taxpayer money to get you out. And guess what? The easiest way to get the bailout money back is not to give bonuses to dumbfucks who think they earn multi-million dollar bonuses even when they bankrupted their companies. In fact, how about a paycut, instead? Just like the people who are now suffering for your stupidity:

All over the country, workers are being told that they can't have bonuses or raises, that they have to cut back their hours, that they are being laid off. The waiters at my favorite brewpub, who have been there for a decade or more, are all being reduced to part time (so that none of them have to be completely laid off) and their tips are off by 60%. The idea that the people who caused all this should get bonuses at the taxpayers expense because they are such valuable employees is ludicrous. That these people who work forsuch massively failed enterprises should be rewarded by the taxpayers for their failure is beyond reason. I can't fathom why they haven't all been fired.

Neither can I. But they seem to have the same attitude the Cons do, which is that they are the creme de la creme and the country can't survive without them. They're so tone-deaf it's astounding. My jaw aches from the dropping it's been doing.

And just when I think that the Cons couldn't possibly be any more obstructionist and stupid, I read something like this:

At this point there are an estimated 6.5 million families still relying on unconverted televisions, and a waiting list for coupons [for converter boxes]. The Obama administration has asked for more time to straighten things out, and the Senate voted unanimously to postpone the deadline for four months. This shows that legislators of good will (Democrat Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia and Republican Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas) can work in a bipartisan manner when the issue at hand is every American’s God-given right to television reception.

Then the bill moved to the House, where quick action required permission of a two-thirds majority. For once, the Republicans got a chance to make their presence felt, and they instantly sprang into action and refused to allow anybody to do anything. This shows you why Nancy Pelosi always seems a little irritable.

How could the Republicans not be worried about this? A disproportionate number of the endangered TV viewers are senior citizens. Bill O’Reilly’s entire audience is in danger!

Forfuckssake. They're even knee-jerking something so simple as delaying the transition from analog to digital so that people who don't have converters yet can get them.

No wonder Nate Silver thinks the Cons are in a death-spiral:

Most fundamentally of all, the McCain campaign radically overestimated the importance of appealing to the base. House Republicans may be replicating their mistake. Self-described conservative Republicans represent only about 20 percent of the population. This base is not necessarily becoming smaller; it's still alive and kicking. What is true, however, is that the (1) base has never been sufficient to form a winning electoral coalition, and (2) that there are fewer and fewer non-base (e.g. moderates, libertarian Republicans, Republican leaning-independents). As these moderates have fled the GOP, the party's electoral fortunes have tanked. But simultaneously, they have had less and less influence on the Republican message.

Thus the Republicans, arguably, are in something of a death spiral. The more conservative, partisan, and strident their message becomes, the more they alienate non-base Republicans. But the more they alienate non-base Republicans, the fewer of them are left to worry about appeasing. Thus, their message becomes continually more appealing to the base -- but more conservative, partisan, and strident to the rest of us. And the process loops back upon itself.

[snip]

Perhaps the House Republicans voted against delaying the digital TV changeover because they don't want Americans to see the carnage.

You know what? I think Nate's wrong about that last bit. You see, to speculate that the Cons are blocking a sensible delay in the analog-to-digital transition because they're trying to keep as many Americans as possible from realizing what a raving bunch of fucktards they've become would require some kind of reason. I have seen no evidence of reason coming from the Cons in the House lately. And if this is emblematic of their thinking, there's no hope that they'll start thinking like normal, intelligent human beings:

Former Bush White House chief of staff Andrew Card complained to right-wing talk-show host Michael Medved that President Obama is insufficiently respectful of the presidency. Apparently, one demonstrates respect for the presidency by their choice of attire:

"...I found that Ronald Reagan and both President Bushes treated the Oval Office with tremendous respect. They treated the Office of the Presidency with tremendous respect. And some of that respect was reflected in how they expected people to behave, how they expected them to dress when they walked into the symbol of freedom for the world, the Oval Office. And yes, I'm disappointed to see the casual, laissez faire, short sleeves, no shirt and tie, no jacket, kind of locker room experience that seems to be taking place in this White House and the Oval Office."

"Locker-room experience." Card wasn't kidding.

I think there are two general angles to this. The first is that Obama isn't especially concerned about the formality of one's clothing. He was photographed at his desk wearing a shirt and tie, and some of the political establishment gasped because he was seen sans jacket. (Obama, a Hawaii native, reportedly prefers a warm office. David Axelrod said, "You could grow orchids in there.") Suits are common on weekdays, but the president issued an informal edict for "business casual" on weekends. That, apparently, means slacks and a buttoned-down shirt.

Traditionalists may not approve of Obama's easy-going style, but we're a long way from a "laissez faire locker-room experience." A frat house it isn't.

The other thing to consider here is exactly how one "respects" the presidency. For Card and others who served with Bush, it's about choice of clothing. For those who serve with Obama, it's about honoring institutional limits and the rule of law.

These fuckwits are incredible. What the fuck can you do with a group of people who think appearance matters more than substance? That "thinking" is so fucking shallow that if it was represented by a pool, you wouldn't even be able to get the bottoms of your feet damp in it.

The fact that 20% of the American public is stupid enough to identify with these dumbshits is a travesty.

Time to Clean Out the Bushies

Something tells me a few people need reminding that there's a new boss now:

I can't figure out if these Bushies are doing this for the usual bribes or because they're homicidally jealous of sentient beings.

Greenpeace nails this:

Bush Holdovers Attempt to Undermine Obama Foreign Policy on Whaling

Greenpeace Calls for Obama, Clinton to Assert Authority and Replace Officials

WASHINGTON - Just days after the inauguration of President Obama, holdovers from the Bush administration are already attempting to undermine his foreign policy on whaling.

According to news reports out of Hawaii, Bush appointees on the International Whaling Commission - Doug DeMaster and commission chairman William Hogarth - participated in closed-door negotiations with Japan to finalize a deal that would allow increased whaling off the coast of Japan in return for marginal limits on Japan's illegal commercial whaling program in the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary. The trade-off will not benefit whale conservation and could actually put additional endangered populations at risk.

Such a deal would directly violate President Obama's stated policy of working to end Japanese whaling.

I guess they couldn't read the memo. Not surprising, considering the caliber of people Bush chose to contaminate the government with.

Obama's a busy man. He's got a ginormous mess to clean up, and rooting out Bush's buffoons on top of the myriad crises he was left with is a gargantuan job. Luckily, there are many firms specializing in the removal of toxic waste. And I'm sure they'll discount for bulk requests.

Send 'em in.

Hangover Discurso

In case you were wondering, yes, socializing was a success. I got to go fall in love with my adopted city all over again, I'm stuffed to the gills on excellent food, and Dark Knight on the IMAX screen was teh awesome.

And I had all of this lovely Con stupidity to come home to. Yippee!

For those of you who were desperate to know who the next chairman of the RNC would be, wonder no more:

Today, Republican National Committee (RNC) delegates chose former Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael Steele as their new chairman. Steele is the first African-American to lead the party, which continues to struggle with diversity problems.

The choice of Steele represents a considerable failure for the social conservatives who dominated during the era of Tom DeLay and George W. Bush. These far right wingers — including Phyllis Schlafly, Tony Perkins, Richard Viguerie, and Ed Meese — all backed Kenneth Blackwell, who had one of the poorest showings in the election.

The frothing fundies didn't get their man, but never fear! Steele has plenty of entertainment potential. This is the man who thinks whites-only country clubs are not a problem because he, personally, doesn't play golf. Which may go a long way towards explaining why he thinks anyone who isn't LGBT doesn't care about LGBT rights. He once called the R in front of his name a scarlet letter and repeatedly tried to brand himself a Democrat in 2006. And he likes to compare stem cell research to Nazi experiments. Doesn't he sound like the perfect Con to improve Cons' electoral chances after two cycles of abject defeat?

Consider that this is the best man they could find for the job:

Indeed, whenever I see Steele, I immediately think of the editorial the Washington Post ran on his U.S. Senate candidacy in 2006, which described Steele as a man of "no achievement, no record, no evidence and certainly no command of the issues." Noting his four-year tenure as Maryland's lieutenant governor, the Post added, "Steele had at best a marginal impact, even on his handpicked projects."

No wonder Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell seemed a little worried when he yammered to the RNC about the Con outlook on the eve of Steele's victory (h/t):

"We're all concerned about the fact that the very wealthy and the very poor, the most and least educated, and a majority of minority voters, seem to have more or less stopped paying attention to us. And we should be concerned that, as a result of all this, the Republican Party seems to be slipping into a position of being more of a regional party than a national one," McConnell told the gathering.

"In politics, there's a name for a regional party: it's called a minority party. And I didn't sign up to be a member of a regional party . . . As Republicans, we know that common-sense conservative principles aren't regional. But I think we have to admit what our sales job has been poor. And in my view, that needs to change."

Oh, Mitch. The voters are totally paying attention to you. That's why they're not voting for you.

But according to the current leading lights in the Con party, it's just a matter of marketing:

Every once in a while, a Freudian slip of mammoth ugly truth proportions falls from someone's lips. Behold:

Before Gingrich offered that somewhat surprising praise, Boehner reminded Republicans that they are no longer in the business of legislating and should focus almost solely on communicating their message with voters.

"We are in the communications business,” Boehner told the crowd during his opening remarks. “We can build a new Republican majority one issue at a time."

Ask not what you can do for your country.

Ask what you can manipulate the voters of your country to do for your own personal ambition and the growing needs of the rapacious Republican party.

[snip]

Because nothing says "man of the people" like a robust speech about how their needs don't matter unless your political party is getting something out of it, while dining in luxury accommodations and taking in the mineral waters and perhaps a morning Sportsman treatment for a bit of uplift around the eye area and a gentle scrubbing of the skin to enhance that Ebenezer glow.

You know why they're talking about "sales jobs," don't you? It's because when all you've got to offer is snake oil, you can't let the product speak for itself. You have to con people into buying your useless bullshit. And that, my darlings, is why they're called "Cons."

What they're trying to sell right now is the idea that we don't need no stinkin' stimulus, and they'll go to pseudo-heroic lengths to stand in its way:

Last night on NPR’s All Things Considered, host Robert Siegel asked Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) about the prospects of a Republican filibuster of the Senate’s version of the economic recovery package. Grassley responded that Republicans would indeed filibuster the package, requiring the bill to garner a 60-vote majority for passage:

SIEGEL: By the way, Senator, we always just assume that anything in the Senate requires 60 votes because there will be a filibuster threat. Is that right? Does this bill need 60 votes to pass?

GRASSLEY: Yes.

SIEGAL: It does?

GRASSLEY: Yes.

They may want to rethink that default obstructionist position just a wee bit. Despite an all-out media assault on the stimulus, voters are smelling the snake oil, and deciding they ain't buying:

A new poll in support of the stimulus plan:

A new poll by Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg.

A survey of 1,200 voters in 40 traditionally Republican congressional districts now held by Democrats Greenberg's firm conducted between Jan. 14 to 19 shows Obama's post-election honeymoon reaching a rapturous stage, with 44 percent of voters strongly supporting his policies.

A full 64 percent favor his economic plan, compared to 27 percent against. And precisely that same proportion favors the stimulus in 13 states that are expected to have competitive Senate races in 2010: Kentucky, Florida, Missouri, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Louisiana, Colorado, Ohio, Kansas, North Dakota, Wisconsin and Illinois.

Greenberg says an incumbent's support for the economic plan appears to make voters more likely to reelect the lawmaker -- particularly good news for the 20 or so Democrats who in November captured districts that former President Bush carried in 2004. He said one-third of Republicans and two-thirds of independents are leaning with Obama's general goals on the recovery.

Numbers like these would make a party capable of thinking engage in some serious cogitation about the likely effects of standing firm against a piece of legislation that 64% of voters in conservative districts love. A party concerned about getting their candidates elected might want to consider the fact that voters are plumping for the pols that support the stimulus. We know the Cons are hard of thinking, but I do hope the Blue Dogs fire up the synapses and stop acting like outrageous idiots. Emulating the Cons seems, I dunno, suicidal at this point.

But if the Blue Dogs and the Cons want to help more progressive Dems win in landslides in 2010, I won't quibble. So nice of them to provide us so much lovely ammunition.

Happy Hour Discurso

Today's opining on (yesterday's) public discourse.

That's right, my darlings. We're going with vintage stupidity because Dana's going to be traipsing through downtown Seattle, doing things like gazing at the Seattle Fault beneath the waters of Puget Sound and marveling at the fact part of it just slipped 35 kilometers down, stuffing herself until she bursts on the best chowder in the Northwest and some of the finest Indian food in town, and seeing Dark Knight at the Imax. Lucy may figure in there somewhere, but depending on how things go, we may be punking her off until a couple weeks from now, when we can spend a bit more time with her.

Since I'll be getting home rather too late to deliver Happy Hour at a reasonable time, and since the Cons were so obliging with the stupid, we'll have a retro discurso for now. I'll hit you with the hangover later so we don't get too far behind. Sound good to you? It does to me. So let's go for it.

Let's begin with Eric Cantor, who demonstrates beautifully the GOP tendency to loudly declaim, "I know you are but what am I?"

House GOP whip Eric Cantor has been successfully using the battle over the stimulus to secure a great deal of media attention. Now he’s trying a novel tack: Making an issue of that ad campaign by Obama allies I wrote about below, which shows, he suggests, that President Obama is the real partisan here.

Cantor has an aggressive new statement out demanding that Obama force the coalition running the ads — which includes MoveOn, AFSCME, SEIU, and Americans United for Change — to take down the spots, which pressure GOP Senators to back Obama’s stimulus package.

“President Obama should immediately disavow plans by some political groups who announced they will run attack ads against Republicans,” Cantor says. “Let us be clear: attack ads will not create jobs or help struggling families but will only serve to undermine our nation’s desire for bipartisanship. Instead of thinking about winning at any cost, we should all be thinking about creating the jobs Americans need.”

I think irony just died a little bit there. Here we have a partisan hack accusing the man who bent over backwards to make the perpetual crybabies of the GOP happy of being a partisan hack. For the Cons, the reality inversion never ends.

My friends, the fundamentals of the pearl-clutching economy are strong. Just listen to Rep. Jim DeMint waxing hysterical:

The stimulus bill that is being championed by President Obama, which was passed by Democrats in the House last night, is the worst piece of economic legislation Congress has considered in a hundred years. Not since the passage in 1909 of the 16th Amendment - which cleared the way for a federal income tax - has the United States seriously entertained a policy so comprehensively hostile to economic freedom, nor so arrogantly indifferent to economic reality. ...

This bill is not a stimulus, ladies and gentlemen; it is a mugging. It is a fraud.

DeMint's preferred solution? You guessed it, folks: make the Bush tax cuts permanent. Why add to the deficit to create jobs when you can add to the deficit to mostly benefit the rich?

Somebody get that main a fainting couch, stat.

David Sirota thinks they deserve a fainting cell instead (h/t):

How do you know House Republicans aren't negotiating in good faith and are acting as legislative terrorists? Because their rantings are verifiably crazy (h/t Steve Benen):

Representative Virginia Foxx, Republican of North Carolina, said that former President George Bush's signature tax cuts in 2001 had created years of growth but that the nation's problems started when Democrats regained majorities in Congress in the 2006 elections.

Again, only legislative terrorists desperate to sabotage the economy would make such deliberately insane statements. Only legislative terrorists would insist that the economy was Teh Awesome under George W. Bush. Only legislative terrorists would ignore the basic facts that most Americans innately know, and that were perfectly summarized by Washington Post...

[snip]

And only legislative terrorists would keep repeating lies that claim - despite overwhelming data to the contrary - that Bush-style tax cuts are a better way to create jobs and boost GDP than infrastructure spending.

Alas, Guantanamo is closing. Where oh where will we put the legislative terrorists who want to destroy America?

Speaking of terrorists, isn't it amazing how the folks on the right so often sound just like 'em?

I've followed this for a quite a while, because I've always been fascinated by the extent to which far-right criticism of Americans runs parallel to terrorists' criticism of Americans.

Dinesh D'Souza, for example, wrote an entire book devoted to arguing that terrorists are right about the problems with the culture in the United States. Osama bin Laden and other dangerous Islamic radicals believe the U.S. is too secular, too permissive, too diverse, too free, and too tolerant -- and D'Souza concluded that they're absolutely correct. Indeed, D'Souza went so far as to argue that liberal Americans are to blame for 9/11 -- the left invited the attacks by reinforcing the beliefs al Qaeda had about the United States.

In one particularly memorable episode of "The Colbert Report," D'Souza conceded that he finds some of the critiques from radical, anti-American extremists persuasive.

Glenn Beck, at the time with CNN, came to the same conclusion:

"More and more Muslims now hate us all across the world, and it really has not a lot to do with anything other than our morals.

"The things that they were saying about us were true. Our morals are just out the window. We're a society on the verge of moral collapse. And our promiscuity is off the charts.

"Now I don't think that we should fly airplanes into buildings or behead people because of it, but that's the prevailing feeling of Muslims in the Middle East. And you know what? They're right."

And a few months later, the Wall Street Journal's Peggy Noonan also seemed to agree with our enemies about America: "We make it too easy for those who want to hate us to hate us. We make ourselves look bad in our media, which helps future jihadists think that they must, by hating us, be good."

And they accuse us of hating America just because we'd like to stop the things that really drive terrorism, like, y'know, torture, invading Middle Eastern countries cuz we wanna, and letting Israel starve and kill as many Palestinians as it likes without so much as a murmur of protest.

Speaking of unhinged torture advocates, John Yoo's doing a spectacular job lying for the cause:

John Yoo, infamous author of the Bush administration legal memos authorizing the use of torture on suspected terrorists, slams President Obama for banning torture in a Wall Street Journal op-ed today, gravely warning that Obama “may have opened the door to further terrorist acts on U.S. soil.”

Throughout the article, Yoo insists that torture is America’s most effective weapon against terrorists and warns that without it, the U.S. will be incapable of intelligence-gathering:

Eliminating the Bush system will mean that we will get no more information from captured al Qaeda terrorists. Every prisoner will have the right to a lawyer (which they will surely demand), the right to remain silent, and the right to a speedy trial. […]

Relying on the civilian justice system not only robs us of the most effective intelligence tool to avert future attacks, it provides an opportunity for our enemies to obtain intelligence on us.

Considering the Bush administration repeatedly insisted its use of coercive techniques was “limited,” it would be a far stretch even for loyal Bushies to suggest that torture is not the one and only method to obtaining information. And as ThinkProgress has made clear again and again, numerous intelligence experts and real interrogators agree that, far from being “the most effective intelligence tool,” torture simply doesn’t work.

You know what? I think they know that now. But they've backed themselves into a corner - if they admit they were wrong, they have to admit that they were criminal dumbshits who really didn't keep America safe, their chances at ever running this country again within the next generation could be measured only with an electron microscope, and it would prove they're so spectacularly stupid that they get their ideas on effective counterterrorism from a teevee show. All they can do at this point is keep digging their hole and hope it's not their political grave.

Good luck with that.

You know what's really sad? We've gotten two Happy Hours out of these assclowns just from their antics from yesterday alone, and I still haven't managed to cover the full extent of the stupid. When historians look back on this period of American history a century for now, I hope they have universal healthcare, because there's going to be a lot of hernias resulting from the hysterical laughter.

Friday Favorite Fun With Earthquakes

So no shit, here I was beavering away at the blogging, and all of a sudden I notice the house is juddering and the cat's sitting bolt-upright acting like the world's coming apart. The shaking lasted nearly a minute. It wasn't the kind of thing that would make a Californian blink, but to this Arizona girl, it was a little intense - and exciting.

Had to be an earthquake. The only other thing that could cause the house to start dancing would be an explosion, and while I had the headphones on, I didn't have the music on that loud.

The cat is currently sitting by my chair pretending she never panicked, nuh-uh, not even a little bit.

The sensation of an earthquake's hard to describe - it's like being on a rollercoaster that's rapidly weaving side-to-side. The power of it is astonishing. My gliding rocking chair didn't know what to do - it was trying to go in all directions at once, which added something of a washing-machine-from-hell element to the whole experience. You can feel it in your whole body. Bizarre.

The Pacific Northwest Seismic Network just reported it:


Magnitude 4.6 is about what I expected. According to the Nevada Seismological Lab, the approximate energy of this thing was somewhere between a small nuclear weapon and a decent-sized tornado. Nice!

Now let's check out its intensity. I'm going to have to guess here, but this fits the bill:

IV. Most people indoors feel movement. Hanging objects swing. Dishes, windows, and doors rattle. The earthquake feels like a heavy truck hitting the walls. A few people outdoors may feel movement. Parked cars rock.

The blinds were swaying. The walls were vibrating. But crap didn't fall down, so yup, I'd say we've got ourselves a IV.

Not that I'm a geologist or even particularly good at reading maps, but it looks like this one hit right on the Seattle Fault:

The Seattle Fault is a zone of multiple shallow east-west thrust faults that cross the Puget Sound Lowland and through Seattle, in the US State of Washington, in the vicinity of Interstate 90. First suspected from mapping of gravitational anomalies in 1965 ^[1] and an uplifted marine terrace at Restoration Point (foreground in picture), its existence was definitely established by a set of five reports published in Science in 1992. These reports looked at the timing of abrupt uplift and subsidence around Restoration Point and Alki Point (right side of picture), ^[2] tsunami deposits on Puget Sound, ^[3] turbidity in lake paleosediments, ^[4] rock avalanches, ^[5] and multiple landslides around Lake Washington, ^[6], and determined that all these happened about 1100 years ago (between A.D. 900-930 ^[7] ), and most likely due to an earthquake of magnitude 7 or greater on the Seattle Fault.

We are also, if you recall, right by a subduction zone, where the Juan de Fuca Plate slides under the North American Plate, and causes things like earthquakes and Mt. St. Helens. It could also cause tsunamis, which is going to delight my stepmother. She, after all, is relatively convinced that moving up here means I'm going to get sucked into the sea.

Maybe I should be worried about that. I've moved to one of the most geologically active areas in the United States. I could easily end up an eye-witness to a devastating earthquake or catastrophic volcanic eruption. Tsunamis are definitely on the list of potential fun. That's too close for comfort for my stepmother, and used to be for me.

But damn it, after getting over the shock of realizing I was in a really-real earthquake, I'm grinning from ear to ear. This shit's exciting. It's a delight to be here where the earth's reforming itself beneath my very feet. It's one thing to read about it, quite another to live it. Now I understand why geologists look like kids at Christmas when they get to go into the caldera of an active volcano.

So there ye go. My first fun with earthquakes (that teensy tiny tremor several months ago doesn't really count - it wasn't even a kiddie ride). I never thought in a million zillion years I'd say this, but I'm almost hoping for an aftershock.

The Republicon Comeback and Other Political Fairy Tales

Tragedy, comedy, or tragicomedy? You be the judge:

The eager band of volunteers standing in the lobby of the Washington Hilton as the Republican National Committee winter meeting rolled into its second day made for a strange sight Thursday afternoon. One part Wal-Mart greeters to two parts Alex P. Keaton, they wore the sartorial train wreck that has become the unofficial uniform of young Washington apparatchiks trying to look "grassroots": a T-shirt, in this case bright blue, over a button-down shirt and dress slacks. "The comeback starts now!" their T-shirts declared. [snip]

That's the state to which the Republican Party has been reduced -- a tiny knot of true believers engaged in a cutthroat battle to win a majority of the GOP's 168 national committee members. It's a voting population so small it makes student government elections seem complicated by comparison. And it's also a very narrow demographic, with a unique, perhaps eccentric, view of the world. If the mood and the speeches at the winter meeting are any guide, Republicans are seeking refuge from electoral defeat in an alternate reality, one where the public still loves them -- or would if they could only improve their sales pitch. And where going along with President Obama's agenda just isn't in the cards.

To the Republican base, and the members gathered at the Hilton, the House GOP's unanimous, losing vote against an economic stimulus bill on Wednesday wasn't a Bronx cheer aimed at a popular new president, but rather a heroic stand on behalf of the American public. Playing to the hardcore grass roots, the party's leaders made clear Thursday that they plan to stick to their new formula, the one they think will lead them back from the wilderness -- even if it sounds pretty similar to the one that got them there in the first place.

Don't you ever change, GOP! Seriously. You've surely got the recipe for success right there. I mean, just look at all the red on this map:


Yeah, baby! That's like totally a center-right nation that will rise up and applaud your obstructionism as what's left of the economy gets flushed down the sewers. You just stand up to that nasty ol' socialist Obama. Let the voters know who's watching out for their interests:

Duncan, for his part, said Republicans were "in a position of strength today."

"The Democrats mean to use this opportunity of unchallenged power to explode the size and scope of the federal government, to take control of entire sectors of our economy, to crush the conservative opposition through parliamentary procedure and redistricting," he told RNC members, winning applause. "The goal is to indoctrinate a generation of American children to the gentle comforts of the nanny state ... The only thing standing between their agenda and success is the Republican Party."

That is, of course, exactly what Democrats want voters to remember when they go to the polls in 2010 -- that the Republicans' first instinct was to stand between Obama's agenda and success.

I do believe some aides de memoire can be arranged. If we don't let the voters forget what you've done for them, you'll probably take your five remaining states by storm!

60?

This could get highly entertaining:

Both Roll Call and the Huffington Post are reporting that President Obama is thinking of nominating Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) to be secretary of Commerce. There'd be a special significance to this move, if indeed the president does make it: New Hampshire Gov. John Lynch, who'd appoint Gregg's replacement, is a Democrat. He could appoint a fellow Democrat to replace Gregg, which would -- assuming Al Franken is declared the victor of his race when the legal battle over that seat is finished -- give the party 60 seats in the Senate, a theoretically filibuster-proof majority.

Well, filibuster-proof is a bit of a stretch, but the terrified screams from the Cons would be almost as satisfying.

From what little I gleaned in a few moments' worth of research, Sen. Gregg is your basic don't-tax and don't-spend Con:

Risk-takers like Wal-Mart create jobs. (Oct 2004)

Voted NO on repealing tax subsidy for companies which move US jobs offshore. (Mar 2005)

Voted YES on reforming bankruptcy to include means-testing & restrictions. (Mar 2005)

Voted YES on restricting rules on personal bankruptcy. (Jul 2001)

Rated 78% by the US COC, indicating a pro-business voting record. (Dec 2003)

Considering the... ah... prestige of the Commerce Secretary position, it's hard to see how Gregg would turn that glory down:

As the Obama administration heads into the last day of its first working week, exactly nobody is poised at the edge of their seat wondering who the next Commerce Secretary will be. The reason is that nobody cares about the Department of Commerce. The only important sub-cabinet job—the head of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration—has already been filled by Jane Lubchenco (an excellent choice).

Jonathan Zasloff suggests doing away with the department altogether:

In the run-up to the 2012 Election, President Obama should propose abolishing the department. It would be his equivalent of Bill Clinton’s support of school uniforms and V-Chip: small, symbolic gestures that send a sort of cultural signal. You can trust the Democrats to run the government frugally.

He might just go for it, though. The political winds howling through New England mean his prospects for re-election may not be all that rosy. He'd at least get bragging rights being in a Cabinet position. And he could play at fostering commerce, which it's rumored Cons care about, although their policies rather put the kibbosh on commerce being successful in this country for a good many years more. (Kinda hard to have commerce when the economy's in shambles, innit?)

Break out the popcorn, my darlings. I'm sure the reaction from the right to the renewed specter of a filibuster-proof Dem majority shall be enormously entertaining.

Buh-Bye, Blago

State Senate to Blagojavich: "Don't let the door hit you in the ass:"

Rod Blagojevich spoke at some length to the Illinois Senate today, imploring state lawmakers not to remove him from office. He was not, apparently, persuasive.

The Illinois State Senate on Thursday convicted Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich on a sprawling article of impeachment that charged him with abusing his power. The vote prompted the governor's immediate and permanent ouster, and ended nearly two months of political spectacle in which he sought unsuccessfully to salvage his reputation and career here and across the country. [...]

[snip]

The senators voted 59 to zero in favor of removing him after a four-day trial; a dramatic, 45-minute speech by Mr. Blagojevich in which he declared his innocence; and about two hours of deliberation.

Blagojevich was also barred from ever running for any public office in Illinois. Democrat Pat Quinn, up until a couple of hours ago the lieutenant governor, has already been sworn in as Illinois' new governor.

And so, the sun sets on an era of political surrealistic entertainment.

You know, I'll almost miss him. He was nearly as bountiful in his dumbfuckery as the Cons.

Happy Hour Discurso

Today's opining on the public discourse.

And the stupid keeps rolling in from every side....

Republicons need to be taken to school and taught what "bipartisan" really means:

Today, Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) offered his understanding of the word.

"[If the Ledbetter and SCHIP bills] are any indication, we'll get votes on amendments, they'll all lose, and the bill will then pass, and we end up with a totally partisan package. I don't think that's what the president had in mind when he talked about putting legislation together in a bipartisan way."

So, the appropriate way to put together legislation is for Democrats to vote for Republican amendments. If GOP measures win, it's bipartisan. If not, it's antithetical to Obama's approach. Got it.

The president and Democratic lawmakers can obviously speak for themselves about how they interpret a "bipartisan" approach to governing, but my sense is, it's built around the notion of an open process. Republicans may have failed spectacularly at governing, and may have been handed devastating electoral defeats that left them as a regional party, but the White House and the Democratic majority are nevertheless willing to hear them out. Their ideas are welcome. Their amendments will be considered. The president is willing to engage them directly, and make some policy concessions to address their concerns. There has been and will be an exchange of ideas, in good faith, and proposals with merit will advance, no matter which party recommended them.

That's what's happened, and that's what Republicans don't believe is good enough. As Kevin Drum noted last night, the GOP apparently "really has decided to blindly stonewall everything Obama wants, no matter what."

They may want to have a bit of a think about their tactics. For one thing, the "center-right nation" myth is going down in flames:

Call it the Obama effect or call it the George Bush effect. Whatever you call it, its name is "bad news" for the Republican Party.

Gallup:

The political landscape of the United States has clearly shifted in the Democratic direction, and in most states, a greater proportion of state residents identified as Democrats or said they leaned to the Democratic Party in 2008 than identified as Republicans or leaned Republican.

As recently as 2002, a majority of states were Republican in orientation. By 2005, movement in the Democratic direction was becoming apparent, and this continued in 2006. That dramatic turnaround is clearly an outgrowth of Americans' dissatisfaction with the way the Republicans (in particular, President George W. Bush) governed the country.

With Democratic support at the national level the highest in more than two decades and growing each of the last five years, Republican prospects for significant gains in power in the near term do not appear great.

Like it or not, the nation's taken a hard swing left. And so antics like banding together to oppose a wildly-popular Democratic president when the Democratic majorities in the House and Senate ensure things get done anyway seem destined to fail.

They are not negotiating from a position of strength. When you demand everything when you offer nothing, you often end up with - wait for it - nothing, which is what the Cons are about to learn:

As far as some House Democrats are concerned, when it came to the economic stimulus package, Republicans wouldn't take "yes" for an answer. The GOP wanted tax cuts, and Democrats offered them tax cuts. The GOP howled at some specific spending measures, and Democrats removed them from the legislation. It didn't affect the outcome.

Amanda Marcotte argued today that House Republicans "can't be dealt with like reasonable people." Not surprisingly, some Democrats who did deal with the GOP as if they were reasonable want to reverse the concessions they gave up.

Rank-and-file Congressional Democrats had been willing to give Republicans the business tax cuts and other provisions they wanted in the stimulus. That is, up until every single one voted against the bill on the House floor Wednesday.

Now, in both the House and the Senate, angry members are lobbying Democratic leaders to yank those tax breaks back.

[snip]

So, are the business tax breaks going to be yanked from the bill? No, at least not yet. Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said, "We haven't reached that point," he said. "In fact, Republican senators I've spoken to today said, 'Don't give up on us. We still want to work with you.'"

We'll see how that goes.

So far as I can tell, the answer will be: not too good:

The recovery legislation will now be heard by the Senate. Is there hope for bipartisanship there? Unlikely. Today on Fox News, Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) excoriated the legislation and said that he “thinks” the bill will receive zero Senate GOP votes:

DEMINT: But I think it is going to help define the Republicans and the Democrats once again. Because every Republican in the House rejected this, and I think every Republican in the Senate might do as well.

And it's worthwhile trying to work with these buffoons how, exactly?

I hope they're prepared for the firestorm headed their way. Nobody's taking this lying down:

The White House has invested quite a bit of time and energy reaching out to congressional Republicans. Late yesterday, the president's efforts were rewarded with exactly zero GOP votes on an economic stimulus plan. As the Politico reported when Republicans announced their opposition, the minority party "slapped" Obama's "outstretched hand," as part of a "coordinated effort to embarrass" the president.

We're starting to get a sense of how the White House plans to respond.

Pushing back against the unanimous House Republican vote against President Obama's stimulus plan, the White House plans to release state-by-state job figures "so we can put a number on what folks voted for and against," an administration aide said.

"It's clear the Republicans who voted against the stimulus represent constituents who will be stunned to learn their member of Congress voted against [saving or] creating 4 million jobs," the aide said.

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said the lawmakers will have to answer to their constituents. And a Democratic official added: "We will run campaigns in their districts."

What's more, Greg Sargent reports that a coalition of groups and unions, including Americans United for Change, MoveOn.org Political Action, AFSCME, and SEIU, are launching a new television ad "targeting Republican Senators and pressuring them to vote for President Obama's stimulus package."

Try to bluff on an empty hand, leave behind an empty seat. Sounds fair to me.

More Republicans Like This, Please

There's one or two of them who occasionally makes sense. Very occasionally:

Rep. John L. Mica (Fla.), the ranking Republican on the transportation committee, called the proposed infrastructure spending "almost minuscule" and expressed regret that the administration had not crafted its plan around an ambitious goal such as building high-speed rail in 11 corridors around the country, which Mica said would cost $165 billion.

"They keep comparing this to Eisenhower, but he proposed a $500 billion highway system, and they're going to put $30 billion" in roads and bridges, he said. "How farcical can you be? Give me a break."

You know what? He's a typical Republican in many, many ways, but here he's actually talking sense. More like this, please.

But, of course, the majority of them are just batshit fucking insane:

Now, Republicans are just chipping away and collecting scalps, and they've been moderately successful, but in a really haphazard fashion. Yesterday, out of nowhere, conservatives started complaining about the lack of housing aid in the bill, which is rich for them. And check out what nutball Michelle Bachmann tried to pass as an amendment (it didn't make it through the Rules Committee) - requiring a state spending cap for any state that receives funds from this legislation, the kind that almost destroyed Colorado a few years back (Republicans are the party of state's rights). I'm not seeing a lot of strategy, just a general lurching from one outrage to the next.

Sadly, it's working. I guess the provision to refurbish the National Mall has been excised. From a raw policy standpoint, it's not a dealbreaker, but it shows a troubling trend where GOP hissy fits bear fruit. Democrats are plowing forward on this bill, but what happens with the next one? Who has the ear of the President? Democrats who want to cement legitimate progress? Or Republican know-nothings who appeal to elites to create firestorms? And the idea that this will buy Obama votes down the road for other liberal initatives borders on the insane.

So here's an idea for Obama: seize on those statements from the rare few Republicans who actually realize the need for more spending, give them their heart's desire, and then go on teevee crowing "See? All bipartisan, these bits were recommended by Republicans, isn't that loverly?!"

Reward good behavior, punish bad. It works for small children. I don't see why it wouldn't work for the bunch of screaming infants the Republicon party has become.

Hey, Congress: We're On Strike!

I just pledged not to donate to my all-time favorite representative. Not one thin dime, at least, not until he throws his support to campaign finance reform. Which I'm reasonably sure he will.

Change Congress has a "donor strike" campaign going to give some impetus to legislation that will give corporate special interests a boot in the arse. It looks mighty fine:

The bipartisan Fair Elections Now Act was offered last Congress, and will be offered again this year by Sens. Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Arlen Specter (R-PA), and Reps. John Larson (D-CT) and Walter Jones (R-NC).

Under this legislation, congressional candidates who raise a threshold number of small-dollar donations would qualify for a chunk of funding—several hundred thousand dollars. If they accept this funding, they can’t raise big-dollar donations. But they can raise contributions up to a certain amount (such as $100 or $250), which would be matched several times over by a central fund. This would create an incentive for politicians to opt into this system and run people-powered campaigns.

No new taxpayer dollars would be required. TV broadcasters, who currently get access to our public airwaves for free and make billions of dollars as a result, would pay a fee that would be the source of revenue for the central fund.

It’s a great bill. You can help pressure Congress to pass it by joining the donor strike today.

Now, I love my senators and my Congressman. I do. They're good Dems, they work hard for us, and I'm proud of them. But they haven't jumped on board with this legislation yet, so it's time to prod buttock (thank you, Terry Pratchett) and get them moving on campaign finance reform.

Especially in light of this:

These people have no shame. The Huffington Post is reporting that the CEO's who received billions of tax payer dollars to save their asses are using the money to organize a massive attempt to block the Employee Free Choice Act.

Three days after receiving $25 billion in federal bailout funds, Bank of America Corp. hosted a conference call with conservative activists and business officials to organize opposition to the U.S. labor community's top legislative priority.

[snip]

This is outrageous. It's bad enough to see these Bozos still try and buy private jets and hand out massive bonuses with our money, but to actively attack labor with it should be a criminal offense.

It's not, and alas not likely to ever be, but we can put a serious crimp in their power by reducing their ability to buy politicians. Time for a wee bit of a message to be sent.

Not only are some of the most non-trusted companies in America blatantly trying to buy off Congress, but they're using our bailout money to do it. Enough!

If there was ever a time to join Change Congress's political "donor strike" in support of fundamental campaign finance reform, this is it.

Click here to join the fight for reform.

We need a theme song. I have just the thing.




Simply pledging to withhold my donations may not be enough. Perhaps I should threaten to perm my hair, put on blue eye shadow, and lip-synch this song outside their offices whenever they're back in town. That should lead to a near-instantaneous change in behavior, doncha think?

Peace On Earth Blah Blah Blah...

The truce proves unexpectedly robust. Many expected hostilities to resume within days, and therefore did not make suitable plans for peace.


Outreach between former enemies continues. Alas, the best intentions can have unexpected results.



We've managed the peace, and we're doing reasonably well on the love, but understanding will need a bit more work, it seems.

And trust, always fragile, is so easily broken.



We adhere to the philosophy that if you want peace, prepare for war. Also bring Altoids.



I can't claim to know what will happen with the truce, but I do foresee hazardous duty claims rising exponentially....

Holy Shit, It's Been Too Long

I loves me my tequila (and rum, o' course), but I haven't been drinking it at home - I've been on a wine kick for years now, and save my hard drinking for when I'm out at the bars with friends. It seems like too much damned effort to mix something for me alone. I just didn't realize precisely how long it's been since I bought a bottle for home use until just now:

Should Washington get out of the booze business?

It's been asked before, and might be again: Should we get rid of state-owned liquor stores?

[snip]

You'll find beer and wine in your local grocery stores, but only the state or businesses operating under contract with the state can sell hard liquor.

Nearly two years I've been here, and I had no fucking clue. It never even occurred to me to look. I guess all of that wonderful wine distracted me.

Happy Hour Discurso

Today's opining on the public discourse.

Hate to say we told you so, Mr. President, but... we told you so:

After all the outreach to House Republicans, all the concessions, all of the reports about the economic crisis, all of the evidence showing the stimulative effects of the plan, not a single GOP lawmaker in the chamber voted for the economic rescue package.

The House voted, 244-188, on Wednesday evening for President Obama's package of federal tax cuts and spending worth $819 billion and meant to jump-start the economy out of its worst crisis in decades.

Although the president's legislative victory was no surprise, given the Democrats' 255-to-178 advantage in the House, the lack of any Republican support was a disappointment for Mr. Obama. The vote came hours after Mr. Obama declared that "we don't have a moment to spare" just after conferring with business leaders at the White House.

If the House Republican caucus, en masse, isn't willing to support a stimulus package in the midst of a global economic crisis, it's hard to imagine when, exactly, GOP lawmakers are going to work with the majority party in a constructive way.

So. Can we shut the fuck up about bipartisan bullshit, realize that these fuckwits think "bipartisan" means "what Cons want," and use the Democratic majority to actually get shit done right, please? Thank you.

The Cons spent the last several days lying about the stimulus bill. Here's Eric Cantor, citing a debunked report to try to sway opinion toward the same Con ideas that put us in the toilet to begin with:

Last week, ThinkProgress called out House Minority Whip Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) for lying about the economic recovery bill, specifically for claiming that the bill would give more money to “grass” on the National Mall than to small businesses. In new interviews, he continues to peddle the same falsehood, even though House Democrats have now agreed to strip the “grass” funding completely.

More importantly, Cantor is lying about the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) assessment of the recovery bill by continuing to cite a preliminary, incomplete, and misleading CBO chart — despite the fact that the full report was released Monday, giving him plenty of time to arm himself with the truth:

– Well, I mean, you know, the lasting problem with this bill, not only will it not deliver real stimulus — even the Congressional Budget Office says it’s not stimulative — is that, you know, people and businesses and entrepreneurs are going to look out into the future and see trillions of dollars of additional debt. [CNBC, 1/28/09]

– I think first of all you have to focus spending on actual stimulus. You’ve got CBO saying that only 25 percent goes out in the first year. You’ve got to have some type of ability to provide that jobs will be created or maintained because of the government spending. [Interview with Marc Ambinder, 1/27/09]

Cantor’s complaints ring hollow. As to his first claim, the CBO analysis found that the recovery bill would have “a noticeable impact on economic growth and employment in the next few years.” As far as his second statement, the CBO report stated that about 65 percent of the funding would be spent by September 2010. (The report said it “would not be appropriate” to calculate spending in 2009 because “because the bill would be enacted almost halfway into the fiscal year.”)

It wasn't just him. The Con grandstanding on the House floor was a veritible parade of dumbfuckery:

Listening to House Republicans talk about the economy is not only tedious, it's a striking reminder that these guys don't know what they're talking about.

I mean that, literally. They're clueless. There are coherent arguments against the stimulus plan, even from a conservative perspective, but actual GOP policy makers apparently aren't familiar with them. Their arguments about the CBO are wrong. Their arguments about tax credits are wrong. Their arguments about aid to states are wrong. Their arguments about the stimulative benefits of tax cuts are wrong. Their arguments about corporate tax rates are wrong. Their arguments about housing are wrong. Even their arguments about allocation are wrong.*

There's probably some entertainment value in considering the "stupid vs. dishonest" dynamic -- maybe Republicans know their arguments are wrong, and are repeating them anyway -- but the end result is always the same. It's hard to get through a single speech without searching frantically for the Maalox.

It reached the point today that Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.), a member of the leadership, said Democrats are acting like ... wait for it ... former Republican president Herbert Hoover. I suppose, by Ensign's formulation, that makes Mitch McConnell FDR?

And they have far too many happy enablers in the media:

The media have been aiding their efforts. In a new analysis, ThinkProgress has found that the five cable news networks — CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, Fox Business and CNBC — have hosted more Republican lawmakers to discuss the plan than Democrats by a 2 to 1 ratio this week:

In total, from 6 AM on Monday to 4 PM on Wednesday, the networks have hosted Republican lawmakers 51 times and Democratic lawmakers only 24 times. Surprisingly, Fox News came the closest to offering balance, hosting 8 Republicans and 6 Democrats. CNN had only one Democrat compared to 7 Republicans.

What was that about the "liberal media" again?

The good thing about all this is that their hand's been played. Obama tried to work with them; they refused. The country needed them to step up and do the right thing; they refused. Despite their objections, this package will pass. Despite their fuckery, we'll see some benefit from it. And Obama's just learned a very valuable lesson about working with Cons: you can't.

Time for the grownups to take charge.

"Thank You, Lord, For Creating Eye-Devouring Worms"

PZ points out that Sir David Attenborough's been getting hate mail from creationists. The whole thing is full of pwn, but I especially liked this bit:

Telling the magazine that he was also asked why he did not give "credit" to the Lord, Sir David continued: "They always mean beautiful things like hummingbirds.

"I always reply by saying that I think of a little child in East Africa with a worm burrowing through his eyeball.

"The worm cannot live in any other way, except by burrowing through eyeballs.

"I find that hard to reconcile with the notion of a divine and benevolent creator."

Have I mentioned lately how much I love the British tendency for devastating understatement?

John Pieret believes Sir David is referring to this:



Let me put it to you this way: giving praise to a deity who's either this inept or this sadistic when it comes to creating all the beasts of the field etc. etc. seems really fucking dumb. And that's setting aside the fact that there's not one scintilla of evidence that even an inept, sadistic son of a bitch exists, much less an omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent one.

"Should've Packed a Map"

I'll know the Apocalypse has arrived when Fox News actually reports a story accurately.

That time is not upon us (h/t):

Reacting to President Obama’s executive order to close down Guantanamo in the coming year, Pennsylvania Congressman Jack Murtha said that the Gitmo detainees could be relocated to prisons in his home state. To find out what residents of Murtha’s district think of this proposal, Fox News headed to Pennsylvania.

They should’ve packed a map.

Our reader alerts to the actual boundaries of Murtha’s district, which don’t include Mel’s Restaurant in Somerset Borough—which Fox said was in the “heart” of Murtha’s district and popular with “constituents”—the pub where the reporter conducted his interviews.

Oops.

When a news channel is this egregiously, consistently stupid, can they still be called "news"?

We've Walked This Road Before

One common theme emerging from the current hullaballoo over the desperately-needed stimulus package is this: Cons don't want one. Unless, of course, it consists entirely of tax cuts. They never shut up about tax cuts.

Now, my darlings, I know you're not stupid. You know that just because someone repeats something ad nauseum does not mean it's true. But you probably all have easily-snookered people in your lives, whom you care about. You may only care because no one has to pass a basic economics test in order to vote, and you wish they'd stop voting for outrageous idiots, but still, you care.

So when they fall under the sway of many Republicon voices all chorusing "Tax cuts, tax cuts, taaaaxx cuuuuttttsss!" you might wish to show them the road already traveled (h/t):

Larry Mishel on the effect, or more precisely the lack of any effect, of the 2003 tax cuts on "Jobs and Growth":

Tax cut approach has already been tried and failed as stimulus:...[The administration claimed t]he Bush tax cuts of 2003 ... would generate 1.4 million jobs on top of the 4.1 million jobs that were expected to be generated over the eighteen months following June 2003. See [here]...

EPI tracked the initiative’s effectiveness through a website, www.jobwatch.org, and found that it fell far short of its goals. Not only did the promised 1.4 million additional jobs not appear, but the 4.1 million jobs expected with no action also failed to materialize. In all, only 2.4 million jobs were created—1.7 million short of the administration’s projection without their new policy. Thus, by the Bush administration’s own metrics the tax cut program fell short by a total of 3.1 million jobs (149,000 pr month). For an analysis of how the Bush 2003 tax plan (The “Jobs and Growth" plan) fell short of its job claims see [here]...

On what basis can the conservatives who embraced those failed initiatives now claim that tax cuts are the best policy?

It seems Republicans have but one answer to every problem, get government out of the way through tax cuts and deregulation. When they are asked what caused it, whatever it might be, there is one answer, government. When asked how to fix it, whatever it might be, there is but one answer, reduce government through tax cuts and deregulation. For many, especially the politicians, it doesn't matter whether tax cuts will actually fix the economy, the goal is to reduce the size of government by any means, and they see this as an opportunity to do just that.

[snip]

They already screwed this up once, the initial tax cut stimulus package put into place last spring was too small and poorly targeted, it had all sorts of problems all in the name of appeasing this same group - and here they are trying to muck up the process once again, to hold jobs hostage while they try to get tax cuts in place, even though something like 40% of the package is already devoted to tax cuts. Camel, tent, nose. I think it's time to stand up and say no, sorry, you lost the election, and not by just a little bit. You had your chance and look where we ended up - with a terrible economy, huge holes in the budget making it much harder to respond to the downturn, a financial sector wrecked by your anti-government, self-regulation philosophy, what is it about the past several years that would lead us to have any confidence at all you have the slightest clue how to manage a well-running economy instead of driving it into a ditch, let alone heal one that is broken?

Down that road lies an economy in ruins, hundreds of thousands of jobs vanishing at an appalling pace, an ever-increasing gap between rich and poor, and a vanishing middle-class. Why the fuck do we want to walk it again?

If Cons had anything useful to contribute, and if they understood bi means two, I'd be quite pleased with Obama including them in the construction and passage of this bill. Considering that all they have to offer are the same horrible ideas that caused this disaster in the first place, I say fuck 'em. The people who broke the country don't get to tell us how to fix it.

The next time the Cons want to throw their weight around and try to impose their will on the stimulus package, this is the only response Obama should give them:



You can tell him so here.

Happy Hour Discurso

Today's opining on the public discourse.

So much flaming stupid... so little time...

Let us begin with Cons demanding today what they kicked up a screaming tantrum over yesterday:

Today, Roll Call reports that conservatives’ newest line of attack will be on housing — specifically, that there isn’t enough addressing this crisis in the economic recovery package:

Republicans now appear set to draw their line in the sand over the issue. One senior Senate GOP aide said Republicans were coalescing Monday evening around a plan to demand that Obama and Congressional Democrats reconfigure the stimulus to help mitigate foreclosures and spur buyers to invest in new homes.

“Republicans are increasingly concerned that the stimulus bill is leaving the housing crisis out of the equation,” the aide said.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is not supposed to focus on housing. Instead, its key areas are: energy, science and technology, health care, education, infrastructure, tax cuts, and helping workers hurt by the recession.

The Obama administration and Democratic leaders aren’t planning to ignore housing, however; they are attempting to address the foreclosure crisis through separate legislation. Last Wednesday, the House passed Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) legislation. As the Gavel pointed out, a key part of this legislation — in addition to stabilizing the financial markets — was helping Americans stay in their homes.

[snip]

Conservatives seem to be the ones actually “leaving the housing crisis out of the equation.” Only 18 Republicans voted for the TARP legislation; 156 voted against it. Last summer, conservatives also put up a vicious fight against Democratic-sponsored housing legislation.
You can please all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but there's not one single fucking thing you can do to please a bunch of batshit insane Cons. I hope Obama stops trying soon.

Their antics lend credence to the rumor that there's a new addition to the Bill of Rights:

An additional amendment has been added to the Bill of Rights.

It's called The Republican Hissy Fit Exception.

No matter what harm has been caused by the Republican party to our country and applies especially when they have been voted out of office because of that harm, any piece of Democratic legislation being discussed may be attacked with the intent of watering it down or destroying it completely (voided) at any time as long as one conservative in Congress has a hissy fit.

The traditional media must immediately validate their hissy fit by repeating said hissy fit talking points over and over again in print, on the Internets, on radio and on TV as many times as necessary to accomplish said goal of compromising the legislation that the hissy fit is applicable to.

False information is also allowed to be transmitted by the hissy fitter and the media in an effort to implement the Conservative Hissy Fit exception. An alternative name that may be used is the Republican Hissy Fit exception.

Many people feel that this amendment has been As Predictable As The Rising Sun.

At least Steny Hoyer's trying to educate these fucktards:

Today, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) had a message for Republicans complaining about the stimulus bill: “Being bipartisan does not mean having to lay down and say we’ll do whatever you want.” His comments came after President Obama met earlier with congressional Republicans to discuss their concerns about the package, which is scheduled to be voted on in the House tomorrow. Hours before that meeting, House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) urged Republicans to oppose the bill unless Democrats make significant concessions. Hoyer called it “very unfortunate” that Boehner “set the stage [by saying], ‘Yeah, you’re coming up here, but we’re voting against you.’” He added, “It takes two parties and two groups to be bipartisan. Bi means two.”

Good luck with that, Steny. Nothing I've seen convinces me these idiots can understand a concept as simple as bi meaning two, but maybe if you illustrate it with pictures from a Dick and Jane book, it'll start to sink in.

The Dems need to follow Steny's lead and develop a spine (I know, forlorn hope), because these dumbfucks aren't getting the idea:

President Obama was on the Hill today, meeting with House Republicans on the economic stimulus package. When asked if the president was winning any GOP votes, one conservative House Republican who was in the room told the Politico, "Nope," adding that Obama "won't compromise on more tax cuts."

I'm not sure what definition of "compromise" the lawmaker was using, but the bottom line remains the same: the president's efforts to garner Republican support aren't working.

Obama seemed ready for the House Republicans to pounce, reportedly telling the gathered GOP lawmakers: "feel free to whack me over the head because I probably will not compromise on that part [tax cuts]," according to two sources in the room.

That's basically what they did, hitting Obama for more than 30 minutes with questions about deficits, taxes and spending. Rep. Kevin Brady (R-Texas), won applause from his GOP colleagues when he asked the president whether he would promise that the stimulus would not be an excuse to raise taxes or increase spending.

Obama responded, according to sources in the room, that he was worried about the deficit and debt, and promised that his fiscal 2010 budget -- coming out next month -- would make hard choices in terms of spending cuts in an effort to reduce the deficit.

The Politico report noted that the "out of power minority party" seems to be "finding its voice as a stout opposition party instead of the party of compromise." Perhaps, but I'm not entirely sure when, exactly, House Republicans were ever positioned as the "party of compromise."

It's time for Obama to stop making the bipartisan noises. These are people who hear no as maybe. Like date rapists, it's best just to let them know in no uncertain terms that no means no - a sharp kick to the nads and a poke to the eyes might do it.

They're going to need something a little more definite than compromise, because no compromise in the world is going to get them on board:

Caving to right-wing flailing and conservatives’ anti-abortion fear machine, President Obama is reportedly pressuring House Democrats to strip family planning funding from its economic recovery proposal — even though it would potentially save $700 million over 10 years.

This afternoon, MSNBC’s David Shuster pressed Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) about the provision, pointing out that it would help relieve states of some health care costs. Apparently unable to respond, Hutchinson launched a reflexive and knee-jerk attack on the recovery plan, defaulting to the first opposition point she could think of:

SHUSTER: When you give them [states] money to help with Medicare, it means that the states that have to balance their own budgets won’t have to spend as much of their own money to try to pour into Medicare because people are hurting.

HUTCHISON: Well, one of the big problems I have with this bill is that you don’t know which states it’s going to, there’s no allocation, it’s just going to be in the agencies and the bureaucracies to make these decisions.

This is a woman who is either too obstinate or too stupid to read a map showing exactly where these allocations would go.

President Obama: time to stop compromising. Reach for a stick. If you'd like to borrow the Smack-o-Matic, I'm sure arrangements could be made.

John Dean Warms My Heart

I loves me some John Dean. For those of you who don't know who the fuck I'm talking about, he's the author of Conservatives Without Conscience, a FindLaw columnist, and former White House counsel to none other than Tricky Dick. There is no one on earth who can wield the Smack-o-Matic 3000 like a former Republican who had his ideals utterly shattered by the president he served.

His columns are always an education. Today, it was also a delight. John begins with a solid whack to Con bottoms that put a grin on my face from ear-to-ear:

Remarkably, the confirmation of President Obama's Attorney General nominee, Eric Holder, is being held up by Texas Republican Senator John Cornyn, who apparently is unhappy that Holder might actually investigate and prosecute Bush Administration officials who engaged in torture. Aside from this repugnant new Republican embrace of torture (which might be a winning issue for the lunatic fringe of the party and a nice way to further marginalize the GOP), any effort to protect Bush officials from legal responsibility for war crimes, in the long run, will not work.

Isn't that gorgeous? "A nice way to further marginalize the GOP." I loves it.

But that's not the blood and the bone of this column. No, he's talking about the potential for prosecutions, and it's looking good:

Bush's Torturers Have Serious Jeopardy

Philippe Sands, a Queen's Counsel at Matrix Chambers and Professor of International law at University College London, has assembled a powerful indictment of the key Bush Administration people involved in torture in his book Torture Team: Rumsfeld's Memo and the Betrayal of American Values. He explains the legal exposure of people like former attorney general Alberto Gonzales, Dick Cheney's counsel and later chief of staff David Addington, former Office of Legal Counsel attorney John Yoo, the former Department of Defense general counsel Jim Haynes, and others for their involvement in the torture of detainees at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and CIA secret prisons.

After reading Sands's book and, more recently, listening to his comments on Terry Gross's NPR show "Fresh Air," on January 7, 2009 I realized how closely the rest of the world is following the actions of these former officials, and was reminded that these actions appear to constitute not merely violations of American law, but also, and very literally, crimes against humanity – for which the world is ready to hold them responsible.

Go, world! Woot!

The following is my email exchange with Professor Sands:

QUESTION: When talking to Ms. Gross you said you were not calling for such international investigations because we all need more facts. Given the fact that Judge Susan Crawford has now made clear that torture occurred, do you – and others with your expertise and background – have sufficient information to call for other countries to take action if the Obama Administration fails to act?

ANSWER: Last week's intervention by Susan Crawford, confirming that torture occurred at Guantanamo, is highly significant (as I explain in a piece I wrote with Dahlia Lithwick: "The Turning Point: How the Susan Crawford interview changes everything we know about torture"). The evidence as to torture, with all that implies for domestic and foreign criminal investigation, is compelling. Domestic and foreign investigators already have ample evidence to commence investigation, if so requested or on their own account, even if the whole picture is not yet available. That has implications for the potential exposure of different individuals, depending on the nature and extent of their involvement in acts that have elements of a criminal conspiracy to subvert the law.

Heaven. I think I'm in... heaven.

QUESTION: Do you believe that a failure of the Obama Administration to investigate, and if necessary, prosecute, those involved in torture would make them legally complicit in the torture undertaken by the Bush Administration?

ANSWER: No, although it may give rise to violations by the United States of its obligations under the Torture Convention. In the past few days there have been a series of significant statements: that of Susan Crawford, of former Vice President Cheney's confirming that he approved the use of waterboarding, and by the new Attorney General Eric Holder that he considers waterboarding to be torture. On the basis of these and other statements it is difficult to see how the obligations under Articles 7(1) and (2) of the Torture Convention do not cut in: these require the US to "submit the case to its competent authorities for the purpose of prosecution".

This is sublime. If we don't take these fuckers down, other countries could very easily do so. And I hope to fuck they have the political will. I count it a good sign Britain's already got an investigation going.

Look, world. Don't worry about the politics of this thing. Just apply some judicious pressure. Insist we try the war criminals. Poor Obama, he didn't want to engage in "looking back," but, y'know, there were those laws we have and the treaties we signed and all that pesky legal stuff, so we kinda sorta had to prosecute the fuckers who turned America into a nation of torturers. Darn the luck.

Really, it'll be just devastating if you force us to hold our leaders accountable, but we'll cope somehow.

And hey, aren't you really doing Bush et al a big ol' favor? Cuz they're under a cloud and stuff, and like John says:

One would think that people like Cheney, Rumsfeld, Addington, Gonzales, Yoo, Haynes and others, who claim to have done nothing wrong, would call for investigations to clear themselves if they really believed that to be the case. Only they, however, seem to believe in their innocence – the entire gutless and cowardly group of them, who have shamed themselves and the nation by committing crimes against humanity in the name of the United States.

Just so. On to the Hague!

Switzerland Offers to Clean Up America's Mess

This should embarrass all of those personal-responsibility fetishizing Cons:

In an important development, Switzerland now says it may be willing to take some of the detainees from Guantanamo Bay once they are released.

Switzerland is ready to consider taking in detainees from the U.S. prison for terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba if that helps to shut it down, the Swiss government said on Wednesday.

"For Switzerland, the detention of people in Guantanamo is in conflict with international law. Switzerland is ready to consider how it can contribute to the solution of the Guantanamo problem," the government said in a statement.

Contrast the Swiss maturity with America's Cons throwing hysterical fits over the idea of transferring detainees into supermax prisons on American soil. It's a wonder the world has any respect left for us at all.

Republican Party: Stupid and Evil. Republican Party: Stupid and Evil. Republican Party: Stupid and Evil...

Whoda thunk it'd be so easy to put a screeching halt to the Cons?

Neuroscientists have demonstrated that repeatedly pairing one word or idea with another leads to changes in both the connections among neurons in the brain that represent those ideas and the readiness of those neurons to fire together, so that even those of us on the left do not realize that concepts like "bureaucracy" and "waste" are triggered unconsciously in our brains when someone mentions government.

All right, everybody, repeat after me:

Republican Party: Stupid and Evil. Republican Party: Stupid and Evil. Republican Party: Stupid and Evil...

Seriously, what else can you conclude about this bunch of assclowns? Since they can't restrict birth control for everyone, they're willing to just force unwanted pregnancies on poor women:

House Minority Leader Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio) appeared on "Meet the Press" yesterday, complaining about a proposed stimulus package. He noted, in particular, a proposal to spend "over $200 million for contraceptives." He asked, "How will this fix an ailing economy?"

Apparently, the contraceptives proposal has become quite an issue for conservatives. It was the lead story on Drudge this morning, far-right blogs are all worked up, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was quizzed on the spending on ABC yesterday.

[snip]

As you might have guessed, it's not quite as scandalous as conservatives would have you believe.

[T]he family-planning program that Pelosi supports expanding in the stimulus bill was created in 1972 under the leadership of Republican president Richard Nixon.

What's being proposed is an expansion in the number of states that can use Medicaid money, with a federal match, to help low-income women prevent unwanted pregnancies. Of the 26 states that already have Medicaid waivers for family planning, eight are led by Republican governors (AL, FL, MS, SC, CA, LA, MN and RI -- a ninth, MO, had a GOP governor until this past November). If this policy is truly a taxpayer gift to "the abortion industry," as John Boehner and House Republicans claim, where are the GOP governors promising to end the program in their states?

They're lying little shits:

In staking out their opposition to the economic recovery package, conservatives have been peddling a variety of myths. One of their favorites is that taxpayers will pay $275,000 for every new job:

Rep. John Boehner (R-OH): All told, the plan would spend a whopping $275,000 in taxpayer dollars for every new job it aims to create, saddling each and every household with $6,700 in additional debt.

[snip]

As Scott Lilly pointed out, the actual cost per job is closer to $50,000, without taking into account the “substantial number of additional jobs [created] beyond 2012.” And even if the conservatives’ number was anywhere close to accurate, their proposed job creation program — tax cuts — would cost more than three times as much per job. As Christian Weller and John Halpin found, “even under the most optimistic assumptions about the relationship between tax cuts and jobs,” President Bush’s 2001 tax cut cost $871,000 for every job created.

(That's just rich, innit? You don't hear them screaming over the fact that Bush's "job creation" plan cost nearly four fucking times as much as even their made-up number for the current stimulus. Sniveling little shitheads.)

They don't live up to their own double standards:

I remember when Alberto Gonzales' confirmation hearings were underway, conservatives like Rush Limbaugh took to the airwaves to decry the racism of those liberals who dared oppose him.

Now the shoe's on the other foot. Even though most of Barack Obama's nominations have sailed through confirmation hearings and votes with alacrity, there's one notable exception -- Hilda Solis, Obama's pick as Labor Secretary:

The confirmation of Rep. Hilda Solis, D-El Monte, as President Barack Obama's Labor secretary has been delayed because of Republican objections.

Democrats have announced that a Republican senator is using a parliamentary procedure to delay Solis' confirmation, the Washington paper Congress Daily reported Friday.

And they think they should get a free pass for war crimes:

Chris Wallace frames the following question on torture as to whether anyone at a lower level should be prosecuted as opposed to anyone in the Bush administration who ordered the torture. McCain follows right along with Wallace in his answer and only talks about those at the lower level in the CIA who followed the orders and not those they were taking orders from, and says we need to "move on".

(That's rich, John. I'll remember that if I ever end up in trouble with the law. "I was just following orders, just like the Nazis, Officer. Seriously, I think we just need to move on here.")

And this is all from just three blogs on one single fucking day. I haven't mentioned the relentless horrors of the last eight years. I shouldn't have to, now, should I?

If anyone takes a lesson away from this mess, it should be this: Cons should never, ever in a billion zillion years be allowed to run anything more important than a bake sale, and that only if it's raising money for the high school football team's jockstrap fund. We sure as shit wouldn't want to let these lying, thieving, torturing sons of bitches near a fundraiser for someone suffering from cancer. That would be as wrong as letting them get their grubby hands all over our government again.

So, my darlings, let's put neuroscience to work for the greater good of this country. Repeat after me:

Republican Party: Stupid and Evil. Republican Party: Stupid and Evil. Republican Party: Stupid and Evil...

Happy Hour Discurso

Today's opining on the public discourse.

John Boehner's stupidity continues to impress:

Congressional Republicans have reportedly "taken issue with the large chunk of funding in the stimulus package -- some $300 billion all told -- that will go to shore up the budgets of states." Matt Yglesias notes how ridiculous this is.

I'm pretty impressed with John Boehner's ability to zero in like a laser on the least-defensible possible position.... In the serious-people universe, [assisting with state budgets] is the least controversial form of federal outlay. The idea is merely to prevent overall public spending from dropping too precipitously at a time when state budget cuts would have a contractionary impact. [...]

One of the privileges of opposition, of course, is that you don't really need to take responsibility for the consequences of your views. So if Boehner wants to take this line, nothing will really stop him or pull him back to planet earth. But it should be seen for what it is.

Abject stupidity. Indeed.

I suspect he believes he can get away with it because the media is so very impressed:

If you ever need an example of how the media swallows whole every right wing talking point, here it is. Norah O'Donnell uses John Boehner talking points about "contraception" to attack President Obama's stimulus plan as if it's the absolute truth. And of course everything else that republicans don't want in the bill is just plain old pork.

Norah: With all due respect isn't that a bunch of pork in here and how is that exactly stimulus?

I take your point Congressman. but go ahead and answer what Congressman Boehner said. How can you spend hundreds of millions of dollars on contraceptives. How does that stimulate the economy?

Well, let me ask you that then, do you think 200 million dollars essentially contraceptives is wasteful spending?
You get my point, (scowl on her face) there is going to be since this is over 800 billion dollars there's going to be a lot in there that people are going to raise questions about in the long run about wasteful spending, whether it's democrats efforts just to HUGE massive, unprecedented spending bill to put stuff and get stuff paid for that they haven't been successful or paid for in the past.

She even used the now discredited talking point about the CBO. Now we have a real CBO report that says: CBO Report Confirms Economic Recovery Act Provides Immediate Stimulus to Help Create Jobs.

It didn't matter what answer Chris Van Hollen gave Norah, she wasn't buying it. Suddenly John Boehner is a source of incredibly non partisan information.

What did we do, empty the world's villages of their idiots to staff our national media? Check out how many times they've been citing a thoroughly debunked report:

Last Tuesday, the AP reported on a leaked Congressional Budget Office (CBO) “analysis” that had concluded that “it will take years before an infrastructure spending program proposed” by President Barack Obama “will boost the economy.” Conservatives, such as House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH), quickly pounced on the story, claiming the CBO had proved that “government spending isn’t going to get our economy back on track.”

After the AP first wrote up the “report,” the rest of the media piled on the story. In a new analysis, ThinkProgress has found that since the AP’s report last Tuesday, the CBO report has been cited at least 81 times on Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, CNBC, the Sunday shows and the network newscasts in order raise questions about Obama’s recovery plan.

[snip]

As the Huffington Post’s Ryan Grim and the American Prospect’s Tim Fernholz reported last Friday, the CBO report being touted by conservatives and the media isn’t an actual report. “We did not issue any report, any analysis or any study,” a CBO aide told the Huffington Post.
It takes a special kind of idiocy to cite a non-existent report over eighty times. Political journalism in this country is dead.

And Faux News is threatening to break the mold on dumbfuckery:

Since President Obama’s announcement last week that he would shut down the Guantanamo Bay detention center within one year, Fox News has done its best to frighten its viewers about the rule...

[snip]

Rep. Jack Murtha (D-PA) said last week that the U.S. could hold the detainees in federal prisons, just like we hold thousands of other dangerous inmates. This morning, Fox and Friends responded by sending a reporter to Murtha’s district to flash photos of suspected terrorists — their only identification being Muslim headgear — and ask residents, “Would you want a guy like this living in your backyard?”
Strangely enough, they're not going to be living in our backyards, unless your actual back yard happens to contain a Supermax prison and you tend to have the inmates over for tea and cookies on a regular basis. Dumbasses. And yet, as Think Progress points out in that post, they somehow manage to get even more stupid:

Later in the segment, the Fox hosts repeated some of the right wing’s favorite myths about Guantanamo. They endorsed the “great idea” conservatives have been pushing of sending detainees to Alcatraz or a “haunted” prison in West Virginia:

CLAYTON MORRIS: We’ve got Alcatraz that exists. We give tours out there. Put them out on an island on Alcatraz, which is under our jurisdiction. What about Moundsville State Penitentiary? Someone from West Virginia wrote me and said it’s a haunted prison. It’s vacant.

In other words, Fox News and the right wing would prefer to send Guantanamo detainees to theme parks rather than to maximum-security federal prisons.

Ye fucking gods.

I need to go lie down with an icepack. The relentless dumbassery is giving me a migraine.

Out o' the Taverns and On Board, Ye Scurvy Dogs!

This be our treasure chest for this month's sailing. It be nearly empty.

We can't have a sailing w'out sailors, as I'm sure ye know. And while Obama's a bloody good leader, I know he didn't scuttle ignorance in his first week. The world still needs its Elitist Bastards! So get those submissions in by Friday.

Pope Palpatine Extends the Hand of Peace to Rabid Anti-Semites

I'm sure plenty of people will blabber about healing, reconciliation, and all that rot, but all I'm seeing here is an attempt to return things to the good ol' days before that bleeding-heart liberal John Paul II put a stop to all the bigoted fun:

A lot of people were concerned when an arch-conservative like Cardinal Ratzinger was named the pope, but I don't think any of us imagined that he would be soon playing footsie with some of Catholicism's most prominent anti-Semites -- namely, the Society of St. Pius X.

From the Catholic Reporter:

Papal reconciliation move will stir controversy

In a gesture billed as an “act of peace,” but one destined both to fire intra-Catholic debate about the meaning of the Second Vatican Council and to open a new front in Jewish/Catholic tensions, the Vatican today formally lifted a twenty-year-old excommunication imposed on four bishops who broke with Rome in protest over the liberalizing reforms of Vatican II (1962-65).

Ironically, news of the move came just one day before the 50th anniversary of the announcement by Pope John XXIII of his intention to call Vatican II.

[snip]

What none of these news accounts observe is that the problem with St. Pius X isn't just that it has some kooky leaders, but that their rejection of Vatican II prominently includes their rejection of one of its most important reforms -- namely, the longtime Catholic belief in the "blood libel" that Jews were guilty of deicide for having ostensibly killed Jesus. In fact, these Catholics openly trumpet their belief that the Jews are responsible for Christ's crucifixion.

[snip]

As the SPLC reported:

It is in The Angelus, published monthly by the SSPX press, and on SSPX's website, that the radical anti-Semitism of the order is most evident today. One example now on the website is a 1997 Angelus article by SSPX priests Michael Crowdy and Kenneth Novak that calls for locking Jews into ghettos because "Jews are known to kill Christians." It also blames Jews for the French Revolution, communism and capitalism; suggests a Judeo-Masonic conspiracy has destroyed the Catholic Church; and describes Judaism as "inimical to all nations."

Another document reproduced on the SSPX's current website is a 1959 letter from Lefebvre's close friend, Bishop Gerald Sigaud, who also rejected the Vatican II reforms. "Money, the media, and international politics are for a large part in the hands of Jews," Bishop Sigaud wrote. "Those who have revealed the atomic secrets of the USA were … all Jews. The founders of communism were Jews."

Not one fucking word to me about morality, Rat-boy. Not. One. Word.

Can Obama Save Journalism?

Maybe if he follows Kevin Drum's excellent advice:

Gossip and chatter have always been part of politics, of course, but over the past decade or two, at the same time that gossip has practically taken over political journalism, it's gotten so inane that it's hard to tell where Access Hollywood ends and Hardball begins. It's nearly impossible to turn on a talk show on any of the cable nets these days and hear anything that's even remotely enlightening.

And I'll bet McQuaid is right: it probably bugs the hell out of a guy like Obama who takes politics and policy seriously. When he said in his inaugural address that "the time has come to set aside childish things," I wouldn't be surprised if he was addressing the media directly.

So how does he work to change things? McQuaid warns that tightly controlling media access the way George Bush did isn't the answer, and I agree. Instead, I'd say that he should send a consistent message about the value of serious journalism by providing the best access to the most serious journalists. Not the ones who are the most famous, or have the biggest audiences, or who agree with him the most often, but the ones who have written or aired the sharpest, liveliest, most substantive, most penetrating critiques of what he and his administration are doing. He should spar with them, he should engage with them, he should take their ideas seriously. Eventually, others will start to get the message: if you want to get presidential attention, you need to say something smart. It's too late to for this to have any effect on media buffoons like Maureen Dowd or Chris Matthews, but you never know. It might encourage a few of the others to grow up. It's worth a try, anyway.

At this point, anything would. There's a damned good reason I rarely turn on the teevee or crack open a magazine - the flood of inanity that pours out is enough to drown a stronger swimmer than I.

Dday has the rundown of the Sunday morning talk shows. T'ain't pretty:

The Sunday talk shows were filled with conservatives (it really is a new era on Sunday mornings, isn't it?) trashing the Obama recovery plan and demanding more concessions in exchange for their votes, despite the fact that they have almost no leverage in the Congress.

You know what? I need a drink. I'll even take one of those fake margaritas at this point. I just hope to hell that Obama takes Kevin's advice. It would be a simple way to try to coax a smidgen of actual journalism out of these assclowns.

I Do Believe Congratulations Are In Order

ZOMG finally I can announce this:


Our own NP is preggers! Join me in breaking out the bubbly and congratulating her on the upcoming birth of her first child, won't you?

NP is my cherished heart sister. You know what this means, my darlings. I'm going to be an auntie.

Gawd help that poor child....

Happy Hour Discurso

Today's opining on the public discourse.

We already had a feel for how dramatically incompetent the Bush regime was, but we knew that as Obama took office and the crannies were poked into, we'd discover more. This truly takes the breath away:

Upon announcing his plan to close the military detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Barack Obama also began a process that would review the case files for every detainee. The problem for the new administration, however, is that there are no files.

President Obama's plans to expeditiously determine the fates of about 245 terrorism suspects held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and quickly close the military prison there were set back last week when incoming legal and national security officials -- barred until the inauguration from examining classified material on the detainees -- discovered that there were no comprehensive case files on many of them.

Instead, they found that information on individual prisoners is "scattered throughout the executive branch," a senior administration official said. The executive order Obama signed Thursday orders the prison closed within one year, and a Cabinet-level panel named to review each case separately will have to spend its initial weeks and perhaps months scouring the corners of the federal government in search of relevant material.

Several former Bush administration officials agreed that the files are incomplete and that no single government entity was charged with pulling together all the facts and the range of options for each prisoner. They said that the CIA and other intelligence agencies were reluctant to share information, and that the Bush administration's focus on detention and interrogation made preparation of viable prosecutions a far lower priority.

These people are un-fucking-real. They were so busy torturing they couldn't bother gathering evidence for prosecution. They must have had some fantasy that they could just keep people locked away forever without doing a damned thing other than degrading them.

It's no wonder our economy's in such a wretched mess. Oh, and the next time some idiot of a Con tells you how great everything was under Bush, you might want to remind them that we haven't seen a president this bad since Hoover:

On Friday, the New York Times provided a jaw-dropping analysis of the dismal state of the economy under George W. Bush. Just days after the Washington Post documented that Bush presided over the worst eight-year economic performance in the modern American presidency, the Times charted his historic failure in expanding GDP, producing jobs and fueling stock market growth. As it turns out, Bush is just the latest Republican to confirm the maxim that Wall Street and the economy overall almost always do better under Democratic presidents.

As the Times revealed (article here, charts here), the only bright spot for the first MBA president's economic mismanagement was the low inflation rate during his tenure:

During his administration, the country grew at the slowest overall pace of any recent president, whether measured in gross domestic product or employment. The last president to preside while the stock market did worse was Herbert Hoover...

...President Bush's administration was marked by a recession that began two months after he took office and another downturn in his final year of office. In the end, the economy during his term added enough jobs to employ only 14 percent of the added number of working-age Americans, the lowest proportion of any postwar administration. Employment grew at a compound annual rate of only 0.3 percent, half the 0.6 percent rate that his father had recorded in what had previously been the worst post-World War II performance.

For the investor class so fond of perpetuating the myth of Republicans' superior economic stewardship, the collapse of the stock marketing during the Bush recession must be particularly galling. The Standard & Poor's 500 spiraled down at annual rate of 5.6% during Bush's time in the Oval Office, a disaster even worse than Richard Nixon's abysmal 4.0% yearly decline. (Only Herbert Hoover's cataclysmic 31% plunge makes Bush look good in comparison.)

The article goes on to explain in some detail, with plenty of evidence, that Dems do the economy right, and Cons leave it in tatters. Not that this will matter to people so disconnected from reality as to still support Cons, but at least it might reach those who just didn't know any better.

In other stupid Con news, McCain's flip-flopping didn't stop with the spectacular fail of his campaign:

Today on Fox News Sunday, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) said that he would not support the stimulus plan in its current form. With the help of host Chris Wallace, McCain criticized infrastructure spending, specifically singling out a plan to expand internet access to rural communities:

MCCAIN: There’s got to be some kind of litmus as to whether it’ll really stimulate the economy and whether it will in the short-term. Some of the stimulus in this package is excellent; some of it, frankly, has nothing to do — some of the projects and others that you just mentioned, $6 billion for broadband and internet access. That will take years.

[snip]

Expanding broadband was also a major part of his presidential campaign. Speaking last April in Inez, KY, McCain emphasized that “government has a role to play” to makes sure “every community” has access to high-speed internet — and that it was key to driving innovation:

MCCAIN: In particular, through access to high-speed Internet services that facilitate interstate commerce, drive innovation, and promote educational achievements, there is the potential to change lives. These kinds of transformations of our way of life require the infrastructure of modern communication, and government has a role to play in assuring every community in America can develop that infrastructure. This country has a long history of ensuring that rural areas have the same access to communication technology as other places.

Still a raging idiot, I see. Quelle surprise.

By the way, if anyone tells you America is a center-right nation, cite this Gallup poll and tell them to go fuck themselves with a fork:

But the numbers I found even more interesting were released Friday, measuring party identification. Based on all 2008 polling, 36% of Americans describe themselves as Democrats, while 28% identify as Republicans. The eight-point gap is "the largest for the Democratic Party since Gallup began regularly conducting its polls by telephone in 1988."

When the poll includes those who "lean" toward one party or the other, the gap is even larger: 52% back Democrats, 40% back Republicans. This is not only the third consecutive year in which Democrats held a majority, but it's also the "best showing for the Democrats -- in terms of both the percentage of Democratic supporters and their advantage over Republicans -- since Gallup began regularly tracking this measure of party support in 1991."

Dems are in. Cons are out. America's finished with them fucking up the country. Eventually, the Cons may even comprehend this reality and start acting like responsible adults.

But I'm not holding my breath.

Sunday Sensational Science

Completely gratuitous picture of Michio Kaku

Outstanding Science Authors

As an SF author trying to grasp enough science to make her world work, I've read a crapton of science books. Some of them have been meh, some mkay, and some teh awesome. There are authors whose books I return to endlessly, not merely because of the science, but because of the way they wield their words. They're not only scientists, but prose poets. They get across the grandeur and excitement of science. They delight in the absurd and bask in the beautiful. They make me think, but more than that, they make me dream.

I'll introduce you to a few of them today. They've not only written books, but articles worth reading.

One of the most important things scientists can do is popularize it, bring it within the grasp of people without degrees. These authors have done that. We owe 'em one.


Steven Pinker, experimental psychologist, Harvard University

During one of my many extravaganzas in the local used bookstore, I ran across a book called The Language Instinct. I'd fallen in love with linguistics because of Tolkien, and here was a man who explored the evolution of language. Brilliant! The book came home with me. And I know I'll probably hear screams from those of you who think evolutionary psychology is so much bunkum, but I enjoyed it immensely. Steven's subject matter isn't simple, but he makes it seem so. He's got a wonderful sense of humor and rapier-sharp insight. One of my favorite lines comes from another book of his, The Blank Slate: "It is precisely because one act can balance ten thousand kind ones that we call it 'evil'." Say what you will about evolutionary psychology, but he's speaking absolute truth there.

I found two fascinating articles by Steven. In "My Genome, My Self", he takes us on a whirlwind tour of what genes mean to personality, and then his adventure in personal genome sequencing:

Our genes are a big part of what we are. But even knowing the totality of genetic predictors, there will be many things about ourselves that no genome scan — and for that matter, no demographic checklist — will ever reveal. With these bookends in mind, I rolled up my sleeve, drooled into a couple of vials and awaited the results of three analyses of my DNA.

Then he provokes some thought by exploring "The Moral Instinct." This one might be of enormous good use in debates with frothing fundies.



Michio Kaku, theoretical physicist, City College of New York

Working at the bookstore brings a lot of books to your attention you might not have noticed otherwise. Such was the case with Beyond Einstein. What did this guy mean, beyond Einstein? Who could possibly be beyond Einstein?

Such was my introduction to string theory. And I fell in love. I understand it even less than I understand quantum mechanics, but damn it, Michio makes it exciting. He takes you right out on the cutting edge, and sends you careening through realms of possibility you didn't even know exist. Beyond Einstein? You betcha! Or at least, there's the possibility we're getting closer to that Theory of Everything Einstein spent the rest of his life pursuing.

Michio also wrote a book called Visions, which is an absolute boon to an SF writer who has a little trouble extrapolating the possibilities for the future. He's got a lot more books out there, all of them intriguing, all of them bringing incredibly complex subjects within the reach of ordinary folk.

His excitement about the cosmos continues to bubble over as he advises NASA to "Follow the Methane!"

The recent discovery of methane on Mars is more than a curiousity. It could be a game changer.

For the last three decades, NASA’s Mars exploration program has been based on a single mantra: Follow the water. Where there is water, there might be life. So far, this strategy has come up empty handed. But now, NASA might have to change course and follow the methane.

Seems like good advice to me.


Oliver Sacks, neurologist, New York City

I had no idea what to think of a book with a title like The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Written by a man whose last name was Sacks, no less. I shelved copies of it many times before intrigue finally got the better of me and I finally bought the thing.

And I was in another world.

Oliver explores damaged minds, showing us the bizarre and fascinating things that happen when the wetware is nonfunctional (h/t Connie Willis). And he does it with glorious warmth, compassion, and wonder. This is a man who adores his work, adores the people he works with, and helps us view even the most damaged people as individuals who are more than the sum of their disorder. And the man who mistook his wife for a hat? Visual agnosia, brought on by a brain tumor.

In "The Abyss," Sacks discusses music, amnesia, and a profoundly amnesiac musician named Clive:

Though one cannot have direct knowledge of one’s own amnesia, there may be ways to infer it: from the expressions on people’s faces when one has repeated something half a dozen times; when one looks down at one’s coffee cup and finds that it is empty; when one looks at one’s diary and sees entries in one’s own handwriting. Lacking memory, lacking direct experiential knowledge, amnesiacs have to make hypotheses and inferences, and they usually make plausible ones. They can infer that they have been doing something, been somewhere, even though they cannot recollect what or where. Yet Clive, rather than making plausible guesses, always came to the conclusion that he had just been “awakened,” that he had been “dead.” This seemed to me a reflection of the almost instantaneous effacement of perception for Clive—thought itself was almost impossible within this tiny window of time. Indeed, Clive once said to Deborah, “I am completely incapable of thinking.”

Richard Fortey, paleontologist, London

When I was studying plate tectonics, I ran across a book called Earth: an Intimate History. And intimate it is. It reads more like a biography than geology, although you come away knowing more about geology than you'd ever imagined you could. The Alps take on a completely different meaning when you know how they formed. You discover that England and America have far more in common than our political history: the Appalachians were once part of Scotland. Other wonders await. I don't think I've ever quite been so absorbed by geology. Richard Fortey turns out to be one hell of a biographer.

He's also an enthusiastic fossil man, having written more than one book regarding life on earth. In the following YouTube video, he introduces us to his favorite fossil:


And in "The Ego and the ID," he gives Intelligent Design the thorough spanking it deserves.

I can assure you from experience that the authors I've explored here are well worth savoring. Here are two that I haven't yet had the pleasure of settling in with yet, but plan to in the very near future:

In "The Beasts Within," University of Chicago paleontologist Neil Shubin explores what made him fall in love with his inner beasties:

I’ve come to love my inner fish. My inner worm, jellyfish and sponge too. And I can tell you exactly when I first recognized this infatuation: in September 2003, the year I was pressed into teaching human anatomy to first-year medical students at the University of Chicago.

And astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson gives us "The Cosmic Perspective" and reminds us not to forget each other as we pursue the stars:

Yet the cosmic view comes with a hidden cost. When I travel thousands of miles to spend a few moments in the fast-moving shadow of the Moon during a total solar eclipse, sometimes I lose sight of Earth.

You know what, Neil? I think Professor Fortney can help you with that.

Torture Advocates Will Be Disappointed

These people are unreal:

Yesterday, President Obama signed an executive order banning the use of torture in all military and CIA interrogations of suspected terrorists. The order specifically revoked the legal memos written by the Bush administration to justify the use of torture on detainees.

Today, the Wall Street Journal editorializes that Obama “wants to have it both ways on torture,” saying he will ban it but simultaneously carve out legal loopholes for coercive techniques to be used in an emergency:

The unfine print of Mr. Obama’s order is that he’s allowed room for what might be called a Jack Bauer exception. It creates a committee to study whether the Field Manual techniques are too limiting “when employed by departments or agencies outside the military.” The Attorney General, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Director of National Intelligence-designate Dennis Blair will report back and offer “additional or different guidance for other departments or agencies.” […]

The “special task force” may well grant the CIA more legal freedom to squeeze information out of terrorists when it could keep the country safe.

Despite the Wall Street Journal’s foreboding intonations, Obama made it clear yesterday that the era of coercive interrogations had come to an end. Speaking to the State Department he said firmly, “I can say without exception or equivocation that the United States will not torture.”

That's it. Zip, nada, zilch, none. No matter how much the fearmongers on the right wish it were otherwise, Obama's not going to carve out loopholes, or play semantics to pretend the torture the U.S. is engaging in isn't really torture. And, just in case there was any doubt as to that point, Sen. Diane Feinstein is all ready with some legislation to sew up any loopholes remaining:

As I noted here yesterday, human rights advocates think that the executive order outlawing torture that President Obama signed yesterday preserves some wiggle room, because it also appoints a task force to determine whether the techniques outlined in the Army Field Manual are appropriate to the task of keeping the nation safe.

Well, it turns out that others have reached this conclusion, too. The ranking Democratic Senator on the intel committee is now working on ways to stitch up this apparent loophole:

Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California and chairwoman of the committee, said that despite the executive orders she still planned to press for legislation mandating a single standard for military and C.I.A. interrogators. Such a law would be harder to reverse than Mr. Obama’s executive order, which he could alter or cancel at any time by issuing a new order.

“I think that ultimately the government is well served by codifying it, by having it in law,” Mrs. Feinstein said.

It’ll be interesting to see how the Obama administration reacts to such legislation, should it gain steam.

It'll be far more interesting to see how the rabid right reacts. I wonder if they'll finally have a complete psychotic break?

Oh, right. They already did. They just haven't been committed yet.

And in case you were wondering how the professionals feel about Obama's new direction, David Danzig has our answer:

Interrogators are lauding President Obama for signing an executive order that will shut down secret CIA prisons and place the use of coercive interrogation techniques completely off limits.

"[The order] closes an unconscionable period in our history, in which those who knew least, professed to know most about interrogations," said Joe Navarro, a former special agent and supervisor with the FBI.

"Some die-hards on the right -- who have never interrogated anyone -- are already arguing that forcing interrogations to be conducted within army field manual guidelines is a step backward and will result in 'coddling' dangerous terrorists," retired Colonel Stuart Herrington, who served for more than 30 years as a military intelligence officer, said soon after the order was signed. "This is a common, but uninformed view. Experienced, well-trained, professional interrogators know that interrogation is an art. It is a battle of wits, not muscle. It is a challenge that can be accomplished within the military guidelines without resorting to brutality."

Read that article for an inside look on how torture provides useless, bullshit intel, and how a smart, humane approach to interrogation led to the capture of Sadaam Hussein and allowed us to locate and kill al-Zarqawi.

I know the fucktards on the right think 24's more realistic than the situations actual investigators have faced in the really real world, but you know what? They can go fuck themselves with a serving fork.

Obama won. They lost. Torture's over.

Remembering What I Loved

Socializing IRL was rather a bit of a shock. I live one of those semi-hermetic lives in which I'm perfectly happy home alone, but even hermits need to kick up their heels every once in a while.

Won't be at the Rodeo Steakhouse again, though. Who the fuck makes a margarita with Jack Daniels? And then they started blaring really awful country and western at us. It's a good thing we were close to home, and the roomie was gone. Alas for my poor friend, he got to go waltzing down memory lane with me. Yup. I busted out the photo albums.

It was initially because we're going to Arizona, and I was showing him some of the places we'd be visiting. Wupatki National Monument and Sunset Crater. The San Francisco Peaks. Places where I roamed happily through all the years of my young life. I'd subject you to those pics, too, but alas, they are not digital, and Dana has no scanner. Dana is not only a hermit, but technologically impoverished.

I left home because I'd fallen out of love. Sometimes, to love a place again, you have to leave it. Spend some years elsewhere. Now, the irritating memories are faded, and the fun ones bubble to the surface. Running flat-out over the slickrock along a mesa in Page, with nothing between me and a 100-foot fall but a ledge four inches wide and a tenuous grip on sandstone. Standing on the side of a mountain surrounded by golden aspens and gazing out over miles of wilderness in the clear Arizona skies. Roaming the rooms of ruins, wondering what it was like to live in such small spaces.

There are things I miss. Strangely, dry dirt looms foremost in my mind. I love the sound of my shoes grating through gritty soil and rock as I roam. Northern Arizona's a place built from volcanoes. You can feel it when you run the earth through your hands. You see it all around you, in the cinder cones, the andesitic peaks, the ridge lines and the lava flows. There is a particular place at Sunset Crater where you can stand and stare into the heart of the caldera that splits the San Francisco Peaks. There is nothing like gazing into that beauty and realizing it resulted from catastrophic destruction. If there were people living there when the mountain erupted, they must have been mightily impressed.

I miss the demarcation between alpine climes and the desert. One side of the Sunset Crater/Wupatki National Monument is all Ponderosa pine. In just a few miles, you pass through juniper and piñon pine trees, and then, abruptly, the high desert looms. This Nasa Earth Observatory satellite image will give you some idea: we're looking northeast, from the pines to the Painted Desert:



For an absolutely spectacular aerial view of Sunset Crater with the desert on the horizon, go here.

All of this awesome stuff used to be my back yard. I could roam ancient plate boundaries, see the remnants of ancient underwater eruptions and seas, visit dinosaur tracks, wander at will through forests, deserts and plains - all without driving more than an hour or two from home.

Those were the good things. I do remember the bad as well - Northern Arizona has very little in the way of big-city culture, and Phoenix is, well, Phoenix. I definitely prefer Seattle. And it's nice not to feel dessicated all the time.

But I loves me my original home state. It'll be teh awesome to go adventuring there again. I especially can't wait to tramp through Wupatki one more time.

What about you lot? Any nostalgia for the places you've left behind, or are you of the "ran away and never looked back" persuasion? And do you believe it's at all right for a restaurant to offer up a margarita that contains not one drop of tequila?

Happy Hour Discurso

Today's opining on the public discourse.

They've got to be delusional. Seriously. It's the only charitable explanation. How psychotic people get elected to national office is beyond me, but then again, America's full of conspiracy nuts, reality-show fans, and pig-ignorant goobers, so perhaps I shouldn't be all that surprised. But even an idiotic electorate should wake up and smell the insanity at some point:

In the first weekly Republican radio address under the new administration, House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) touted the GOP's vision for an economic recovery.

"Our plan is rooted in the philosophy that we cannot borrow and spend our way back to prosperity," Boehner stated.

The minority leader said the package authored by congressional Democrats was "chock-full of government programs and projects," noting a Congressional Budget Office report that projected less than half of the $355 billion that House Democrats would spend to create jobs through infrastructure programs and other efforts is likely to be used before the end of fiscal 2010.

This, of course, is coming from the same fucktard whose internet plea for an economist who would tell him what he wanted to hear - tax-cuts good, spending bad - has gone unanswered. That's because his ideas on economic policy will not only flush the rest of the economy down the sewers, but set it on fire with a flamethrower as well.

But that makes Boehner uber-stupid, not delusional. Note what I highlighted in bold above - his reference to a CBO report. This is why he's delusional:

Reports of a recent study by the Congressional Budget Office, showing that the vast majority of the money in the stimulus package won't be spent until after 2010, have Democrats on the defensive and the GOP calling for a pullback in wasteful spending.

Funny thing is, there is no such report.

"We did not issue any report, any analysis or any study," a CBO aide told the Huffington Post.

That's right. He's citing a report that doesn't even exist.

This is what the Cons are so expert at doing, my darlings: making shit up. Facts don't fit the fantasy? Invent them! Can't find anyone to support you? Pretend they do anyway! Was the last president who came from your party an unmitigated disaster that three-quarters of the country absolutely despises? Praise him anyway!

George W. Bush is gone from office…but he is not forgotten, at least not by Reps. Trent Franks (R-AZ), Mike Pence (R-IN), and Steve King (R-IA). On Thursday, the three men spent almost 40 minutes delivering their final love letters to Bush. Some highlights:

– FRANKS: “President Bush often had to walk like a knowing lion — like a knowing lion, Mr. Speaker, through the chattering of hyenas. … [I]f those critics do not devour themselves in the meantime, Mr. Speaker, they may face the bared teeth of an enemy that will make us all wish the lion still walked among us.”

Psst. Hey, Arizona? Aren't you just, I dunno, maybe just an eensy bit, y'know, mortally fucking embarrassed that you have a mental midget who compares a complete assclown to lions representing you? I mean, there's stupid, there's egregiously stupid... and then there's Rep. Franks, for whom we shall have to invent a whole new adjective.

You might wanna do something about that next election if you want to retain even a tattered scrap of dignity. Just sayin'.

But maybe, you're thinking, Franks is just rank-and-file. Surely the House leadership is more intelligent? Surely, were someone like, oh, say, House Minority Leader Mitch McConnell asked about smart power, which can be quite simply defined as using more brains than brawn in foreign relations, he'd be able to answer the question coherently, right? Alas:

I was watching Minority Leader Mitch McConnell answer questions from the audience yesterday during his appearance at the National Press Club. [I'm hoping to get a transcript, but you can watch the video at CSPAN] And someone in the audience submitted a question (at minute 53:15, if you're watching the video) that asked McConnell 'what is your understanding of the foreign policy concept of Smart Power?'

McConnell took a moment to collect his thoughts, and then responded:

"I'm not sure I know what that means. [It's] probably in the eye of the beholder. Um...I'm not sure I know exactly what that means. I assume it probably means...um...be careful when you..um...decide to attack, and I think most everybody would agree with that."

That was the sum total of Mitch McConnell's response.

Someone tell me: how the fuck did this country survive at all after being run by rubes like this for eight years? How do people this spectacularly dumb end up elected?

We could, perhaps, explain the remarkable idiocy of these Cons by looking the media's way. Warning: doing so could permanently damage your eyesight. The stupidity's that blinding:

[NBC White House correspondent Chuck Todd] Asking Press Secretary Robert Gibbs about President Obama' intentions with regard to a stimulus bill reaching his desk without bipartisan passage:

"Would [the President] veto a bill if it didn't have Republican support?"

Proving once again that manipulating a fancy touch-screen and adding up spring delegate counts is a completely different skill set than covering the White House.

That's right, my darlings. That was a member of our vaunted White House Press Corps asking if a Democratic president would veto a bill passed with Democratic votes because Cons don't like it.

Chuck Todd is, potentially, the only person who could make Bill O look a smidgeon less than wretchedly ignorant:

Bill O'Reilly just can't help hawking right-wing talking points on his segment devoted to same, even if they're largely false, hyperinflated propaganda:

So we can add this guy to a list of 61 former Gitmo detainees who have returned to being terrorists after they've been released, according the Defense Department. That's 11 percent of those let go returning to the terror world.

Actually, there are only 18 confirmed ex-detainees who've been identified as having returned to terrorism:

Indeed, during a January 13 press conference, Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell stated: "The new numbers are, we believe, 18 confirmed and 43 suspected of returning to the fight...."

More to the point, doesn't this actually tell us that the Bush detention policies were a failure? O'Reilly assumes that closing Gitmo means letting all these people go; what it actually means is giving our legal authorities the ability to make sure we hang on to people who are real threats and to do so legally instead of relying on extralegal measures like Gitmo.

Not that O'Reilly would have the capacity to figure this out if it were explained to him. His precious talking point is much more important.

For those who might need a refresher on how the American courts handle terrorists, see here. It includes pictures and clear, simple explanations using short words for any Cons in the audience.

And, for the last time, despite what your shock jocks and your pseudo-journalists write, the Fairness Doctrine is a non-issue:

The National Review's Michael G. Franc's latest item begins with the headline: "Will Obama Revive the Fairness Doctrine?"

Sigh.

Apparently, during Eric Holder's confirmation hearing, both Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania (remember, he's supposed to be one of the Republican caucus' more sensible members) and Jeff Sessions of Alabama peppered the Attorney General-designate on his position on the Fairness Doctrine. Holder conceded he didn't know much about the policy, saying he would need to "know more about it before I could intelligently respond to the question."

Later, Holder responded to Specter and Sessions in writing, explaining that if Congress acted on the Fairness Doctrine, he would review its legality and be "fair and impartial" about its application. In other words, Holder doesn't much care, and the issue isn't on his radar screen. Given that he'll be at the Justce Department, the issue isn't really up to him anyway.

The National Review's Franc, without noting for his readers that Obama has already said he opposes reinstating the Fairness Doctrine, believes Holder's "evasive responses" offer a "hint" that the new Obama administration may "re-open" the Fairness Doctrine issue. Franc concludes:

The bottom line is beware -- and stay tuned to your favorite talk radio host for further details!

It's like reading dispatches from a parallel universe.

For the record, TNR's Marin Cogan recently wrote a great piece, noting that she couldn't find anyone on the left who was serious about reinstating the policy.

Why the fuck would we want to impose a fairness doctrine? It's ever so much fun having a plethora of dumbfuckery to pick from when we want to enjoy some patented American ignorance.

Our economy may be in ruins, but when it comes to stupidity, we are still the most prosperous nation on earth.

How I Feel Today

I've just finished one of the most painful ninety minutes' worth of writing ever. It is very hard to extract useful thoughts from your brain when it's sizzling, and in fact on the verge of bursting into flame.

I just realized I haven't taken a few hours off to just go and play since November. When I haven't been blogging, I've been working on my fiction, or reading serious tomes for same, or attending the day job. It's a good thing I have plans to head out for a steak with a friend tonight. Whether I'll remember how to hold a conversation without typing remains to be seen...

End of Week One: Sea Change

I'll be honest with you: the night before Obama became the 44th President of the United States, I was preparing myself for pain. He'd tacked a bit too far center for my taste. There were disturbing signs he'd pander to Cons in the name of bipartisanship. And I fully expected most of those glorious campaign promises to go unfulfilled.

Day One, I thought, would see a sharp pulling back. I figured he'd use the economy as an excuse to sweep the thorny problems of Guantanamo and torture under the rug. Transparency would give way to opacity. And the expanded powers of the presidency bequeathed by Cheney and his minion Bush would prove too tempting to discard. We'd see a few empty gestures, and some decent work on economic issues, but not much else.

Well, this is one of those times when I've been thrilled to be wrong. Utterly, completely, gloriously wrong.

I can't even keep up with him. If he keeps up this pace, all of the abuses of the Bush years will be rolled back by next week, all of the major issues resolved by next year, and who the fuck knows what he'll find to do with the remaining three in his first term?

Yes, that's hyperbole. But after this week, perhaps I can be forgiven a little exaggeration. Let's just take a quick gander at some of the many highlights.

Ending the Ill-Conceived War on Terror

On his first day, Obama had a draft executive order circulating to close Guantanamo and called a halt to kangaroo trials. By Thursday, he'd taken a wrecking ball to Bush's blunders:

With a few strokes of a pen Thursday, President Obama undid years of policy that was the cornerstone of George W. Bush's "war on terror." He ordered the prison at Guantánamo to be shut down within a year, the detainees moved to other countries or to regular U.S. courts; forced the CIA to stop torturing people, to close secret "black sites" around the world and to follow the Army Field Manual rules on interrogations; and told the entire government to stop relying on legal opinions issued by the Bush administration to justify policies that were never justifiable except in the eyes of the people who hatched them up.

He'd also ordered the Red Cross have access to any and all detainees held by the U.S. government. And he'd signed an order ending extraordinary rendition. He's not stopping at rolling back Bush's abuses, but fixing Clinton's mistakes as well.

If anyone was looking for a clean break with the past, this is it.

Reproductive Rights and Global Health

Most politicians pussyfoot around Roe vs. Wade. Not Obama:

"On the 36th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, we are reminded that this decision not only protects women’s health and reproductive freedom, but stands for a broader principle: that government should not intrude on our most private family matters. I remain committed to protecting a woman’s right to choose.

While this is a sensitive and often divisive issue, no matter what our views, we are united in our determination to prevent unintended pregnancies, reduce the need for abortion, and support women and families in the choices they make. To accomplish these goals, we must work to find common ground to expand access to affordable contraception, accurate health information, and preventative services.

On this anniversary, we must also recommit ourselves more broadly to ensuring that our daughters have the same rights and opportunities as our sons: the chance to attain a world-class education; to have fulfilling careers in any industry; to be treated fairly and paid equally for their work; and to have no limits on their dreams. That is what I want for women everywhere."

It's the first time in my life I've heard a president come out this strongly for my rights. And at WhiteHouse.gov, it becomes even more clear he knows and understands the issues women face.

The day after Roe's anniversary, he lifted the global gag rule. The world will be a far healthier place for it.

White House Ethics and Transparency

On his first full day in office, Obama tightened ethics rules and froze pay* for those White House staffers making more than $100,000 a year.

But that stuff wasn't as breathtaking as the sweeping changes in transparency. You know it's serious when the White House press are the ones wanting to withhold information while the government wants to release it. Can we say sea change?

The most important thing Obama did was overturn Bush's records secrecy order. Talk about night and day:

Under Bush's order, former presidents had broad ability to claim executive privilege and could designate others including family members who survive them to exercise executive privilege on their behalf.

Obama's new order gives ex-presidents less leeway to withhold records, Aftergood said, and takes away the ability of presidents' survivors to designate that privilege.

Separately, an Obama memorandum issued Wednesday also appears to effectively rescind a 2001 memo by President Bush's then-Attorney Gen. John Ashcroft giving agencies broad legal cover to reject public disclosure requests.

"For a long time now, there's been too much secrecy in this city. This administration stands on the side not of those who seek to withhold information but with those who seek it to be known," Obama said before a gathering that included his senior staff. "The mere fact that you have the legal power to keep something secret does not mean you should always use it. Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency."

Under Obama, the Freedom of Information Act will mean that information is free:

According to Obama's memo: "All agencies should adopt a presumption in favor of disclosure, in order to renew their commitment to the principles embodied in FOIA, and to usher in a new era of open Government. The presumption of disclosure should be applied to all decisions involving FOIA."

[snip]

"The presumption of disclosure also means that agencies should take affirmative steps to make information public. They should not wait for specific requests from the public. All agencies should use modern technology to inform citizens about what is known and down by their Government. Disclosure should be timely."

And as if this isn't awesome enough, WhiteHouse.gov is now actually a site worth visiting. There's even a blog.

Science and Environment

The long war on science is finally over, and America is filled with happy scientists:

After some very frustrating years, it seems the scientific community finally has reason to celebrate. The New York Times reported today that many scientists are "exuberant" about Barack Obama becoming president, and staff members throughout the government's scientific agencies "reported being teary-eyed with joy."

"If you look at the science world, you see a lot of happy faces," said Frank Press, a former president of the National Academy of Sciences and former science adviser to President Jimmy Carter. "It's not just getting money. It's his recognition of what science can do to bring this country back in an innovative way."

When a politician can make scientists cry for joy, you know science is going to do all right.

And, glory be, despite all the nattering about clean coal, Obama's EPA has already put the kibbosh on new coal plants, demanding they meet stringent standards before they're approved.

There's even scientific claims that Obama makes you smarter. The study's methods seem a little questionable, but that does not prevent me from enjoying its conclusions thoroughly.

Peace In Our Time

In his first moments in office, Obama rang up "the leaders of Israel, Egypt, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority to talk about next steps for peace." In his next few moments, he appointed George Mitchell to take care of bidness. I'll have more on this man later. For now, the key facts are that he's so even-handed that the extreme right-wing allies of Israel are in a blind panic, and he helped bring peace to Northern Ireland. I do believe Obama's serious about getting this peace thing right.

"No More Fake Optimism"

Naomi Wolf, reflecting on Obama's inauguration speech, captured the essence:

The great leaders in the US weren't the cheerleaders who promised ­morning in America. They were the ones that forced us to look in the mirror. Since Reagan there has been this tradition, which has become a cliche, of promising morning in America, this fake optimism, we're the best, the city on the hill.

In fact the great American task is self-scrutiny. Abraham Lincoln gave speeches about the civil war in which he said, in essence, "We've brought this on ourselves by enslaving Americans." Obama's speech was a diagnosis: "We have to take steps to rebuild our nation." I'm not saying, "Hooray, he offered a tough, dark recognition of our reality." I'm saying "Hooray" because he has recognised that the only way to save America is to confront it.

I think we can safely say he's doing just that. No more fake optimism. This is the real deal.

Now if you'll excuse me, I think I'm going to go lie down. The pace of change has been absolutely dizzying.



*I know, I know. But one waiver does not destroy the implications. I'll feel differently if this becomes a habit.

Mongers of Fear

We're all gonna diiiieeeee!!1!!!111!!!

Such is the sentiment of the right-wing retards that brought us 9/11 by ignoring intelligence community warnings, sent 4,871 soldiers to die in wars that were not only pointless but generated more terrorists for us to deal with, and presided over the destruction of America's moral authority.

President Obama issued orders to close Guantanamo and cease torturing people. Thirty seconds later, the right wing exploded. Preliminary reports suggest the remnants of their sanity imploded, setting off a chain reaction of insanity with a force roughly equivalent to India's entire nuclear arsenal.

Bush's former speechwriter is shitting himself in terror:

Just yesterday, Marc Thiessen, up until recently George W. Bush's chief speechwriter, wrote a rather twisted op-ed for the Washington Post, engaging in the kind of shameless demagoguery that's so over the top, it almost reads like a parody. Today, Thiessen went even further.

Yesterday, Thiessen argued that if Barack Obama changes Bush's national-security apparatus in anyway, he'll invite domestic terrorism and will shoulder the blame for American deaths. Today, writing for the National Review, Thiessen believes Obama is the most dangerous president "ever."

Less than 48 hours after taking office, Obama has begun dismantling those institutions without time for any such review. The CIA program he is effectively shutting down is the reason why America has not been attacked again after 9/11. He has removed the tool that is singularly responsible for stopping al-Qaeda from flying planes into the Library Tower in Los Angeles, Heathrow Airport, and London's Canary Warf [sic], and blowing up apartment buildings in Chicago, among other plots. It's not even the end of inauguration week, and Obama is already proving to be the most dangerous man ever to occupy the Oval Office.

This is not only a rather hysterical rant, it's rather silly.

For example, a CIA program was not "singularly responsible for stopping al-Qaeda from flying planes into the Library Tower in Los Angeles." What Thiessen neglects to mention is that the Library Tower plot was an idea that "had not gone much past the conceptual stage." Many within the intelligence community eventually concluded that the Library Tower scheme was never much more than "talk." We literally tortured this idea out of detainees, but that doesn't make it a thwarted terrorist plot. What's more, the evidence to bolster Thiessen's other examples is no more compelling. (And this puts aside the notion that we might be able to get intelligence without torturing suspects.)

Bill O and Laura Ingraham screech that without torture, America can't possibly be safe:

Bill O'Reilly was harping on his recent favorite theme -- that Obama needs to keep America a torturing nation in order to keep us safe from imminent terrorist attack -- with Laura Ingraham last night, and she chimed in thus:

Ingraham: We want to understand here, Bill, if America is safer today or less safe than she was on January 19. And I think any objective review of what's being done -- and you're right, he promised to do these things and he's doing them -- shutting down the military tribunals temporarily, a 120-day pause, closing Gitmo by 2010, and doing away with [scare quotes] "harsh interrogation methods" -- I think you can make a pretty compelling case that we're less safe today. And Barack Obama apparently is willing to roll the dice on that. Because he made these promises and -- he campaigned on them.

This particularly ugly meme is rapidly gaining favor on the right. It was recently advanced in the Washington Post by George W. Bush's ex-speechwriter, Marc Thiessen...

[snip]

As Jason Zengerle adroitly observed, "You almost get the sense guys like Thiessen are hoping for an attack so that they can blame Obama when it happens."

Indeed, claims like these actually invite domestic terrorist attacks, since they announce to terrorist organizations that Obama will be especially politically vulnerable to divisive right-wing attacks if they pull off another major event; Obama won't have Bush's right-wing Mulligan. This in turn will further motivate them to pull off such an event. It makes America a much more inviting target to strategic-oriented terrorists like Al Qaeda (which, since 9/11, has been largely content to focus on its own back yard).

Once again, Conservative ideology is more important to right-wingers than our national well-being.

Thanks, Cons, for not only creating more terrorists, but giving them more ideas. That's just awesome.

I'm not sure what it is about Cons. They seem to live in a state of perpetual paranoia. What else explains rampaging idiocy such as this?

One day before President Obama ordered the closing of Guantanamo Bay, Rep. John Murtha (D-PA) said he would be willing to facilitate the process by bringing some of the detainees into his district. “Sure, I’d take them,” Murtha said. “I mean, they’re no more dangerous in a prison in my district than they are in Guantanamo.”

Fox News’s Glenn Beck called Murtha a “clown” yesterday because of the proposal. But Diane Gramley, president of the American Family Association of Pennsylvania, may have won top prize for the most absurd reaction. Calling the idea “ludicrous,” Gramley’s main complaint seems to be that the al Qaeda suspects will indoctrinate the other American inmates:

“I don’t think the average murderer or rapist hates all Americans or hates what America stands for like the terrorist prisoners from Guantanamo,” said Gramley, who lives in Venango County. “You intermix them with the prison population, and there’s the very real possibility they would influence those individuals in prison.”

What amazing visions they have dancing in their heads. Not only do they believe that mixing a terrorist or two in amidst our own crooks will have the instant effect of turning everybody into terrorists, they think people in a Supermax get to socialize. You know what? I think we should have a sleepover program so that right-wing dumbfucks can see firsthand that the prisons they consign the worst of the worst ordinary criminals to are not the luxurious resorts they consign their own white-collar malefactors to.

They should also have their citizenship stripped and have to attempt to get it back. Then they might realize how incredibly stupid this hypothetical is:

Discussing Obama’s plan to close Guantanamo on Mike Gallagher’s radio show yesterday, Rep. Steve King (R-IA) claimed that Obama’s actions could be “the beginning of shutting down…the activities of the CIA.” When Gallagher said that Obama wanted to “bestow American citizenship rights to somebody from another country” who wants “to murder civilian Americans,” King claimed that closing Gitmo could put 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed “on a path to citizenship”:

KING: Let’s just say that, that, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11, is brought to the United States to be tried in a federal court in the United States, under a federal judge, and we know what some of those judges do, and on a technicality, such as, let’s just say he wasn’t read his Miranda rights. … He is released into the streets of America. Walks over and steps up into a US embassy and applies for asylum for fear that he can’t go back home cause he spilled the beans on al Qaeda. What happens then if another judge grants him asylum in the United States and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is on a path to citizenship. I mean, I give you the extreme example of this.

[snip]

As terrorism expert Peter Bergen noted on CNN last night, “the idea that somehow these terrorists are going to be released is just absolutely nonsensical.” “When terrorists have been tried in the United States, they go away forever,” said Bergen. “The embassy attackers in ‘98 who blew up two American embassies, they are in prison for life without parole.”

I don't think anyone has to worry about Khalid Sheikh Mohammed getting a green card and buying a house in the burbs any time soon.

Choosing a winner for most ridiculous statement was damned difficult, but I think Rep. Cantor won by a nose:

GOP House Minority Whip Eric Cantor warned: "Actively moving terrorists inside our borders weakens our security. Most families neither want nor need hundreds of terrorists seeking to kill Americans in their communities."

Well, no shit, Eric. That's why they'll be in prison, not roaming the streets, you fucktard.

Their hysteria's bad enough when it's based off of their fantasies. It goes up astronomically when there's a wee bit of reality to feed the flames:

The New York Times reports that “the emergence of a former Guantánamo Bay detainee as the deputy leader of Al Qaeda’s Yemeni branch has underscored the potential complications in carrying out the executive order President Obama signed Thursday that the detention center be shut down within a year.”

[snip]

Asked about the Times story, CAP’s Ken Gude responded that “it is impossible to guarantee that no detainees released from Guantanamo will ever join up with terrorists or commit violent acts. The Obama admininstration must do all that it can to prevent this from occuring, but the chances are likely that it will.”

But you cannot assess the dangers of Guantanamo simply by looking at a handful of released detainees and whether they participate in terrorism. Guantanamo’s existence has driven far more individuals into al Qaeda’s ranks than those who could join the fight after being released.

And the Iraq war provided an environment in which to train them. Contrary to what conservatives will inevitably insist, the story of Said Ali al-Shihri doesn’t argues for abandoning the effort to close Guantanamo (it’s unknown whether al-Shihri’s Gitmo stint further radicalized him, as it has other detainees), but for a more competent and responsible process for dealing with detainees. More importantly, given the apparent ease with which al-Shihri was able to hook up with an Iraq-fed Al Qaeda affiliate after his release, it argues for a counter-terrorism policy that doesn’t actually fan the flames of extremism in the Middle East, as the Bush administration’s did.

Of course, the frothing fuckwits can't reason this through. They can't accept that the mess they created is going to leave a stain. And they're trying to pawn responsibility off on Obama, who didn't even release the above terrorist:

I'd just like to point something out to the many rightwingers who are frothing at the mouth today over the NYT's story that a former Gitmo detainee has become the deputy leader of Al Qaeda's Yemeni branch.

The Bush administration released this man in 2007, without trial -a decision made by political appointees, not judicial review - and handed him over to the Saudis who let him walk.

So who is at fault here?

Rather than blaming Obama for wanting to actually put bad guys on trial - proper trial - shouldn't these rightwing pundits be asking why the Bush administration made a political decision to let this guy go?

Well, they should, but they won't. That wouldn't fit their fearmongering narrative, which is that Obama's going to get us all killed because he's not willing to be a lawbreaking, torture-encouraging, short-sighted dumbshit like Bush.

We are seeing just the beginning of the right-wing freakout that will sweep this nation. We need stamp on the flames before they get out of hand. In a rational country, all of their babbling would be no more than an amusing distraction. Alas, there are far too many willingly stupid people in America. So arm yourself with facts, my darlings. Sharpen them into pithy points. Hone your rapier wit. And be ready to turn right-wing attacks right back at 'em, just as Glenn Greenwald has so ably done.

Tell the mongers of fear to go peddle their wares elsewhere.

Happy Hour Discurso

Today's opining on the public discourse.

I'm sitting in my comfy gliding rocking chair here at home, but that's not the only thing lending to my peace and contentment today. There's also the fact that I'm watching the GOP set itself up for a third catastrophic fail in 2010. It is a cold day in Seattle, but my heart is warm.

I do believe I see now the reason why Cons are so adamantly against any and all gun control. It's because they want plenty of options and ammunition available when they shoot themselves in the foot:

The National Republican Congressional Committee has an "issues" page, which includes the "Economy" on its list. (It's seventh on the page, behind Social Security and Border Security.) The page tells readers, "Thanks to Republican economic policies, the U.S. economy is robust and job creation is strong."

After clicking "read more," we learn all about the NRCC's message on the economy.

Thanks to Republican economic policies, the U.S. economy is robust and job creation is strong.

Republican tax cuts are creating jobs and continuing to strengthen the economy, yet there is still more to do so that every American who wants a job can find one.

The NRCC's site also explains that if we stray from Republican economic ideas, we will "set back our economy."

[snip]

The DCCC, meanwhile, is having quite a bit of fun with all of this: "I'm sure the millions of Americans struggling to make ends meet in this 'robust' economy are overflowing with gratitude for those Republican economic policies that got us into this mess."

Absolutely priceless.

And so was the NRCC's response. First, it was "our site is under construction," which is pretty rich considering a) the economy is one of the top issues on Americans' minds, so you'd think that maybe that would be a construction priority, and b) "the site was updated as late as yesterday, with…a discussion of Pelosi’s economic policies." Epic fucking fail.

They've since taken it down. So here's a screen shot for posterity:



I wonder how long it will be before this ends up on Fail Blog?

Speaking of fail, Rep. Cantor apparently needs help understanding large numbers:

Today, President Obama held a White House meeting with congressional leaders from both parties to discuss his Recovery and Reinvestment plan. Afterward, Republicans made it clear they were not looking to compromise. Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-VA) circled the cable news shows to mock the plan’s infrastructure spending, fixating on — and lying about — one particular and modest proposal to revitalize the crumbling National Mall, which he falsely claimed would receive more stimulus funds than would small businesses:

– When you’re seeing four times as much money spent on grass in Washington — that is actually lawn grass in Washington — than you do to help small businesses, that has your priorities backwards. [MSNBC]

– If you look at the bill that passed the ways and means committee yesterday, for every dollar spent to help small businesses, four dollars is being spent to help upkeep the grass on the lawns of Washington. Again, what does that have to do with a stimulus bill? [Fox News]

Let's do have a look:

Ah. I think I see the problem here. Rep. Cantor is apparently having a hard time understanding that taller columns signify more money. He seems to have latched on to that $20,000 figure without realizing it's in millions. So allow me to translate this for Mr. Cantor: that means small businesses are getting 20 billion dollars in tax cuts. This is on top of the fact that $880 million is more than $200 million, numbnuts.

I hope that clears things up for him.

Cons may want to think thrice before they throw more fits over the stimulus package. For one thing, even conservative Americans loves them some infrastructure spending:

Republican pollster Frank Luntz has been doing similar tests of public opinion, and has found similar results: Americans really care about infrastructure.

[snip]

Consider this: A near unanimous 94% of Americans are concerned about our nation's infrastructure. And this concern cuts across all regions of the country and across urban, suburban and rural communities.

Fully 84% of the public wants more money spent by the federal government -- and 83% wants more spent by state governments -- to improve America's infrastructure.

How strong is the support? Luntz found that Americans are prepared to pay (cue scary music) higher taxes for more infrastructure investment. Luntz was further shocked to find that three out of four Republicans would accept such a trade off.

Second, the economic news is worse than ever:

I don't know that you could rationally argue anything as a "strong sector" of the economy at this point:

SAN FRANCISCO — Not even high-tech is immune from the economic meltdown.

Despite predictions — wishful thinking? — by some financial analysts that it would remain relatively unscathed, Silicon Valley and the rest of the industry buckled under distressing news Thursday.

Microsoft (MSFT) announced 5,000 layoffs — its biggest cutback ever — and Sony (SNE) said it will report an operating loss for the first time in 14 years: $1.65 billion. A day earlier, Intel said it will close several older factories, displacing 5,000 to 6,000 workers.

It is sobering news for the tech industry, which had resisted the gravitational pull of the tottering economy over the past year as consumers continued to snap up laptops and iPhones.

Not anymore. In the span of several weeks, orders for both business and consumer tech products have cratered, and technology companies began shedding workers.

Third, their obstructionist ways are presenting a deliciously broad target:

One thing that the success of Obama’s agenda will depend on is the help of outside groups that will raise big money to drive his message and to blitz the opposition with TV ads.

I’ve just learned that an ad campaign blitzing a half dozen GOP Senators will be launched in the middle of next week by one such outside group, Americans United For Change, which will air ads for at least four days pressuring the Senators to back Obama’s stimulus package.

The ads will reflect the aggressive style of the group’s chief, Brad Woodhouse, a well-known and hard-edged operative who helped drive the Democratic National Committee’s message during the 2008 election.

“The ads will say, `Senator, you have a stark choice. Are you going to play politics as usual and embrace the failed policies of the past, or will you support the Obama plan?’” says a Democratic operative involved in the project. “Mentioning the Obama plan is central because his approval rating is at 70% or more. In our polling, he is a dominant messenger.”

Fourth, they're opening the way for Obama to ignore them by making ridiculous demands from a position of no power:

Barack Obama has prioritized bipartisan support for an economic stimulus package. But as predicted, it's very difficult to pass a meaningful, effective bill that draws support from congressional Republicans. The president made concessions from the outset -- offering tax cuts to garner GOP backing -- and wouldn't you know it, Republicans aren't satisfied.

Just days after taking office vowing to end the political era of "petty grievances," President Obama ran into mounting GOP opposition yesterday to an economic stimulus plan that he had hoped would receive broad bipartisan support.

Republicans accused Democrats of abandoning the new president's pledge, ignoring his call for bipartisan comity and shutting them out of the process by writing the $850 billion legislation. [...]

Republicans have a long list of grievances. Sen. Arlen Specter (Pa.), who gave Vice President Biden a 17-page list of spending requests, said he opposes the proposed increase in funding for Pell Grants for college students because it would do little to spur short-term economic growth. House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (Ohio) said the plan lacks enough "fast-acting tax relief," such as a temporary halt to payroll taxes and more relief for businesses. Sen. John Thune (S.D.) said the nearly $1 trillion price tag would add too much to a federal deficit that is already predicted to top $1.2 trillion for 2009.

Republicans believe they have not been treated as equal partners in the process, and that conservative ideas aren't being taken seriously. Newsflash: they're right. What Republicans seem to be missing here is that they shouldn't be treated as equal partners -- they're a small congressional minority whose economic ideas helped create the mess Democrats are now trying to clean up.

We're left with the same dynamic that's existed from the beginning of the process: the Obama administration can pursue a better bill that passes with 60 votes, or a weaker bill that passes with 80. The priority should obviously be the quality of the package.

And fifth, they fucking lost:

Jonathan Weisman reports on today's bipartisan stimulus meeting at the White House:

Challenged by one Republican senator over the contents of the package, the new president, according to participants, replied: “I won.”

And that's it. As Steve Benen notes (my emphasis):

In context, Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) told the president that the Democratic plan to give a tax credit to those who don't pay income taxes isn't a tax cut, but rather, a check. Obama responded that this was a common point of debate during the presidential campaign -- McCain/Palin called Obama's plan "welfare" -- and voters were not swayed by Republican arguments. "I won," Obama told lawmakers.

So, Obama wasn't throwing too sharp an elbow, but it was nevertheless a not-so-subtle reminder to the minority party. There are two sides to this debate, and one of them has the backing of the American electorate, and was endorsed after a national campaign based on a specific policy platform. Hint to Kyl: it's not your side.

It's good to see that Obama understands that. He's serious about this bipartisan stuff, but not so much that he'll go to utterly ridiculous lengths to satisfy the party that lost two fucking elections in a row.

And if Cons continue to live up to the General Obstruction Party moniker, if they dig in their heels and whine and scream and try to drag the country further down into their mud, they'll keep losing. And losing. And losing. Credibility, arguments, political battles, elections, you name it, they will fucking well lose it.

I've focused on the economic aspects of their inanity today. That is, alas, only a small slice of the enormous bullshit pie of abject dumbfuckery they are engaging in today. I'll have a whole nother post on the theme of national security later. But for now, I just want to leave you with this delight to savor. Think of it as a dinner mint:

With several Senate Republicans recently announcing their retirement, the GOP leadership would presumably encourage all of their remaining incumbents to seek re-election. Apparently, however, there is an exception.

One of the more fascinating campaigns in recent years was Sen. Jim Bunning's (R) re-election fight in Kentucky in 2004. While political observers routinely joke about politicians who are "crazy" or have "lost it," Bunning was one of those rare candidates who actually, literally, seemed to be suffering the effects of dementia. He would fail to show up for campaign events, he skipped a debate he agreed to participate in, and he lied about using a teleprompter in a different debate in which he wasn't supposed to use one. He insisted on traveling with a special police escort, at taxpayer expense, for fear of a terrorist attack.

[snip]

Four years later, Kentucky Republicans and the NRSC are looking ahead to the 2010 cycle. A growing number of Republicans would love to see Bunning quietly go away.

Some Republicans are privately urging Sen. Jim Bunning (R-Ky.) to step down at the end of his term amid growing concerns that he can't win reelection in 2010.

According to two GOP sources, leading Republican fundraisers in Kentucky are hesitant to raise money for Bunning and have told him he should not seek a third term.

"They want him to realize he's had a good run but that it's time to move on. These people want to win, and they realize he could easily lose this seat," said one leading Kentucky Republican operative who requested anonymity to speak candidly.

[snip]

Expect the pressure on Bunning to retire to get pretty intense. Republicans are already in a state of semi-panic over 2010.

They've certainly got plenty to panic about. And the beauty of it is, they brought it all on themselves.

Update: Speaking of "they brought it on themselves:"

Scott Lilly makes a sharp but important point about congressional conservatives fretting that the stimulus plan isn’t sufficiently fast-acting:

It is unfortunate that government cannot turn on the spigots of job creation more rapidly, and that the damage already done to households and businesses cannot be repaired more quickly. Those were facts that Rep. Lewis and his House Republican colleagues should have weighed more thoughtfully when they blocked a smaller stimulus package in September. Had it been passed and implemented then, money would now be flowing and the precipitous drops in monthly employment that we are now enduring might have been significantly softened.

I shall have enormous fun reminding Cons of this every time they whine about the size, scope and speed of the stimulus.

Shine a Light

This delights me:

It looks like Senate Democrats are poised to try again on Lisa Jackson and Nancy Sutley, the Obama environmental nominees whose confirmations were slowed down by Republicans signaling their frustration over White House climate adviser Carol Browner.

As Senate environment committee chairman Barbara Boxer (D-CA) put it to TPM today, "Once we go public with [the GOP delay], it should go away."

And sure enough, drawing attention to the Republican objections did the trick. Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY) clarified what Boxer termed his initial opposition to the environmental nominations, deeming it nothing but a misunderstanding. We won't know for sure until Democrats call up Jackson and Sutley again, but if no objection is heard, consider it further proof that sunshine is the best disinfectant.

It looks like Dems have figured out that dealing with Cons is much like dealing with cockroaches: shine a light on 'em, and they scatter. I just love the fact Dems are so matter-of-factly siccing the public on recalcitrant Cons. Seems they've finally figured out most Americans are fed up with obstructionist bullshit, and all that is needed to swing the public to their side is to show exactly who it is kicking and screaming on the floor just like tantrum-prone toddlers.

It's about bloody time.

Friday Favorite Melancholy

You're probably thinking Dana's gone right round the bend. How could anyone have a favorite melancholy?

If you love a particular sad song, or somber poem, or tragic story, you're as guilty as I am. I wouldn't say we enjoy wallowing in misery, but sometimes it's nice to soak in some sorrow. Some of the most beautiful things I know arise from desolation.

What brought melancholy to mind during this, one of the happiest weeks of my life? Well, in the few hours I haven't been blogging, I've been organizing the disaster otherwise known as My Documents. My computer is full of fragments, things that caught my attention, things that informed a story I was writing or gripped me by both shoulders and demanded I pay attention. One of those things is a paragraph from Emyr Humphreys's beautiful book The Taliesin Tradition, where he described the essence of Ieuan Brydydd Hir's I Lys Ifor Hael, and said everything that needed to be said about the loss of a world:

The fact of a defeat, with the pain unassuaged by the passage of time, gives a cutting edge beyond romantic melancholy. Brambles cover the ruins of splendour, the halls of song are the haunts of the owl, and the qualities of generous noblemen and a whole way of life are less than stones in the sand.

I think that's why we're attracted to ruins. Each one contains a story. Each one reminds us that nothing lasts forever. We're fascinated, sometimes elevated and sometimes humbled by the knowledge that this is all that is left of people who, like us, had hopes and passions and ordinary lives.

Berl Katznelson, one of Israel's founders, used a wall as his example of impermanence:

You see this strong wall? Although it understands nothing, it too will disintegrate, it too will split. Disintegration has a logic of its own.

You never really think of disintegration being something logical, but Berl's statement made me see it a different way. And it's strangely comforting. It's the senseless that we really have trouble with. Things that follow a logical progression can be accomodated, dealt with, even when they can't be overcome.

And for a writer, it's good to hear Lao Tzu remind us that words sometimes have a power that outlasts the merely physical:

The very bones of those you talk about have turned to dust. All that remains of them is their words.

The wall splits. A way of life is less than stones in sand. But the words live on. And they can mean just as much now as they did thousands of years ago. Think of Philoctetes, who was no more immune to pain and loneliness than we are, for all that he was a legend:

You jutting broken crags, to you I raise my cry-
There is no one else I can speak to.

I love that line. It reminds me that we're never truly alone. When all else fails, a mountain can be your best friend.

Adversity brings out the worst in us, sometimes, but it can also bring out the best. Those moments of doubt and loss, suffering and melancholy, they've inspired us to create some of our greatest philosophies, works of art and literature that enthralled generations, and taught us how to be human. Every life should include a generous measure of happiness, but don't knock the melancholy. It can lift you up as easily as bring you down.

Some Things Must Neither Be Forgiven Nor Forgotten

It will take years, perhaps decades, before the full scope of the catastrophe Bush visited on this country is understood. But I already know what I will never forgive him for:

Of all the horrible things done by America over the last 8 years, nothing was more shameful than the formalization, the normalization, of torture.

It was the 2004 election which sealed the shame, for America knew, Americans knew, indeed all the world knew that torture had happened. Was happening. Would continue to happen if George Bush was reelected. I still don't know what Americans thought that election was about, but to many of us from outside it was about whether Americans were the sort of people who would elect George Bush once he had shown them his soul.

America then showed its soul to the world, and it was hard not turn aside in contempt and disgust. Hard to look at what the shining city on the hill, the nation which stood against both Nazism and the totalitarianism of the Soviet Union, had become.

America before Bush had been far from perfect, but no matter what dumbass thing we did, no matter what stupid mistakes or unethical bullshit we engaged in, I could at least say we didn't take pride in torturing people. We'd drawn a bright line and refused to step over it. Until Bush.

Everything else he did - destroying the economy, weakening the government to the point where it couldn't respond to disasters like Katrina, raping the environment, ignoring global warming, warrantless wiretapping, even invading Iraq based on lies - all of that pales in comparison to the fact that he took us over that line. He made us into a nation of torturers.

Christopher Hitchens, who had to be waterboarded before he discovered what torture was, still thinks it wasn't Bush's fault. He blames the masses:

Continuing his discourse on torture policy, Hitchens then claimed that the Bush administration's commitment to harsh interrogation techniques, which he considers torture, derived from a desire among Americans for a more “ruthless” government. “It has to be admitted by every American that in the majority after the 9/11 Commission, people wanted an administration that was much more ruthless than the one they'd had on September the 10th,” he said.

“I know something for a sure thing,” Hitchens continued. “The demand for torture and other methods I would describe as illegal, the demand to go outside the Geneva conventions — all this came from below. What everyone wants to say is this came from a small clique around the vice-president. It's not educational. It doesn't enlighten anyone to behave as if that were true. This is our society wanting and demanding harsh measures.”

Poor, pathetic President Bush. He was only doing what the unwashed masses told him to. The people were screaming for blood, and so he gave it to them.

Bull. Shit.

I know that Americans were hurt, scared, angry and looking to lash out after 9/11. But I didn't hear a deafening demand for our government to start torturing people. Even if the people had demanded that, it's why we have representative government. We choose leaders to lead. And a leader's responsibility is to ensure cooler heads prevail.

Instead, Bush took the opportunity to turn us into a nation of torturers.

He and his apologists are doing their level-best to convince us that the past is best left in the past, that Bush's torture regime kept us safe, that without torture we're all going to be murdered by terrorists. It's Jack Bauer thinking. They can't separate fantasy from reality:

We are supposed to feel bad for Jack Bauer, the lead character on FOX's hit show "24." Only he and a handful of his colleagues, it seems, have the moral strength necessary to do what has to be done. While Senators whine and his superiors wring their hands about what is "right," Bauer acts and saves the nation.

What this means - and has meant for more than six seasons of "24" - is that Bauer is a not-so reluctant torturer. He beats up the bad guys because, as he has said so many times, "there is no other way."

The reality is that there are more reliable and effective ways. Resorting to torture isn't heroic, it's stupid. Reliance on it has resulted in strategic mistakes and has made the nation less safe. The torture chorus has yet to document a single instance of a "but for" success, and that refusal looks more and more like a criminal cover-up.

I taught interrogation and the law of war for 18 years to U.S. Army, Air Force, and Marine interrogators. The truth is that torture is just as likely to lead to false information or no information, not solid intelligence. History is replete with victims who have refused to talk or lied or died under torture. American torture has killed or addled suspects who might have provided vital intelligence if interrogated humanely. One problem with TV fiction is that viewers assume that if Jack Bauer can break some fingers and crack the case in an hour, anyone could.

Unfortunately that is exactly the message that some have gleaned from this program. After watching torture work over and over again, some junior soldiers (and, sadly, some very senior policy makers who ought to know better) have copied the tactics they have seen on "24" and other action programs, according to evidence gathered by journalists and Human Rights First. Military educators have also reported that "24" is "one of the biggest problems" they have in their classrooms.

How fucking pathetic is it that any teenager in the country (well, aside from the budding Republicons) will, when asked, explain very calmly and rationally that there's a clear difference between what works in Hollywood and what works in the real world, yet the fucktards who were in charge of our government and the delusional fools in our armed forces think 24 is an instructional video?

This is what Bush and his cronies wrought. The fact they decided torture was necessary and efficient led a lot of people to believe the same, because they're our leaders and people trust their leaders to do what is right.

Of course, it seems Cons have a hard time distinguishing between right and wrong:

From the new WaPo/ABC poll:

A majority of Americans in a new Washington Post-ABC News poll oppose the use of torture in terrorism investigations, backing Barack Obama's pledge that "under my administration, the United States does not torture."

...

Overall, 58 percent support the prohibition Obama declared before taking office, but there's a wide gap across party lines: 71 percent of Democrats and 56 percent of independents in the poll said torture should never be used, but most Republicans, 55 percent, said there are cases in which the U.S. should consider using torture against terrorism suspects.

Funny how that "right and wrong/black and white" world conservatives love so much turns gray when it comes to torture.

And on Gitmo:

In a new Washington Post-ABC News poll, 53 percent of Americans said the United States should shutter the controversial facility, finding another way to deal with the prisoners under custody there. But a sizable proportion of all adults polled, 42 percent, and a broad majority of Republicans, 69 percent, said terrorism suspects should remain at Gitmo. Most Democrats, 68 percent, and independents, 55 percent, said they'd prefer another way.

Apparently, when Hitchens and the rest of the Villagers talk about "what Americans want," they're only talking to Cons. It presents a rather warped view of what the majority of the country knows to be right.

And the majority of us know that there will be no going forward, that our moral authority cannot be restored, until there is an accounting for the war crimes Bush and his regime committed:

Even more surprisingly for spouters of conventional wisdom, a majority of Americans (50-47%) believe that the Obama administration should investigate whether the Bush administration's treatment of detainees was illegal. When asked: "Do you think the Obama administration should or should not investigate whether any laws were broken in the way terrorism suspects were treated under the Bush administration?," Democrats overwhelmingly favor such investigations (69%), while Republicans oppose them by the same margin, and independents are slightly against.

This number was obtained despite the 24/7 yawping of pundits, gassbags, opinion-makers, and other self-important fools telling us all how vital it is that Obama move on, forget the past, and incidentally hang on to the torture option because you never know when you're going to need to break a few fingers to stop a ticking time bomb. A hair-thin majority, but still a majority, hasn't fallen for the lies. They know it's important to prosecute those who broke countless laws and destroyed our country's moral standing.

We have to set things right, but not just for us. The world is watching. So are our adversaries:

One hesitates to say this will amount to anything, but Marc Lynch notes that Mohammed Essam Derbala, a leader of Ayman Zawahiri's Egyptian terrorist group that merged with Al Qaeda in 1998, today urged his former confederates to declare a unilateral ceasefire to "test Barack Obama's pledges to establish a new relationship with the Islamic world and to close Guantanamo."

[snip]

Let's be clear about a few things. Derbala has no power to call for or enforce any Al Qaeda ceasefire. But consider how overwhelmingly significant it is that a former terrorist of such obvious credibility would say something like this. And why'd he say it? Because Barack Obama just renounced torture. He put the United States on a clear path to repudiating the detentions, interrogations and, as important, humiliations that Muslims consider the U.S. to have inflicted not just on terrorists, but the entire Muslim world. Part of Al Qaeda's entire propagandistic message is that the U.S. is an unchanging brutish entity determined to subjugate the Muslim world. What Obama did today severely complicates that narrative. But it's not enough for us to consider the narrative to be complicated -- it takes Muslim figures of credibility to say so. That's what Derbala just did.

Imagine that. In the real world, not torturing people makes you safer and more secure. We should ask the producers of 24 to break the news to Jack Bauer - otherwise, the Cons will never understand the truth.

And the truth is this:

We must wipe the grime and filth from the walls of that shining city on a hill. We must relight the beacons. If we are to do any good in this world, we must go forward with prosecutions, hold our own war criminals accountable just as we have those in countless other countries.

We can't forgive, and we can't forget. Not this. We have to love our country enough to hold those who broke her most fundamental laws to account, or there will be nothing left of that shining city but ruins.

For Simon

I thought you might like it, my joy.

Happy Hour Discurso

Today's opining on the public discourse.

Obama's second full day in office endures a tsunami of stupid. Where to begin? I'm spoiled for choice.

Look like I could've held my breath on the right-wing freakout over Obama's oath after all - I wouldn't have had to hold it for long:

Just when it seemed we could finally move from complaints about Barack Obama's oath of office, the right finds something new to whine about.

When Obama took the oath on Tuesday, he used the same Bible that Lincoln used in 1861. When he followed up with another oath last night, he raised his right hand, but kept his left hand by his side. This, apparently, is making some people unhappy.

The lead story on Drudge right now reports, in all caps, "No Bible Used At Obama Re-Swear."

Obama urged the nation to put an "end to the petty grievances" on Tuesday, but it appears some haven't quite gotten the message.

These people are just astoundingly inane. I can see I'm going to have to buy a new thesaurus, one with plenty of synonyms for "abject, batshit-insane, pathetic, outrageous stupidity." It's not just that they're freaking out because Obama didn't have his hand on a Bible when he swore the second time. It's the fact that people like Glenn Beck are claiming that this has never ever happened before in the whole history of the country. Au contraire, my research-challenged fucktards.

And the stupid certainly isn't limited to right-wing noise machine blowhards. It's neck-deep in the halls of Congress:

Earlier today, President Obama signed an executive order directing the closure of the U.S. military prison at Gitmo. Asked during a news conference for his reaction to the order, House Minority Leader John Boehner made it clear that he wasn’t even sure why anyone would want to close the prison in the first place. After all, he explained, the detainees there get “more comforts than a lot of Americans get”:

QUESTION: A lot of members of Congress on both sides of the aisle say that Guantanamo Bay has just given the United States a black eye on the world stage. Isn’t that part of the problem, too? […]

BOEHNER: I don’t know that there’s a terrorist treated better anywhere in the world than what has happened at Guantanamo. It is — we have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to build a facility that has more comforts than a lot of Americans get.

Tell you what, John. Next vacation, why don't you spend it in Gitmo? Here's some of the luxuries awaiting you:

“For 160 days his only contact was with the interrogators,” said Crawford, who personally reviewed Qahtani’s interrogation records and other military documents. … Qahtani “was forced to wear a woman’s bra and had a thong placed on his head during the course of his interrogation” and “was told that his mother and sister were whores.” With a leash tied to his chains, he was led around the room “and forced to perform a series of dog tricks,” the report shows.

The Post also reported that al-Qahtani’s treatment was so extreme he had to be hospitalized twice and at one point his heart rate dropped to 35 beats per minute. In 2007, an FBI report found that detainees “were chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor for 18 hours or more, urinating and defecating on themselves.” Similarly, in 2004, the Red Cross reported “cruel, inhumane and degrading” treatment which was approaching “torture.”

Sounds like a veritible luxury resort, doesn't it just? Makes you wonder why detainees demanded habeas corpus rights - I mean, who'd ever want to leave such a ritzy place?

As far as group-level stupid goes, the Republicon strategy of obstructing for the sake of obstruction is well underway:

Congressional Republicans forced a brief but unnecessary delay on Hillary Clinton's nomination, and have forced additional delays on the confirmation of the next Attorney General and Treasury Secretary. Today we learned that another conservative Republican senator is standing in the way of EPA nominee Lisa Jackson and Council on Environmental Quality nominee Nancy Sutley.

David Kurtz wonders what the Republicans are thinking.

Think about it for a minute. This is the Republican Party circa 2009: pro-torture and pro-global warming. This is what they're staking their claims on. And willing to obstruct a wildly popular new President in the midst of not just a national economic crisis, but a convergence of international crises of which economic collapse is just one.

That is, of course, true. Congressional Republicans don't really have a strategy in mind -- they know these confirmations are going to go through anyway -- but they're flailing around, demonstrating little more than their ability to be nuisances.

A herd of screaming infants. That's what they remind me of. These fuckwits should be sent to daycare until they learn to play well with others.

You can learn a lot about people from what they're inspired by. In the case of one contender for the RNC chair, it turns out that his political career was inspired by the civil rights movement:

In the race for the RNC chair, it's becoming difficult to figure out which candidate is the most problematic in terms of party outreach to minority voters and adjusting to the political realities or our times.

The Politico reports that South Carolina GOP chairman Katon Dawson has publicly traced his political coming of age to the civil rights movement -- that is, opposition to 1960's busing policies. "Government reached into my life and grabbed me and shook me at the age of 15," Dawson told a University of South Carolina audience in 2003.

This is the same idiot who belonged to a whites-only country club until he realized that might hurt his chances at political advancement. Interesting people they have in the running for control over the RNC. Makes you wonder if they've decided they never want to win an election ever again.

What else can you expect of delusional fuckwits?

On his radio show this morning, conservative talker Bill Bennett hosted the most prominent global warming denier in Congress, Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK). Opening up the conversation on the subject, Bennett declared, “I think you’ve prevailed on this.”
“I really believe it,” replied Inhofe, claiming that his opponents “won’t say global warming any more, they’re trying to say climate change.” He added that he thinks former Vice President Al Gore is “getting nervous” because, he claimed, “the science is totally changed.” Inhofe then claimed that more scientists are skeptical of climate change than those who believe in it:

INHOFE: So the science, the science is totally changed. It was the IPCC, those Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change with the United Nations. But keep in mind, the only report you get from them is their summary for policy docs. And those are not scientists. There’s only 52 scientists that signed on to those, to that, as opposed to what? Some 650 who now have rebuked that.

I wonder if he sees sparkly ponies when he looks out his window. That must be what's blinding him to the fact that his list is bogus, and this week's survey of 3,146 scientists finds 90% of them have, in fact, not rebuked global warming in the least.

The Cons have a long way to go before they start looking like anything more than a pathetic farce.

Because Some Things Are Too Damned Funny Not to Share

That's almost too close to the truth to be funny, but it's still hilarious.

And a toddler reflects on life lessons Bush taught her:



Made of awesome.

Val Kilmer for Governor?

Yes, damn it, I have to insert a Tombstone joke in here. Deal with it.

When asked if he would consider running for governor of New Mexico, Val Kilmer said, "I'm your Huckleberry. That's just my game."

Okay, not in so many words, but close enough (h/t):

Actor Val Kilmer is strongly considering a run for New Mexico governor in 2011 when Democratic Gov. Bill Richardson will be term-limited out of office.

He told The Hill at Monday’s Huffington Post party at the Newseum that he has been approached to run for the highest office of the state where he owns a ranch and has family roots.

“Actually, they’ve asked me to run for governor,” he said, not specifying who “they” are. “People seem to want me to.”

Speculation has swirled for months that Kilmer will run to succeed Richardson, and Kilmer said nothing that would have tamped down those expectations.

“I love my state and I love the people,” Kilmer said.

When asked by a reporter if he was giving a “strong maybe” for a run for governor, Kilmer agreed.

“That’s what it is,” he said.

I'm torn. On the one hand, he supported Nader over Obama, which doesn't say much for his political acumen. On the other hand, it's Val Fucking Kilmer.

We'll see how I feel after the WTF Val Kilmer running for governor srlsly?!?!! factor has worn off. Anyone else as discombobulated by the idea as I am?

Exponential Change

A friend stopped by my desk on his way home and asked what the news was. How's President Obama doing on his first day?

I had to point him to the intertoobz. Obama did so much on his first day in office that I couldn't keep up. Luckily, Joan Walsh has a snapshot for us:

By noon on his first day in office, Obama had called the leaders of Israel, Egypt, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority to talk about next steps for peace; asked Defense Secretary Robert Gates to halt Guantánamo trials and circulated a draft executive order to close the prison within the year; and attended a prayer service that included the first-ever sermon by a woman minister and the prayers of a Muslim imam.

In the afternoon he signed two executive orders and three presidential memoranda, tightening ethics rules for his staff, strengthening the Freedom of Information Act and giving the public greater access to presidential records. "Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency," he said as he signed the documents. Then he watched Vice President Joe Biden swear in his senior staff, and stayed to shake hands or embrace every one of them. After that he met with senior economic advisors and top military staff to discuss plans for the economy and Iraq; later, he hosted an open house for the American people, a new symbol of his commitment to access and transparency.

All of this, and retaking the Oath of Office, too.

As for those wondering if the abuses of power so recently enjoyed by the Bush regime will continue, I think we have got our answer:

It's encouraging, then, to know who'll be sitting in John Yoo's office for the foreseeable future.

A Georgetown source forwards over an email from that school's administration, reporting that Professor Marty Lederman's class will be canceled -- because he's joining the Obama administration.

Lederman, another former Clinton Office of Legal Counsel lawyer, is perhaps the most prominent of several high-profile opponents of the Bush Administration's executive power claims joining Obama, a mark that he intends not just to change but to aggressively reverse Bush's moves on subjects like torture. With hires like Barron, Johnen, and Lederman, Obama is not just going back to Democratic lawyers: These are anti-Bush lawyers.

Damn straight. Lederman has been a leading opponent of Bush's torture policies, and the legal reasoning behind them. He's even suggested that the former administration officials committed crimes in this area. Now, thankfully, Lederman is headed to the OLC.

And what an OLC it will be. The Lederman announcement came shortly after David Barron was named Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the OLC. Barron has been a staunch opponent of Bush's executive-branch power-grabs and war-time legal arguments.

Both Barron and Lederman will, of course, join Dawn Johnsen, who'll head the OLC, and whose record on these issues is sterling.

President Obama's not going to be 100% perfect. No one ever is. But it looks like I'm going to have to struggle hard to come up with more than quibbles with the job he's doing, and when I have the low-hanging fruit of right-wing idiocy to pluck, it's hard to muster the energy for more than a rousing shout of "Huzzah, an adult in office at last!"

Update: You can thank Obama for hitting the ground at Mach Three here.

Satisfied Now?

President Barack Obama retakes the oath of office:

Wednesday evening, Barack Obama was sworn in as president again, and this time he and Chief Justice John Roberts got it right.

[snip]

"We believe that the oath of office was administered effectively and that the President was sworn in appropriately yesterday," new White House Counsel Greg Craig said in a statement. "But the oath appears in the Constitution itself. And out of an abundance of caution, because there was one word out of sequence, Chief Justice Roberts administered the oath a second time."

A pool reporter was present for the swearing-in. According to the pool report, as Roberts prepared, Obama joked, "We decided it was so much fun..." and later told the chief justice, "We're going to do this slowly." After the two men completed the process successfully, Roberts congratulated the president again, and there was applause. Then Obama turned and quipped, "The bad news for the pool is there's 12 more balls."

There. All sworn in with the words in the right order and everything. Is this enough to make the right-wing noise machine realize that Obama is really, seriously, and for sure the President of the United States now?

Yeah, I'm not holding my breath, either.

Happy Hour Discurso

Today's opining on the public discourse.

I love the smell of wingnut fear. And there's plenty of it today, as Obama rolls back the veil of secrecy, and some torture cheerleaders begin to realize that this could mean the end of torture without consequences.

The UN is calling on the U.S. to prosecute:

In remarks that aired on German television last night, Manfred Nowak, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, urged the U.S. to pursue former President George W. Bush and defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld on charges that they authorized torture and other harsh interrogation techniques:

“Judicially speaking, the United States has a clear obligation” to bring proceedings against Bush and Rumsfeld. […] He noted Washington had ratified the UN convention on torture which required “all means, particularly penal law” to be used to bring proceedings against those violating it.

“We have all these documents that are now publicly available that prove that these methods of interrogation were intentionally ordered by Rumsfeld,” against detainees at the US prison facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Nowak said.

The panic is palpable:

That Senate Republicans want to delay confirmation of Eric Holder as our next Attorney General is not surprising. It's interesting, though, what's driving the hold-up.

Do Specter, Cornyn, & Co. want to talk some more about Marc Rich? Elian Gonzales? No, apparently, Republicans are concerned that Holder might prosecute a certain group of people who violated federal laws.

Senate Republicans hope to delay a vote on the confirmation of Eric Holder to become attorney general in order to pressure him to say whether he will prosecute intelligence agents for torture if they were following orders and acting within what they believed to be legal guidelines.

Holder told the Judiciary Committee last week that waterboarding is "torture" and therefore illegal. Susan J. Crawford, the top Bush administration official overseeing the trials of detainees, told the Washington Post that at least one individual held at the prison center at Guantanamo Bay was "tortured."

The question Republicans want answered before Holder is confirmed: Will you prosecute those who took part in that torture?

[snip]

I do find it odd, though, that this is the rationale for more delaying tactics. To hear Republicans tell it, they want to block Holder from serving as the nation's chief law-enforcement officer because he hasn't ruled out prosecuting those who broke the law.

It's quite a worldview.

That it is, Steve. That is is. Remarkable.

Rush Limbaugh, living up to his reputation as a big fat idiot (thank you, Sen. Franken), is in full cry:

Earlier today, President Obama issued his first set of executive orders. One of these orders instructs “federal agencies to handle requests for information from the public and press under the Freedom of Information Act [FOIA] with an eye toward disclosure, not refusal.” The order reportedly returns to “pre-Bush administration policies” regarding FOIA.

In response to the “new standard of openness,” conservative talker Rush Limbaugh said that he fears that the more open FOIA rules will make it easier for Bush to be held to account for any misdeeds he committed as president:

LIMBAUGH: What I’m afraid of is that what Obama did with this executive order is actually make it easier for the media to go get Bush documents. Because you know Pelosi and some of the guys over in congress are talking about war crimes trials and charges and so forth. […]

What I’m afraid of is what Obama’s done here is made the gathering of the information for this kind of stuff– This is not American. This is not America. This is not what America does. We don’t– This is Banana Republic kind of stuff.

Just sit back and take a moment to appreciate the supreme idiocy of that statement. In Rush Limbaugh's world, only banana republics take their laws seriously, and hold their leaders to account when the nation's laws are broken. It's "un-American" to abide by the rule of law. It's "not American" to have transparency in government.

Can someone please explain to me why conservatives take these people seriously? It must be a failure of my imagination, because I just can't understand how people can swallow this much bullshit all in one go.

The hysterical fits are just getting more surreal. Here's the latest right-wing conspiracy theory, as reported in that *cough* upstanding news source, WorldNut Daily:

A prominent far-right website called WorldNetDaily ran a piece the other day with a provocative headline: "Hail King Obama: President for life -- Move under way to repeal Constitution's term limits." WND reported:

As Inauguration Day approaches and Barack Obama prepares to assume his first term as president, some in Congress are hoping to make it possible for the Democrat to not only seek a second term in office, but a third and fourth as well.

The U.S. House Committee on the Judiciary is considering a bill that would repeal the Constitution's 22nd Amendment prohibiting a president from being elected to more than two terms in office.

Rep. Jose Serrano, D-N.Y., earlier this month introduced the bill, H. J. Res. 5, which, according to the bill's language, proposes "an amendment to the Constitution of the United States to repeal the twenty-second article of amendment, thereby removing the limitation on the number of terms an individual may serve as President."

Steve M. noted a variety of right-wing blogs that got pretty worked about this, including one that insisted Obama "might take a page from his role models Chavez and Castro."

Before this becomes a standard conservative talking point -- I can only assume Fox News coverage is around the corner -- let's just nip this in the bud.

Serrano did, in fact, recently introduce a measure to repeal the 22nd amendment. Is this because he wants Obama to be "president for life"? No. Serrano has introduced this exact same measure a half-dozen times, starting 12 years ago. It has nothing to do with Obama -- Serrano just happens to believe presidential term limits are a bad idea.

By their logic, Serrano wanted Bush to be "president for life" as well, which I somehow doubt was his aim. Amazing how these people have no comprehension of context.

Or law:

We knew this was coming from the second Chief Justice John Roberts botched the oath of office during President Obama's inauguration. This will, no doubt, be just one of the many right wing talking points for weeks, months, if not years to come. (h/t TPM for the video)

Wallace: ..."I have to say I'm not sure Barack Obama really is the President of the United States because the oath of office is set in the Constitution and I wasn't at all convinced that even after he tried to amend it that John Roberts ever got it out straight and that Barack Obama ever said the prescribed words. I suspect that everybody is going to forgive him and allow him to take over as president, but I'm not sure he actually said what's in the Constitution, there."

Chris Wallace may want to have a little look at what the lawyers say before he continues to make an absolute ass of himself on national television. But then, those little details never stopped anybody on Faux, did they?

And as for bipartisan cooperation, I hope Obama wasn't expecting much from that:

House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) recently conceded that Republicans can't simply be "the party of 'no.'"

There's apparently some difference of opinion on that.

Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina is the kind of uncompromising conservative who can make the leaders' life difficult. Mr. DeMint thinks, among other things, that some of his Republican colleagues are helping Democrats push America far to the left.

"We have to have a remnant of the Republican Party who are recognizable as freedom fighters," Mr. DeMint said. "What I'm looking to do as a conservative leader in the Senate is to identify those Republicans, and even some Democrats, and put together a consensus of people who can help stop this slide toward socialism."

These people are fucking insane. That's the only explanation. They are clinically batshit fucking insane.

It's going to be an interesting four years, innit?

Gaza: Israel Withdraws

Even in the afterglow of Inauguration Day, we're keeping up on the news from Gaza, my darlings. It wouldn't do to get distracted by shiny things. Considering how the ongoing crisis between Israel and the Palestinians destabilizes the Middle East, it's worth keeping a close eye on.

The news is mixed. On the good side, Israel has withdrawn its forces:

The Israel Defense Forces on Wednesday said it had withdrawn all of its soldiers from Gaza, three and a half weeks after launching Operation Cast Lead against Hamas in the coastal territory.

"As of this morning, the last of the Israel Defence Forces soldiers have left the Gaza Strip and the forces have deployed outside of Gaza and are prepared for any occurrences," an army spokesman said.

On the bad side, there's been mortar fire and some shootings:

Israel reported mortar shelling from Gaza on Tuesday. The Palestinians have said Israeli troops shot to death two farmers since the truce took hold.

[snip]

The Israel Air Force on Tuesday attacked areas in the Gaza Strip from which Palestinians fired mortar shells. The Israel Defense Forces said that about eight mortar shells were shot from near a central Gaza refugee camp, apparently by Hamas. Two of the shells landed in the Strip and the rest fell in open territory in the western Negev near the border.

At this stage, the IDF is holding its fire after its attack at around 6 P.M. Tuesday.

The Palestinians also fired light weapons into Israel on Tuesday, from both north and south of the Kissufim crossing. An explosive charge was also apparently set off.

Not good.

The reporting's too sketchy to determine what exactly is happening - after the lies Israel told during the invasion, I'm disinclined to believe their claims that it's all Hamas's fault. But I'm also not going to be shocked in the least if some pissed-off Palestinians have ignored the cease-fire in the interest of extracting a pound or two of flesh.

After all, there's plenty to be pissed about:

As outside observers enter Gaza, we’re learning more about what has happened during the Israeli attack. What they are seeing is devastating - and is leading to accusations of Israeli war crimes.

[snip]

Amnesty International reported Monday on the findings of a four-person fact-finding team who have just been allowed to Gaza. The team included a weapons expert who said:

"Yesterday, we saw streets and alleyways littered with evidence of the use of white phosphorus, including still burning wedges and the remnants of the shells and canisters fired by the Israeli army…White phosphorus is a weapon intended to provide a smokescreen for troop movements on the battlefield. It is highly incendiary, air burst and its spread effect is such that it that should never be used on civilian areas".

And their conclusion is that the Israeli use in Gaza “is a war crime:”

"Such extensive use of this weapon in Gaza's densely populated residential neighbourhoods is inherently indiscriminate. Its repeated use in this manner, despite evidence of its indiscriminate effects and its toll on civilians, is a war crime," said Donatella Rovera, Amnesty's researcher on Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

They've left behind plenty of outrage, and there's that small matter of having destroyed the very security forces that might have enforced a cease-fire.

It's not over. Not by any means.

A Benediction Even an Atheist Can Love

I didn't mean to listen to the religious pablum at Obama's inauguration, but with it splattered across Pharyngula, Crooks and Liars, and Digby's Hullaballoo, it was just a wee bit hard to miss. Perils of living in a religious country and all.

Rick Warren's blabbing reminded me of everything I can't stand about evangelical Christianity. All glory to God, can't do it without God, forgive us when we try to take a smidgeon of credit from you God, blah blah blah. When I hear these types of Christians pulling the "we're not worthy" shit, I always wonder just what kind of father they think their God is. My father would give me a good, sharp smack upside the head if I started abasing myself to him. And he'd be frankly horrified at the idea that I was helpless without him.

His invocation wasn't as noxious as it could have been, but it was still self-righteous exclusionary bullshit, and if you think it does no harm, then you need to read this. It's inexcusable.

I'm under no pressure to cheer on god-bothering schmucks or face the wrath of a person who could destroy my career, so I sniggered at Warren's ridiculous yammering, and chuckled watching a calvacade of supposedly mature people going on and on about a figment of the imagination. I'm sorry if that's too harsh for the few of you in this audience who are religious, but that's just unvarnished truth: that stuff makes me laugh.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I found myself watching the Reverend Joseph Lowery's benediction, and shouting "Amen!" at the end.

The thing is, Rev. Lowery gave a benediction even a jaded old atheist can love:

We go now to walk together, children, pledging that we won't get weary in the difficult days ahead. We know you will not leave us alone, with your hands of power and your heart of love.

Help us then, now, Lord, to work for that day when nation shall not lift up sword against nation, when tanks will be beaten into tractors, when every man and every woman shall sit under his or her own vine and fig tree, and none shall be afraid; when justice will roll down like waters and righteousness as a mighty stream.

Lord, in the memory of all the saints who from their labors rest, and in the joy of a new beginning, we ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get back, when brown can stick around -- (laughter) -- when yellow will be mellow -- (laughter) -- when the red man can get ahead, man -- (laughter) -- and when white will embrace what is right.

Let all those who do justice and love mercy say amen.

Amen. Most decidedly, amen.

You know why I love this benediction? It's because it's got a sense of humor, for one thing. The man knows how to laugh, and isn't afraid God will strike him dead for making a joyful noise.

But mostly it's because it's such a celebration of the human spirit and human ability. He's not asking God to do all the work. He trusts that God has given people everything they need to get the job done themselves. A little help would be wonderful, but we can get it done.

He gave me the feeling that even us godless heathens have a part in this, because it's people who are doing the hard work, people who will beat tanks into tractors (how I love that new spin on an old metaphor!), people who walk together and pledge not to get weary. He didn't ask all Christians who do justice and love mercy to say amen, he extended that invitation to us all.

If he wants to ask God to lend a hand, I won't quibble. I won't even laugh. I'll just sit here with a big, beaming grin and shout "Amen!"

President Obama: "This Is the Journey We Continue Today"

Ladies and gentlemen, the 44th President of the United States, Barack Obama:

Photo courtesy New York Times

I've been struggling all day with some strange sensations. They've been hard to identify, it's been so long since I felt them in connection with a president. There's a sense of something eager, as if tomorrow is going to be even better than today... my goodness, it's optimism. And this glorious, feel-I-could-fly lightness in my chest... I do believe it's hope.

Like Hilzoy, I don't know how to put this into words. Thankfully, Natalie Walker does:

Pinch me
Is this real
This feeling of release

That's how today has been. I kept wanting to ask people to pinch me. And I felt a little ridiculous, feeling this way over the inauguration of a president. I wasn't going to admit this to you, but I kept randomly weeping. I'd see something like this:

Less than twelve hours after assuming office, President Obama ordered a 120-day halt of the trials at Gitmo. At about 11 p.m., Keith Olbermann reported that Reuters had the story.

This story was posted on the website of the Canadian Press at about the same time:

The new administration of U.S. President Barack Obama has verbally ordered the prosecution to seek a 120-day adjournment in war-crimes cases at Guantanamo Bay.

A commissions spokesman says the order was made through Secretary of Defence Robert Gates. The prosecution has filed a motion with the military commission in the case of Canadian Omar Khadr and those of the men accused of plotting the 9-11 attacks.

Source ~ Canadian Press

and I'd tear up again. I wanted to jump up, punch the air, shout "Yes he did! That's change we can believe in, bitches!" but I was at work, and so I had to refrain.

Photo courtesy Seattle P.I.

Just when I'd gain control over my emotions and return to being the calm, collected tech support rep, I'd click over to Daily Kos in between calls and see something like this:

Science is one of those rare instances where economic stimulus, unity, jobs, social benefits beyond compare, national security, pride, and even a bit of inspiration and hope, all converge. Today, finally, the one missing, essential ingredient lacking in that potent mix -- grand vision and wise leadership from a President that gets it -- is at last officially added to Whitehouse.gov:

Restore Scientific Integrity to the White House: Restore the basic principle that government decisions should be based on the best-available, scientifically-valid evidence and not on ideological predispositions. ... Invest in the Sciences: Double federal funding for basic research over ten years, changing the posture of our federal government to one that embraces science and technology. ... Invest in Climate-Friendly Energy Development and Deployment: Invest $150 billion over the next ten years to enable American engineers, scientists and entrepreneurs to advance the next generation of biofuels and fuel infrastructure ...

Welcome to the pages of history, Mr. President.

and I'd be blinking back the tears once again.

So why am I destroying what little reputation I had left as a hardcore political snarkmeister by admitting that I blubbered like a little girl? It's because I'm not the only one:

I wept. No matter how you feel politically, I can't imagine how anyone could fail to be moved by what we just witnessed. I am a cynic, but I wept. The common misconception is that cynics are merely cold and negative, people who always find the worst rather than the good, but the truth is that every cynic is a frustrated idealist. Only someone who holds an ideal in mind can be bothered when they see that ideal undermined and ignored.

I wept because Obama spoke so eloquently about the importance of those principles and ideals that animate this nation. The only form of patriotism that has ever mattered is allegiance to those powerful ideas expressed with equal eloquence by Thomas Jefferson 233 years ago in the Declaration of Independence, however imperfectly he and the other founders may have applied them.

[snip]

There will be plenty of time for second guessing, for criticism and for pointing out hypocrisies and failures. But for today, let us all embrace the spirit of this moment. And let us weep.

If Ed Brayton, who's a Libertarian, not one of us far-left liberals, invites us to weep over Obama's inauguration, then by all means, let us weep.

Photo courtesy Daily Kos

We now have a President of the United States of America we can be proud of, who is determined to take this country down a different path, who hasn't wasted a second before he's started undoing the abuses of the past administration, who is a tremendous human being and can speak in complete English sentences to boot. All of that would be awesome enough. But there's something a little extra-special for the atheists here, because he's serious about this inclusion stuff (h/t):

By several small choices of word or phrase, Obama made big leaps of inclusivity.

"We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus — and non-believers."

Mentioning Muslims and Hindus is a small act of courage. But what other recent president-elect or presidential candidate would have gone out of his way to acknowledge the agnostics and atheists?

Certainly not the one we just waved good riddance to. All of this together tells me that Obama is truly different. We made the right choice.

Image courtesy Seattle P.I.

Obama has swept us all up in this journey. He's thrown the doors to our own government open wide and invited us to walk in, brought us together and encouraged us to work together for a finer world. I was afraid to believe, but now I've seen enough evidence to stop fearing and start believing: the next four years are going to be an extraordinary journey. There will be times when we get lost and argue over whether to ask for directions or try to get the GPS working. We'll get hungry, thirsty, tired and bored. We'll bicker and argue and then stop speaking for a few hours. But those will just be the typical, minor irritations, swept away by the wonders we see on the way.

We can do wonderful things. We've done it before, and now that we've got the right man in the driver's seat, we can do it again. Yes, we can.

Senator Diane Feinstein said it just right as she got us underway:

In a world where political strife is too often settled with violence, we come here every four years to bestow the power of the Presidency upon our democratically elected leader. Those who doubt the supremacy of the ballot over the bullet can never diminish the power engendered by nonviolent struggles for justice and equality like the one that made this day possible. No triumph tainted by brutality could ever match the sweet victory of this hour and what it means to those who marched, and died, to make it a reality.

Our work is not yet finished. But future generations will mark this morning as the turning point for real and necessary change in this nation. They will look back and remember that this was the moment when the Dream that once echoed across history from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial finally reached the walls of the White House. In that spirit, we today not only inaugurate a new Administration; we pledge ourselves to the hope, the vision, the unity, and the renewed call to greatness inspired by the 44th President of the United States, Barack Obama.

And I'm sure you've heard what our President said, but just in case you missed it, here you go:

In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of short-cuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted - for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame. Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things - some celebrated but more often men and women obscure in their labor, who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom.

For us, they packed up their few worldly possessions and traveled across oceans in search of a new life.

For us, they toiled in sweatshops and settled the West; endured the lash of the whip and plowed the hard earth.

For us, they fought and died, in places like Concord and Gettysburg; Normandy and Khe Sahn.

Time and again these men and women struggled and sacrificed and worked till their hands were raw so that we might live a better life. They saw America as bigger than the sum of our individual ambitions; greater than all the differences of birth or wealth or faction.

This is the journey we continue today.

In our travels, my darlings, it may be a good idea to remember a Taoist proverb, just so we remember to enjoy ourselves along the way: The journey is the reward.

I can already tell it's going to be the trip of a lifetime.

Image courtesy New York Times.

Happy Hour Discurso

Today's opining on the public discourse.

Photo: Seattle PI

Mr. President.

It feels so damned good to say that.

Barack Obama was sworn in at the 44th President of the United States, although not without incident:

The presidential oath of office is quite straightforward, and only 35 words long: "I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."

Somehow, Chief Justice John Roberts, with the whole world watching, managed to flub it.

As you can see in the video, Roberts initially made the first sentence too long. It should have been "I, Barack Hussein Obama," and then wait for the response. In fact, Obama started to respond at the right time, but Roberts kept going, adding, "do solemnly swear." Obama recovered and corrected it. No biggie.

But then Roberts, who had allegedly practiced this, rearranged the words of the oath, saying, "that I will execute the office of president to the United States faithfully." That's wrong in two places -- the "to" and the placement of "faithfully." Obama stopped, realizing Roberts had misspoken, before saying "that I will execute ... the office of president of the United States faithfully." That's not what the oath says, but that's what Roberts told Obama to say.

CNN's Wolf Blitzer said, "John Roberts had one job to do today and he sort of screwed up." True. Roberts, I noticed, wasn't reading from a prepared text, apparently confident that he could just memorize the 35 words. Note to the Chief Justice: four years from today, bring notes.

Josh Marshall added that some "nutballs" who'd hoped to prevent the inauguration, claiming that Obama isn't a natural-born citizen, "may get a second lease on life by claiming he didn't take the oath correctly."

Count on it.

Considering just about everything else went smoothly, that's ultimately not so bad. Despite the fact we'll now have a plethora of right-wing frothers trying to discredit his administration over an oath John Roberts flubbed.

Best wishes to Sen. Ted Kennedy, who suffered a seizure during luncheon. He's alert and joking now. Hopefully, he'll be there soon to help our new President turn this country around.

Not everyone, of course, is excited to see Obama take office:

“Are conservative talk-show hosts eager to go on the attack, after years of defending Bush?” asks the Louisville Courier-Journal’s Larry Muhammad. The answer is clearly yes.

Barack Obama has not yet taken office, and Rush Limbaugh is already rooting for his failure. On his radio show last Friday, Limbaugh said, “I disagree fervently with the people on our [Republican] side of the aisle who have caved and who say, ‘Well, I hope he succeeds.’”

Limbaugh told his listeners that he was asked by “a major American print publication” to offer a 400-word statement explaining his “hope for the Obama presidency.” He responded:

So I’m thinking of replying to the guy, “Okay, I’ll send you a response, but I don’t need 400 words, I need four: I hope he fails.” (interruption) What are you laughing at? See, here’s the point. Everybody thinks it’s outrageous to say. Look, even my staff, “Oh, you can’t do that.” Why not? Why is it any different, what’s new, what is unfair about my saying I hope liberalism fails? Liberalism is our problem. Liberalism is what’s gotten us dangerously close to the precipice here. Why do I want more of it? I don’t care what the Drive-By story is. I would be honored if the Drive-By Media headlined me all day long: “Limbaugh: I Hope Obama Fails.” Somebody’s gotta say it.

It hasn’t taken long for Limbaugh to reveal his core hypocrisy. In July 2006, with conservatives in power, Limbaugh offered one of his common screeds against the left. “I’m getting so sick and tired of people rooting for the defeat of the good guys,” he complained.

Hey, Rush? Shut the fuck up.

Change is coming. It's already begun:

This is so cool

BREAKING: White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel stops Bush’s last-minute regs. Emanuel signs a memorandum ordering all agencies and departments to stop all pending regulations until a legal and policy review can be conducted by the Obama administration.

Awesome. Neocon heads are going to start spinning. We may even see some pea soup flying through the air, there.

This little item is a beautiful way to illustrate the contrast between our new President and the one we just rid ourselves of:

The LA Times reports this morning that one of Barack Obama's first acts as president will be "to lift a rule that prevents federal money from going to international family planning groups that counsel women on abortion or perform the procedure."

This seems to be something of a recent tradition. One of Bill Clinton's first acts as president was to lift the global-gag rule, and eight years later, one of George W. Bush's first acts as president was to bring it back. Obama is apparently poised to keep the trend going.

It's probably worth noting that Bush didn't exactly know what he was doing when he acted on this issue. Soon after his inauguration, Bush met with a group of Roman Catholic bishops in the White House to tout his support for the "the Mexico City" policy, which got its name because Ronald Reagan launched the ban in Mexico City in 1984. Bush was anxious to show his support for issues of direct concern to the church, and was overheard by a live microphone that he didn't know was piping his remarks directly into the White House press room.

The president had just signed an executive order on the policy, literally just days prior to speaking to the bishops, but he clearly had no clue what he'd just done. Bush ended up bragging about "the money from Mexico, you know, that thing, the executive order I signed about Mexico City."

I'm so very, very happy we now have a President who can actually comprehend what he signs, and moreover, can make quick, reasoned decisions about what needs to be done. And explain the result using clear, complete English sentences.

Incredible.

The new Administration even has a blog:

The entire Whitehouse.gov website has been renovated to reflect our new President, Barack Obama. It is a thing of beauty and nearly brought tears to my eyes - again.

Tuesday, January 20th, 2009 at 12:01 pm

Change has come to WhiteHouse.gov

Welcome to the new WhiteHouse.gov. I'm Macon Phillips, the Director of New Media for the White House and one of the people who will be contributing to the blog.

A short time ago, Barack Obama was sworn in as the 44th president of the United States and his new administration officially came to life. One of the first changes is the White House's new website, which will serve as a place for the President and his administration to connect with the rest of the nation and the world.

Millions of Americans have powered President Obama's journey to the White House, many taking advantage of the internet to play a role in shaping our country's future. WhiteHouse.gov is just the beginning of the new administration's efforts to expand and deepen this online engagement.

Just like your new government, WhiteHouse.gov and the rest of the Administration's online programs will put citizens first.

That's good to hear.

Mr. President: thank you for bringing us to this day.

Today, our country has a new direction, a second chance at getting things right, and hope for a better future.

Together, yes we can.

Gaza: What Israel Gained

For now, the fighting has stopped. Bombs aren't falling, rockets aren't firing. It may seem to a naive observer that Israel met its objectives.

But look deeper, and you see that all they've done is make a horrible situation worse.

The threat of imminent violence is still there:

The 22-day war ended without surrender. Neither Israel nor Hamas, the Islamist movement that controls Gaza, made any concessions, except to stop fighting temporarily.

"The essence of this is you have two completely separate cease-fires, with no underpinnings in them of agreement or understanding, and no resolution of the original causes of the conflict," said Alistair Crooke, a former British intelligence officer and former European Union adviser on Palestinian issues. "On one level, it's back to square one, and all of the elements of the situation are back to where they were before the war."

Although Hamas sustained the heavier losses, by a lopsided margin, Israeli officials acknowledged that the movement could quickly rebuild its political and military wings and that it still posed a potent long-term threat to Israel.

The chance of enduring peace is further away than ever, especially since right-wing hawks are poised to poison Israeli politics still further:

And prospects for the negotiations with the Palestinian Authority and Syria that have been central to Kadima's platform look shakier than ever.

Many believe the Israeli operation has further weakened the legitimacy of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, the negotiating partner on the Palestinian side.

"I don't think we have a peace agenda now - Syria doesn't want to talk any more, the Palestinians are in a very delicate situation," says David Nachmias, Professor of Government at the Interdisciplinary Center, an academic institute north of Tel Aviv.

[snip]

And Prof Doron points out that an electorate that was already right-leaning has moved further right, as evident in gains for the Yisrael Beiteinu party of far-right Avigdor Lieberman.

They've earned a reputation for senseless brutality:

"We walked at the head of a group of women and we waved white flags. We managed to pass three houses on the street and then I saw an Israeli soldier 40 meters away aiming his weapon at us," said Yasmin A-Najar. "I thought he wanted us to come closer. Ruwahiya and I continued to walk and suddenly the soldier shot at us."

Yasmin was wounded in her right leg and Ruwahiya fell on the street with her head bleeding. The rest of the women panicked and scattered, hiding while the shooting continued.

Yasmin said she tried to return and help Ruwahiya but the soldiers fired at her. They also shot at the ambulance driver who arrived and he was forced to turn back, she said. When Ruwahiya was finally evacuated at 8 P.M., she was already dead.

And Hamas is not broken:

The top Hamas leader in Gaza, Ismail Haniya, said Israel had "failed to achieve its goals".

In a speech broadcast on Hamas TV, he said: "God has granted us a great victory, not for one faction, or party, or area, but for our entire people."

Hamas said it would hold fire for a week to give Israel time to withdraw its forces from the Gaza Strip.

A spokesman for Hamas' military wing, Abu Ubaida, said its rocket capabilities had not been affected by the conflict.

"We hereby stress that our rockets are being developed and are piling up, and that the enemy will receive more rockets and God willing, our rockets will hit more targets," he said in a news conference broadcast live on Hamas' al-Aqsa TV.

I fail to see how this insanity served Israel's long-term interests. All they've done is created sympathy for the Palestinians and broken fertile ground for extremism and terrorism.

AP Compares Apples to Oranges and Goes Bananas

Sorry. I couldn't help that post title. I needed something just as fruity as this:

This week, inaugural festivities are a pretty big deal -- in D.C., throughout the country, and even around the world -- but it appears some news outlets have found a way to find fault with the celebration.

The AP, for example, reported, "Unemployment is up. The stock market is down. Let's party. The price tag for President-elect Barack Obama's inauguration gala is expected to break records, with some estimates reaching as high as $150 million."

[snip]

Eric Boehlert set the record straight, explaining, "[T]he Obama figure of $160 million that got repeated in the press included security costs associated with the massive event. But the Bush tab of $42 million left out those enormous costs. Talk about stacking the deck."

...For years, the press routinely referred to the cost of presidential inaugurations by calculating how much money was spent on the swearing-in and the social activities surrounding that. The cost of the inauguration's security was virtually never factored into the final tab, as reported by the press. [...]

For decades, that represented the norm in terms of calculating inauguration costs: Federal dollars spent on security were not part of the commonly referred-to cost. (The cost of Obama's inauguration, minus the security costs? Approximately $45 million.) What's happening this year: The cost of the Obama inauguration and the cost of the security are being combined by some in order to come up with the much larger tab. Then, that number is being compared with the cost of the Bush inauguration in 2005, minus the money spent on security.

In other words, it's the unsubstantiated Obama cost of $160 million (inauguration + security) compared with the Bush cost of 42 million (inauguration, excluding security). Those are two completely different calculations being compared side-by-side, by Fox & Friends, among others, to support the phony claim that Obama's inauguration is $100 million more expensive than Bush's.

So, how much did Bush's 2005 inauguration actually cost, using the standard the media is applying to Obama? Boehlert crunched the numbers and came up with a total of $157 million.

In fact, the majority of his inauguration festivities are being paid for by small donors:

Julia has more on the inaugural cost nonsense that seems to be sweeping the media today. But this really takes the cake:

Bush's inaugural donors were mostly individuals, lobbyists and companies with a vested interest in high oil prices, deregulation,** and the mortgage bubble. The Obama team isn't taking money from lobbyists or companies, has lowered the top donation from Bush's $250k to $50k, and (we find tucked into the bottom of a Politico story about "big donors") all but 5,632 of the 200,000 donations they've received were less than $200, for an average donation of $34.

Note to all of you fuckwits desperate to start some kind of controversy over Obama: stop making such absolute asses of yourselves by making shit up. He's the President. He's popular. He's hard to smear. Get the fuck over it.

Aye, Yer Captain Be Callin' Ye

Captain Efrique shall be taking the HMS Elitist Bastard into the maw of ignorance once more come January 31st, and he'll be needin' ye aboard. Ye've been wanting to shove some wisdom down ignorance's throat, me hearties, haven't ye? Get yer submissions in no later than January 30th.

Time to man the ship, prime the guns, and win another battle for Elitist Bastardry!

(Postdated so all Elitist Bastards may heed the call!)

Rick Warren Bashing, Inauguration Edition: He Loves Him Some Hitler

Oh, yes, indeedy, he does:

Bruce Wilson at Talk2Action has come up with easily the most disturbing audio clip of a Rick Warren sermon I've heard yet -- and that's saying something:

On April 17, 2005, at the southern California Anaheim Angels sports stadium thirty thousand Saddleback Church members, more than ever gathered in one spot, assembled to celebrate Saddleback's 25th anniversary and listened as Rick Warren announced his vision for the next 25 years of the church: the P.E.A.C.E. Plan.

Towards the close of his nearly one hour speech, Pastor Warren asked his followers to be as committed to Jesus as the young Nazi men and women who spelled out in mass formation with their bodies the words "Hitler, we are yours," in 1939 at the Munich Stadium, were committed to the Führer of the Third Reich, a major instigator of a World War that claimed 55 million lives. Rick Warren has exhorted Christians towards Nazi-like dedication in at least several public speeches and also during a one hour video recording of a talk by Warren, explaining his P.E.A.C.E. Plan, that is currently hosted on the official P.E.A.C.E. Plan website. A version of the anecdote can also be found on page 357 of Rick Warren's 1995 book The Purpose Driven Church, which sold over one million copies.

Exhibit A: Rick Warren's own words:

"In 1939, in a stadium much like this, in Munich Germany, they packed it out with young men and women in brown shirts, for a fanatical man standing behind a podium named Adolf Hitler, the personification of evil.

And in that stadium, those in brown shirts formed with their bodies a sign that said, in the whole stadium, "Hitler, we are yours."

And they nearly took the world.

Lenin once said, "give me 100 committed, totally committed men and I'll change the world." And, he nearly did.

A few years ago, they took the sayings of Chairman Mao, in China, put them in a little red book, and a group of young people committed them to memory and put it in their minds and they took that nation, the largest nation in the world by storm because they committed to memory the sayings of the Chairman Mao.

When I hear those kinds of stories, I think 'what would happen if American Christians, if world Christians, if just the Christians in this stadium, followers of Christ, would say 'Jesus, we are yours' ?

What kind of spiritual awakening would we have ?

Um. Well, from the examples Warren cites, there would be a hell of a lot of dead people, to start. People would be forced to follow one rigid ideology or suffer the consequences. Democracy would die out in the flames of totalitarianism. Art, history and culture would be consigned to those flames.

Come to think of it, that's what most evangelicals seem to want, innit?

No wonder Warren loves him some dictators. And he's training his followers to become proper little brownshirts:

"Jesus said, 'I want you to do this publicly.' So what I want you to do is take the card, and in just a minute, and if you say 'Rick, I am willing to serve God's purposes in my generation.'

I want you to open up to the sign that says 'Whatever it takes.'

Whatever it takes.

And I want you to just say, 'This is my commitment, before God and in front of everybody else. I'm in.' "

And I would invite you to just stand quietly and hold up 'Whatever it takes'. . .

I'm looking at a stadium full of people who are saying 'whatever it takes'.

[snip]

As Wilson points out in the piece, he doesn't point to the methods of great spiritual leaders like Ghandi or Martin Luther King. He doesn't even point to the positive ideals of political or revolutionary leaders like the founding fathers. He stands before a roaring crowd of 30,000 followers in a huge sports stadium and points to the 20th century's worst genocidal madmen as inspiration! And from his work in Africa, it appears he practices what he preaches.

Some of you might get even more upset at Obama for allowing this Hitler-admiring, gay-bashing, African-dictator-enabling outrageous fucking freak to give the invocation. But I've now come around to thinking it's a brilliant idea.

You see, before the spotlight got shone on him, all most people knew was that he wrote The Purpose-Driven Life, hosted a presidential debate, and seemed somewhat moderate to the casual observer.

Now look at all the info emerging that proves he's a batshit-insane frothing fundie who's learned to speak in a normal-person voice. That, my darlings, is priceless. So yes, let him get up there and babble a few faux-holy words. It gives us such a delightful opportunity to introduce the country to the real Rick Warren.

Obama's Inauguration: NSFRWK

So. We're about to swear in the first African-American President of the United States. This is history, my darlings, and it's one of those things kids will remember for a lifetime.

If they're allowed to watch it, that is. The frothing freaks are trying to mark the event as Not Suitable for Right-Wing Kiddies:

Students in the Federal Way, Washington school district must have parental permission slips to watch the Inauguration because, according the school district--which also put a moratorium on An Inconvenient Truth while the board investigated whether a screening adhered to district policies:

The concern is that the televised inauguration was not listed in syllabus handed out at the beginning of the term. The district considers the inauguration a full length documentary, unlike some newspaper or internet reference articles which do not require pre-approval.

Let's look up "documentary" in an "internet reference article" which won't require me to leave mom's basement (aka Rapunzel's ivory tower) to get a signed permission slip:

A documentary is a creative work of non-fiction.

Federal Way school district, you flunk! A news broadcast, in real time doesn't actually equal "documentary."

Ah, but it does if you're a right-winger looking for a way to wriggle out of letting the kiddies see a dirty Dem take power while treating gay people like actual human beings:

Never one to be outdone, Gary Cass of the Christian Anti-Defamation Commission is telling parents not to let their children watch what will be the "most perverted [inauguration] in our nation’s history" and warns that God just might destroy the nation's capital because of it:

The inauguration of Barack Obama as the President of the United States is going to be historic for many reasons, not all of them good. Obama’s inauguration may help move race relations forward in America, but Obama’s inaugural events are a major step backwards for historic Christian values. CADC must issue this WARNING message: Don’t let your children watch!

National events ought to unify and elevate the nation by celebrating what is virtuous, such as God and patriotism. Obama is making a terrible mistake by polluting his inaugural events with sexual sin. Some one ought to remind him that he wasn’t elected mayor of Sodom.

Barack Obama’s inauguration will have the dubious distinction of being the most perverted in our nation’s history ... In order to be consistent in using this kind of reasoning, Obama ought to have a stripper lead off the inaugural parade followed by the Hell’s Angel’s Motorcycle Drill Team followed by the Crips Precision Handgun Corp. and the Transvestite Fashion Police. Just because something exists in society does not mean it is good and is to be paraded in front of everyone, especially children.

On this historic occasion of the Inauguration of the 44th President of the United States, I must unfortunately recommend that you keep the kids away from the TV and pray that God will not rain fire and brimstone down on Washington DC.

What's got his panties in a bunch? Like you had to ask:

Flamboyant Homosexual Inaugural..Robinson will be appearing with the Gay Men's Chorus of Washington D. C. which forces all Christians around the world to compromise their character if they want to watch the inauguration....To ensure no one misses the perversion, the Inaugural parade will include a homosexual marching band with their rainbow flags flying proud with millions of our nation's children and Christians watching.

No wonder he thinks it's the end of days. To him, a gay choir topped off with a gay pastor and a gay marching band must seem like Armageddon.

Obama. I'm still not giving you a pass on letting Warren give the invocation, but kudos for getting so very far up these fucktards' noses.

One More Night

Nightwish best expresses my sentiments tonight:

One more night to bear this nightmare.
What more do I have to say?

Ocean Soul - Nightwish

You know what nightmare I'm talking about.


Let no locked doors thwart George W. Bush as he gets the hell out of our White House. In fact, let's make sure there's doorkeepers standing by, just in case.



Thank you, President Obama, for ending the nightmare. Come on in.



You can laugh a lot
And bring out that smile

For now we're hanging in
Even though we're blessed with sin
You make my heart...
You make my tired heart sing

Tender Trip on Earth - Tristania

As ridiculous as it sounds, you do indeed make my tired heart sing. And judging from the evidence, I'm not the only one.

Happy Hour Discurso

Today's opining on the public discourse.

On Bush's last day in office, it seems fitting we lead off with a story about those "hardcore" detainees he's still got locked up in Gitmo:

Describing the detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Dick Cheney said last week, "[N]ow what's left, that is the hardcore." This is consistent with the line from the Bush White House, which has always maintained that those held at the facility are "the worst of the worst."

And yet, there's ample evidence to the contrary. Since November, at least 24 detainees -- roughly 10% of the population of the detention camp -- have been found to have been wrongly held by the Bush administration. The latest painful story is that of Haji Bismullah.

For nearly six years, Haji Bismullah, an Afghan detainee at Guantanamo Bay, has insisted that he was no terrorist, but had actually fought the Taliban and had later been part of the pro-American Afghan government.

Over the weekend, the Bush administration flew him home after a military panel concluded that he "should no longer be deemed an enemy combatant."

[snip]

The United States kept this man detained for nearly six years. He was on our side, a fact that our allies were prepared to corroborate -- and did corroborate in 2006.

In 2009, on the way out the door, Bush finally gets around to admitting that, you know what, not everybody left in Gitmo deserves to be there.

I can't wait to see these assholes go.

But not everybody's happy to usher the new administration in:

Iowa Politics reports that tomorrow after President-elect Obama’s inaugural parade and swearing-in ceremony, Iowa’s congressional delegation will be hosting a reception in the Dirksen Senate Office Building. Attending will be the state’s two senators and four of the five representatives — with Rep. Steve King (R-IA) refusing to participate:

That’s right, four — not all five. U.S. Rep. Steve King, a Kiron Republican known for his warning that the election of Barack Obama would lead to terrorists “dancing in the streets,” declined to participate, according to congressional aides.

He has a cute little bullshit excuse meant to make him look like the taxpayers' hero. Forgive me if I don't believe one fucking word.

And the idiot white supremacists are making as much noise as they can:

We're already aware that the white-supremacist crowd is already creating a higher level of security concerns surrounding Barack Obama's inauguration.

So somehow it probably figures that Sean Hannity's old pal Hal Turner would be out there leading the parade of nutcases making threats around the events.

According to Mark Potok at the SPLC, Turner has gone public this week with his threats:

On Friday, neo-Nazi threatmeister Hal Turner, amplifying on an earlier posting suggesting that it would be a good thing to use an unmanned drone carrying explosives to attack the crowds, said a mass murder of those attending the festivities “would be a public service.” “I won’t say what may happen Tuesday but I will say this,” Turner wrote on his blog. “After Tuesday, the name Hal Turner may live in infamy. Let it be known that I saw what was necessary and decided to do what had to be done. I make no apology to those affected or their families.”

That, my darlings, is called making terroristic threats. It is, oddly enough, not covered under free speech laws. I have a feeling Hal's about to get a visit from the Feds, and he's not going to enjoy it very much.

I hear there's an opening in Gitmo....

Of course, the Feds may be laughing too hard to take him in, as the above post assures us:

Well, fortunately, Turner is not someone to take seriously, any more than gay-basher Fred Phelps. He's made numerous threats in the past, and all have been just so much gasbaggery. Moreover, he has a nonexistent following, especially after it was revealed he had been doing federal-informant work, which pretty much destroys your cred in white-power circles.

Still and all, threatening to attack your new President and the crowds there to see him sworn in probably isn't going to win any friends in the law enforcement community. I hear the Secret Service rather likes Obama, which means they probably rather don't like people like Hal. Oops.

So aside from snivelling Cons who won't go to parties and white supremacists who want to bring weapons, how're things looking as far as peace and harmony in D.C. go? Ooo, not too good:

Senate Republicans, frustrated over the answers they say they're not getting from Rep. Hilda L. Solis, may try to block her confirmation as Barack Obama's secretary of labor.

"She answered no questions," said Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), a member of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. "If she won't answer the questions, how can you support the nomination?" During the California Democrat's Jan. 9 confirmation hearing, Solis repeatedly told senators that she could not speak for the incoming Obama administration on the card check bill, and she told Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) that she was "not qualified" to speak about maintaining right-to-work laws that prohibit workers from paying union dues as a condition of employment.

"These aren't positions that you're allowed not to have an opinion," Wyoming Sen. Michael Enzi, the ranking Republican on the committee, told Politico. "These are extremely critical things that she was asked about. Each of the people that asked questions from the Republican side asked about different areas of labor law and wondered what she was going to do. And we still don't know."

[snip]

Democrats dispute the GOP criticism, saying Solis has been forthcoming and that nominees typically have certain limitations on what they can discuss since they work at the behest of the president.

"Our Republican friends have posed numerous questions and the secretary-designate has responded quickly and thoroughly to each one," said one Democratic committee staffer.

Well, they haven't managed to start a stink with Holder, so I guess they figured they'd better start obstructing someone else. It's how they roll. Too bad for the obstructionists that there's plenty of other, somewhat more mature Republicans ready to vote in Solis's favor.

In last-minute pardon news, Bush gives a big fuck-you to the immigrant community:

I knew we'd see more pardons.

President George W. Bush has commuted the prison sentences of two former Border Patrol guards whose convictions for shooting a Mexican drug dealer ignited debate about illegal immigration.

Bush's act of clemency on Monday for Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean was a victory for Democratic and Republican members of Congress and others who pleaded with the president to pardon the men or at least commute their sentences.

Ramos and Compean are each serving sentences of more than 10 years for shooting an unarmed illegal immigrant as he was fleeing an abandoned marijuana load in 2005, then trying to cover it up.

Of all of Bush's end-of-presidency clemency decisions, this is easily the biggest.

As Dafna Linzer explained a while back, Ramos and Compean "are serving sentences of 11 and 12 years, respectively, for the nonfatal shooting in the back of an unarmed Mexican drug runner in February 2005. A jury found the two border patrolmen then tried to cover up the shooting."

And also a big fuck-you to Scooter and his fans:

Today is President Bush’s last full day in office, and according to Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff, he has decided not to pardon Vice President Cheney’s former chief of staff Scooter Libby for his role in the leak of CIA agent Valerie Plame’s identity. The move has left many conservatives very disappointed:

“I’m flabbergasted,” said one influential Republican activist, who had raised the issue with White House aides, but who asked not to be identified criticizing the president.

Ambassador Richard Carlson, the vice chairman of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a neo-conservative think tank, added that he too was “shocked” at Bush’s denial of a pardon for Libby.

“George Bush has always prided himself on doing the right thing regardless of the polls or the pundits,” Carlson said. “Now he is leaving office with a shameful cloud over his head.”

Funny. I thought he was already leaving with a shameful cloud over his head. You mean to tell me the neocons are just now noticing that?

Silly, aren't they?

Gaza: Returning to Devastation

Hamas has turned the tables on Israel by declaring its own cease-fire and reiterating its demands:

Hamas announced an immediate cease-fire by its militants and allied groups in Gaza on Sunday, giving Israel a week to pull out its troops from the coastal territory.

Israel, which mounted an offensive against Hamas three weeks ago to halt years of rocket attacks, agreed to silence its guns and ground its aircraft early Sunday.

"We the Palestinian resistance factions declare a cease-fire from our side in Gaza and we confirm our stance that the enemy's troops must withdraw from Gaza within a week," said Damascus-based Hamas official Moussa Abu Marzouk.

Ayman Taha, a Hamas official in Cairo for talks with Egypt on a truce deal, demanded that Israel open all of Gaza'sw border crossings to allow in food and other goods to meet the "basic needs for our people."

This is a brilliant move on their part. It shows they're willing to play the diplomacy game, and takes back the initiative. Hamas is bruised, battered and bloody, but refuses to back down. I think this is a signal to the rest of the world that, despite attempts to declare them nothing more than a terrorist group, they're a duly-elected government that intends to govern. And they're going to have to be treated as such.

I'm not sure about the borders, but it looks like Israeli troops may soon be leaving Palestinian soil:

Olmert told European leaders visiting Jerusalem on Sunday evening that in the wake of the cease-fire, Israel planned to withdraw all of its troops as soon as possible. He said that such a move would come when the situation between Israel and Gaza was "stable."

That stability may be a wee bit hard to achieve:

Meanwhile, although Hamas's leadership said they'd stop firing missiles, the missiles have kept firing. Why? Well, at a guess "Hamas's leadership" is a lot less powerful than it used to be since the Israelis assassinated most of it. And the security forces who used to make sure that missiles didn't get fired if Hamas's Leadership didn't want them to be fired, well they were the first and main target of Israel's strikes. It's almost as if Israel wanted to make sure that Hamas's leadership couldn't control their military wing.

That's a recipe for catastrophe, and Israel won't have anyone to blame but themselves. Hamas showed itself capable of controlling other militant groups' activities during the six-month cease-fire. With their security forces destroyed, angry Palestinians with access to rockets won't have much standing in their way. Just the excuse Israel will need for yet another invasion.

Of course, invading under indictments may prove a little tricky:

Israel is preparing for a wave of lawsuits by pro-Palestinian organizations overseas against Israelis involved in the Gaza fighting, claiming they were responsible for war crimes due to the harsh results stemming from the IDF's actions against Palestinian civilians and their property.

Senior Israeli ministers have expressed serious fears during the past few days about the possibility that Israel will be pressed to agree to an international investigation of the losses among non-combatants during Operation Cast Lead; or alternately, that Israelis will be faced with personal suits, such as happened to Israeli officers who were accused of war crimes in Britain for their actions during the second intifada.

It wouldn't sadden me a bit to see Olmert and a few other of Israel's hawks stuffed in the Hague with our own war criminals. Should we all splurge to buy them a vacation in Amsterdam?

Israel's doing its best, now that the true extent of the destruction will be revealed, to craft its alibi:

With this in mind, Israel is reportedly “readying a new offensive — the battle for public opinion.” AFP reports Israel has begun compiling information to try to prove that many of the 4,000 residential buildings, 51 government buildings, and 20 mosques it hit during the offensive were legitimate targets used by Hamas militants. At least six Israeli ministers will be “fanning out to different countries to press home Israel’s view of the conduct of the war.” Welfare Minister Isaac Herzog said Israel is aiming to prevent an ‘over-dramatization‘ of the facts.”

I'm not quite sure how you can over-dramatize facts that are dramatic enough in and of themselves.

First, an illustration:


That was the death toll before the war even ended. That's a hell of a lot of dead women and children to have to explain.

Then there's the evidence of new weapons used:

Some Palestinian casualties in the Gaza Strip were wounded by a new type of weapon that even doctors with previous experience in war zones do not recognize, according to Dr. Erik Fosse, a Norwegian cardiologist who worked at Gaza's Shifa Hospital for 11 days, during Operation Cast Lead.

However, he added in a telephone conversation from Oslo, most casualties were people hit by shrapnel from conventional explosives.

Fosse, a department head at a university hospital in Oslo, worked in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation and several times in Lebanon, also in 2006. That was when he first heard about the new kind of weapon, but did not see any such wounds with his own eyes.

The unknown weapon appears to mainly affect the body's lower part, he said. It severs the legs, leaving burns around the stump, small punctures in the skin and internal bleeding.

[snip]

Fosse and a Norwegian colleague, Mads Gilbert, arrived in Gaza on December 31 and remained until January 10. They were financed by the Norwegian government.

On his return, Fosse submitted a report to his government in which he accused the IDF of deliberately targeting civilians. Fosse said he believes Israel deliberately chose to attack while Westerners working for international organizations were back home for the Christmas vacation.

"The Palestinian witnesses, as medical workers, are very accurate in their reports, but if we hadn't been there to confirm their testimony, it would all have been presented as Hamas propaganda," he said.

Remember that, when Israel starts presenting its case and dismisses horror after horror as "Hamas propaganda."

Palestinians are left to assess the rubble and try to put their shattered lives back together. This is what they're coming back to:

All day, thousands of Gazans have been rushing back to their neighbourhoods to see what is left after Israel's campaign of bombing and shelling.

Gaping holes and fire-blackened cars litter the streets in the areas hit hardest by the fighting.

I have spoken to some people who say they have not even been able to find their way round their bomb-damaged neighbourhoods, never mind find the remains of their homes.

Many simply turned round and returned to the UN-run schools they fled to amid the fighting.

But for some Gazans even attempting to return home is virtually unimaginable.

Amira al-Girim, 15, lies in a hospital bed with her leg in traction.

She was found alone, bleeding in a house, about four days after she saw her father killed by an Israeli tank shell in front of her.

Her brother and sister died - she thinks in an air strike - as they ran to get help.

Her remaining family thought she too had died, and had already buried the scraps of flesh they thought were her remains in a box.

Let those images sear themselves into your mind. Don't forget. This is what happens when a country responds with disproportionate force to a threat. America did it on a far greater scale than Israel, and for less reason. The war in Iraq and the war in Gaza are inextricably entwined.

We must not forget:

As we wait to see what happens next, it’s important to remember what we’ve just seen. So often we are encouraged to sink into a comfortable amnesia designed to wipe away the news of civilian deaths and the war crimes - whether our own in Iraq and Afghanistan – or now those of our allies and best arms customers in Israel. So let’s recap and remember – and insist on international action.

Last March, Israeli officials met with Condi Rice and then approved a plan for a war on Gaza. By their own admission, Israel signed onto the June 19 cease-fire in order to buy time for preparing for that war – and while Hamas honored the cease-fire, Israel used the world’s focus on the Obama election on November 4 to launch an incursion into Gaza, killing 6 Palestinians – knowing this would provoke a Hamas reaction since it was an act of war. That reaction was then used as an excuse for further Israeli incursions and as the justification of a siege of Gaza, blocking all shipments of food, medicine and fuel to the residents who live in a virtual prison, unable to leave, unable to live with no electricity, starvation level food supplies and a compromised water supply since the fuel needed for the water sanitation plants was not let in. The people of Gaza were reduced to eating bread made from animal feed – and when that ran out, grass. Even with this continuous collective punishment of the people of Gaza, their elected government announced – multiple times – that they would agree to a new cease-fire on the condition that the blockade of supplies be lifted.

Instead, Israel – with its massive PR campaign – claimed that Hamas refused a new cease-fire – and then launched a vicious attack on Gaza.

Over 1300 Gazans have been killed, over 5,000 wounded – one third of those children - and the casualties included medics trying to rescue wounded families, journalists, and more than 50 Gazans who had fled to UN schools for refuge from the fighting. The UN warehouse and all the humanitarian aid in it were destroyed when Israel bombed it– apparently using white phosphorus, setting the building on fire.

There can be no real peace for the people of Gaza until they are allowed self-determination – in the meantime, at least we can insist that Israel open the borders and allow in the humanitarian aid they so desperately need. Let’s not forget them while the world shifts its attention t the celebrations in Washington this week.

We have this chance to take a new direction. With Obama in office, we'll be leaving Iraq to determine its own way forward. We've failed to learn a harsh lesson from the wars of the past several years: we cannot solve terrorism with bombs. We cannot bring peace by raining down destruction. America tried and failed. Israel tried, and I guarantee you that they will also fail.

Peace, if it comes, will be brought about by tough compromises. We cannot call every government we do not like a "terrorist organization."