Tuesday November 26, 2002
I just thought I'd welcome all of you coming from the Phoenix theme-ing (theming?) site. This isn't a "Mozilla" blog, as you'll see below. Just lots of anti-fascist rhetoric. Enjoy!
Monday November 25, 2002
Will lack of health insurance have to engulf the entire American population before something is done to fix the problem?
Richard Perle admits that Americans are suckers
Thursday November 21, 2002
Bob Herbert: "States of Pain"
There are those who have long dreamed of the day when governments would be so drained of revenues they would have no choice but to call a halt to many of their functions. The realization of that dream is getting closer, in part because its tragic implications remain obscure to vast segments of the public served by those governments.
I've been saying this since I started this blog, folks. The Rightists are intentionally starving our public systems of funds. And they do it so brazenly, across the whole political spectrum. That takes some cajones.
Wednesday November 20, 2002
More "What were you doin' when totalitarianism came a'knockin'?":
U.S. watch list has 'taken on a life of its own,' FBI says
That's right, all you suspected terrorists! Now you too can be turned down for a job because the Rightists have placed you on their list of suspects!
Paul Krugman: Victors and Spoils
If anyone had doubts that Bush's Fatherland Security Agency was more about power consolidation than domestic security, read Krugman's article above. Why else would he want that lack of civil service protection for its new employees pulled from other departments? It's a way to gut a system of contrarians and do-gooders and bring a whole government system in line with your ideology.
These people are playing for keeps -- do you still doubt it?
It just can't be! Fox News isn't fair and balanced? What the hell? I set my clocks by Fox's unemotional and clear-headed reporting!
What will I do now?
Tuesday November 19, 2002
Tom Tomorrow has a nice set of links on the ever deepening quagmire that is Afghanistan.
If the U.S. has won the war in Afghanistan, maybe somebody should tell the enemy it's time to surrender. The bad guys are still out there, undetectable in the rocky, umber hills of eastern Afghanistan — until they strike, which they do with growing frequency, accuracy and brazenness. These days American forward bases are coming under rocket or mortar fire three times a week on average. Apache pilots sometimes see angry red arcing lines of tracer bullets rising toward their choppers from unseen gunners hidden in Afghanistan's saw-blade ridges. Roads frequented by special forces are often mined with remote-controlled explosives, a new tactic al-Qaeda fighters picked up from their Chechen comrades fighting the Russians. With phantom enemy fighters stepping up attacks and U.S. forces making little headway against them, General Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, felt compelled to acknowledge last week, "We've lost a little momentum there, to be frank."
Oh, another glorious morning.
Eschaton has this great quote from Richard Perle, Bush administration advisor and ignominious hawk. The overarching characteristic of the Rightists is that irony is completely lost on them (he's apparently comparing democracies to dictatorships here):
"The lesson of history is that democracies don't initiate wars of aggression, and if we want to live in a peaceful world, then there's very little we can do to bring that about more effective than promoting a democracy. People who live in democratic societies don't like to pay for massive military machines. Democratic societies don't empower their executives to make unilateral decisions to plunge countries into war. Wars have been started by tyrants who have complete control and who can squander the resources of their people to build up military machines."
Saturday November 16, 2002
It seems like everyone is taking a break. I think I will too. I'll be posting, but it might not be with as much regularity as before.
I haven't lost my voice as much as my energy. How can I read daily about our country going the way of the blackshirts and retain any optimism?
Thursday November 14, 2002
Damn - Bill Safire and Drudge are a bit slow off the mark. They're reporting on the "Information Awareness Office," run by that Republican stalwart and all-around scumbag John Poindexter.
But if you've been reading this blog or Eschaton you saw information about this department a month ago. And we even have the Office's logo in full color. Black and white seems to obscure the effect of the death ray from the eye of the pyramid.
Who would have thought that you could make yourself so pessimistic that you move from pessimism to outrage and out the other side to pessimism again? I guess outrage implies a glimmer of hope.
Our system of government was built with as much intent to delimit and stifle democracy as validate it. It has been so good at what it does and so good at building the mechanisms that stifle dissent that our population is now completely emasculated. Demonstrations are functionally useless because they barely get the attention of the national media and are ridiculed by news anchors as puppet shows. Unions have lost their strength and companies ranging from online retailers to universities have used intimidation and lies to prevent unionization of workers. Voting has been nullified by the Right's willingness to use fraud and intimidation. In Florida alone, over 90,000 people were illegally denied their right to vote by the Jeb Bush administration. They're getting their rights back, but conveniently after the midterm elections were over.
We face the continued fracturing of our population along ever-more-partisan lines. The Internet has been the catalyst for the focusing of partisan rhetoric, and has made the dissemination of this rhetoric immediate and visceral. Outrage is directly proportional to one's closeness to an event, and when there is direct, immediate reinforcement of opinions from points across the map the result is a crystallizing of subjective opinions into fact. The brain has to go through far fewer weighings of truth and falseness when it has an external support structure to fall back on. How does any cult or separatist group keep its members? By the validity of their ideas? By honesty and integrity and openness to change? Or by repetition and the appearance of truth, and by making it easy for a person to relax their judgement and let outside forces make the decisions for them? Leftists and Rightists in this country have started to coalesce into partisan cults, and the Internet has made it easy for people to limit their information gathering to partisan news sources that will reinforce their beliefs. The Rightists unfortunately have the religious component that unifies them and makes them doubly dangerous.
We don't need to rehash 2000 or the horrendous voter intimidation and fraud that occurred during the midterms to know that the Rightist wing of the American political spectrum would eschew democracy entirely if they knew that they could still make money. And they are not beyond lying and crass manipulation of the population to get their way. (Note Dana Milbank's recent column on the Washington Post [Front page, Oct. 22nd] on Bush's lies -- that Dana never explicitly calls lies. Eric Alterman isn't afraid to say the "L" word.) They're not beyond intimidation and threats of imprisonment: see the recent story on Larry Klayman. They're not beyond imprisoning citizens without access to counsel.
Tell me, how does this differ from authoritarianism? Does it differ because they're not kicking in doors and firing up ovens? Does authoritarianism need to be that extreme to be recognized? I say no. Does it differ simply because "That would never happen in America"?
We have a fervent administration headed by a uncharismatic and flawed intellect. His will-to-power and base behavior is well known. His administration has gone out of its way to consolidate and render unaccountable the executive branch of our government. It has manipulated the truth in a manner more blatant than Bill Clinton, yet through intimidation of the White House press corps it has skirted scrutiny. To quote Bob Herbert in his recent piece in the NYTimes:
Give credit where it's due. Bill Clinton at his most devious was never as sly or as cunning (or as politically effective) as the Republican Party has become.I think of the G.O.P. as the costume party. It wears a sunny mask, which conceals a reality that is far more ideological, far more extreme, than most Americans realize.
Based on the extreme philosophy of a few idealogues it intends to disrupt and demolish the fundamental structures of our society and government and place them in the hands of the private sector. This isn't just words. The tax cutting isn't a means of revitalizing our economy. It's a means of starving the government. To quote Bob Herbert again:
There is a method to the G.O.P.'s tax cut madness, beyond the obvious benefits to the very rich. Conservatives have long reasoned that the only way to destroy popular programs that actually help ordinary Americans (Social Security, Medicare and so on) is to starve the government of the money needed to pay for them.The intensity of the conservative opposition to such programs can be startling. To Ronald Reagan, for example, Medicare was an affront to the very idea of America. The historian Robert Dallek noted that Mr. Reagan "saw Medicare as the advance wave of socialism, which would `invade every area of freedom in this country.'"
9/11 was more than a terrorist act for this administration. I believe that it made concrete in their heads the idea that their reign has some sort of deific mandate. These are people who for the last 10 years have felt themselves morally superior to their opponents, and I don't believe they much like the idea of someone like Bill Clinton ever holding office again. Do their actions seem like those of people working in the best interests of the people? Do the changes they are making to secrecy laws seem like ones that they would want their opponents to have? Or does it seem like they're laying the foundation for a long term occupation?
It took a singular event to change the course of American history and bring about fundamental changes in our government and its accountability to the American people. But curiously the country seems as ill-prepared as ever for the next terrorist attack. Are they afraid the terrorists are going to convert us? I thought the bomb thing and the gas thing were a lot scarier. But apparently the truly frightening possibility is allowing people access to lawyers and due process. Wait, aren't those people us?
Wednesday November 13, 2002
Pakistan helped North Korea's nuclear weapons program while they were aiding us in the war on terror. Such a collosal misstep by the Bush administration -- allowing one of the evil Axis to further its weapons program under Bush's watch -- will undoubtedly go unmentioned by most of our mainstream media.
...the administration believes Pakistan continued to trade nuclear technical knowledge, designs and possibly material in exchange for missile parts up until this summer...
Nothing like a pliant press to make your mistakes disappear.
Ahh... early to bed, early to rise...
Tuesday November 12, 2002
Looks like Virginia is one of the states dealing with the effects of Republican tax cuts. Oh, just a 1 billion shortfall in their budget. No biggie.
I had a dream last night that I was tattooed all over my upper body with large, colorful Dr. Seuss-like creatures. I liked it, except for the smiling balloons.
I know this is a political blog, but since you and I both know that our country is royally buggered now that the Rightists are in power (waiting for the other boot to fall as it were), I decided to branch out a little lest I become redundant.
Monday November 11, 2002
Larry Klayman of Judicial Watch, no friend of the left after his behavior during the Clinton years, is back in the news. Apparently dogging the Bush administration isn't as easy or as fun as going after Clinton: the Bush people are trying to find ways to jail Klayman to get him out of the picture.
That's right - imprison the ones that oppose you, or even question you.
Mark Shields: Why Newt Gingrich isn't missed
Revisionist and cowardly Republicans spent the year waist-high in Denial, fruitlessly rewriting history to insist that the word "privatize"-- as of Social Security -- had never passed their craven lips.
What had been an undistinguished political year looked absolutely noble when compared to the dishonorable character defects of the resigned Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, R-Georgia, nationally televised on the October 27 "Meet the Press..." For calculated deceit and deliberate dishonesty, the former speaker showed he is still a master of that sinister art.
Bob Herbert gets it: Behind the Smile
There is a method to the G.O.P.'s tax cut madness, beyond the obvious benefits to the very rich. Conservatives have long reasoned that the only way to destroy popular programs that actually help ordinary Americans (Social Security, Medicare and so on) is to starve the government of the money needed to pay for them.
Sunday November 10, 2002
I'm tired of hearing how the Democrats "didn't have a message" and the Republicans presented the people with "a clear vision".
It's all crap.
The Republicans idea of a domestic policy platform is a plank with one word written on it: "taxes". The Republicans idea of a foreign policy platform is "we're right and we don't give a damn about your opinion". The paucity of ideas in the platform that won control of our country is staggering.
What vision did they present to us? A Homeland Security office that will be nothing but a Republican staffed SS? A domestic agenda completely subservient to our defense budget? Judicial nominations that would turn our pregnant women into wards of the state?
Think back upon what Bush has been saying these past few months -- it boils down to a handful of catchphrases and righteous indignation. "They're not interested in the security of the American people." "They're going to raise your taxes. I want to make that tax cut permanent." "Saddam Hussein's time is nearly at hand."
There's nothing there. Everything's under the surface, waiting. It doesn't have to wait much longer.
Friday November 08, 2002
Paul Krugman says it better.
Thursday November 07, 2002
We should be clear about what happened on Tuesday. The American people looked at the state of America over the last two years: unemployment up, anxiety up, taxes down, deficits up, markets down 25%, geared up for war war war, alienated from our allies, civil liberties eroded -- and they said, "Give me another helping of THAT!"
"Supersize it!"
We've set our government free in an all-you-can-eat steakhouse.
And the one thing that we're sure about is that there's no bottom to the stomachs of Americans. Our entire infrastructure will be eaten up and we'll start eating dirt.
Wednesday November 06, 2002
I wish I had been right about the dolphins, instead of the other thing.
Ok, I was right. Why did the rest of us on the left not see it coming? Well, I think Joe Conason saw it.
What does this mean for America? Think just one thing: the courts, stacked to the ceiling with Antonin Scalia and William Renquist clones, with a few Clarence Thomases for diversity's sake. The Supreme Court with a 7-2 split in favor of the radical Christianists. For 20 years or more.
For the amazing Karnak's next prediction: we're going to see a descent into radical Christianist and Rightist thuggery over the next 6 years unseen since they were shooting unionists and their families out of tents in Colorado in 1914.
New science and technology being driven underground by the insipid moral meanderings of people like Jerry Falwell and George W. Bush will bring about a resurgence of Japan and Europe as both press forward with biotechnology. Many major breakthroughs in genetic therapy will happen in Europe, while America flounders under the anti-cloning ban. And on the other end, there will soon be citizen rights for the fetus in the next two years, and possibly the embryo in the next 6. Will pregnant mothers have to become wards of the state? I won't venture that far, but it seems that it might be a possible outcome.
Oh, and how could I possibly forget? There's going to be war. At least one, if not more. And not just little police actions like in Kosovo or Haiti (that the Rightists dredge up to demonstrate that Clinton was a warmonger).
Tuesday November 05, 2002
Harvey Pitt is gone! Praise Jeebus!
I believe that my prediction is going to hold. But I can't bring myself to watch the news. I guess I'll post tomorrow morning.
EJ Dionne on the Rightist's voter intimidation campaigns
Voter intimidation and misinformation campaigns by the Rightists:
Tennessee: Voter Intimidation Charged
New Mexico: GOP voting notice misleading, state official warns
Pennsylvania: GOP's election-bureau visits draw flak
If you haven't tried Mozilla yet, maybe this page, "101 things that the Mozilla browser can do that IE cannot" will make you want to give it a try.
Here are a few things that Mozilla has that you might find useful:
Tabbed browsing
Lets you display more than one site in a window using multiple tabs.
Popup Blocking
Block all those popup ads.
Easily installed
Can be installed quickly and without much fuss.
Can be easily uninstalled
One can uninstall in the same manner as one does with other applications.
Can bookmark groups of pages (in tabs)
You can bookmark a set of pages and them open them all at once in multiple tabs.
That's just a small sampling. If you're interested, check out Mozilla at the Mozilla.org website, read latest news on Mozilla at our site MozillaZine, and try downloading one of the latest releases. 1.2 is due out soon, but there's a beta of it available now.
Remeber Thomas White and his dealing with Enron? Remember how Jason Leopold wrote a story about it for Salon that was quashed?
Now you yourself can peruse the source documents that Jason Leopold used in his piece, with commentary from Mr. Leopold.
Ok, my predictions for the election: Republicans pick up seats in the House and the Senate.
The weight of corruption in Florida sinks it into the ocean. The new electronic voting machines there are waterproof, though. The Republicans shout about widespread polling place corruption as dolphins proceed to vote Jeb Bush out of office. The new dolphin party takes over the now undersea world of Florida, and rules it with an iron fin. Republicans and Democrats alike are forced to slave away for secret dolphin oil drilling concerns that are slant-drilling into American oil fields.
Bush declares war on the dolphins and bombs the living fuck out of everyone, but refuses to occupy the ocean long enough to remove the dolphin despot. After his two years of sparring with the dolphins in the UN and using America's resources to fund an absurd sanctions effort that attempts to block off the dolphin's domain with a giant sea wall, Bush is re-selected by the Supreme Court. However, two years into his second term a sly investigative reporter finds out that the Bush family oil cartel has been supplying the dolphins with oil-drilling equipment and new technologies. Even though Bush is caught red handed dealing with the traitorous nation-state-under-the-sea, the mainstream press never covers it. Bush bombs the fuck out of everyone again.
Is it really possible that we could see Sharon uncerimoniously yanked from power right in the middle of his war with the Palestinians?
Is it too much to hope that we get a two-fer and Arafat is replaced as well?
Is it too much to hope that they're not replaced by even more fanatical warmongerers?
Well, it's "I was bludgeoned on the way to the polling place and no one cared" day. Congratulations to all the Republicans who already won by voter intimidation, scams and outright lies.
Paul Krugman still wants us to vote. He even mentions some of the Rightist's misinformation in Maryland (that link from TalkingPointsMemo).
Am I voting? You're damn right I am. And not for Mike "I hate taxes! I like guns!" Fisher. I want an economy that works, not an economy that works at the receiving end of a handgun.
Monday November 04, 2002
Michael Kinsley deals with the new Bush doublespeak about embryos. Are they people? If so, are they entitled to protections? If so, does that make sex an illegal act?
But medical research involving embryos is one issue where Bush has posed as a one-man Aspen Institute, bragging Clinton-style about all the books he has read, experts he has consulted, thinking he has done. And he has attempted to portray his incoherent policy as the result of subtle reasoning and moral anguish, rather than confusion and calculation.
To keep up with the election shenanigans (felonies?) of the Republican Rightists, be sure to check out the new blog "The Election". Sample from the site:
Poll watchers in Florida are being challenged by Democrats. The poll watchers come from a group calling themselves "The Emergency Committee to Stop Bill McBride", which makes me nervous even if they are legally allowed to poll watch (which, thanks to the fact that it's much easier to exploit esoteric rules than it is to challenge the exploitation of them, they might not be), given that their express purpose is to "stop Bill McBride". They may have every right in the world to be there, but it's still more than a bit troublesome that their express goal is not the sanctity of elections, but rather to maintain a position at polling places to stop a candidate from getting elected.
Sunday November 03, 2002
Saudis deny base and airspace access for any US action against Iraq.
After having the wind knocked out of you with the piece below about Sean Hannity, how's 'bout a good kick in the head to finish you off? Head over to Media Whores Online scroll down to this headline: "GOP – AND MEDIA WHORE -- DIRTY CAMPAIGN UPDATE VOTER SUPPRESSION: OLD G.O.P. TRICKS IN NEW MEXICO And In New Hampshire and New Jersey – and Iowa, Too Plus: Novak Plays The Race Card". Here's a sample:
The New Mexico State Bureau of Elections has blasted brazen efforts by the state Republican Party to trick voters into believing that voting a straight ticket will nullify their votes.It’s the old lever trick. Tell voters that, if they pull the straight-ticket lever (or press the straight-ticket button), they will nullify their votes for individual candidates. By hopelessly confusing voters with this utter lie, Republicans get Democratic voters either to cast spoiled ballots or incomplete ones.
The Bush administration and John Thune, candidate for senator in South Dakota, conspired to take money earmarked for school lunch programs and food banks and divert it to a cattle drought relief program, according to an article appearing in the 11/2 Washington Post.
"Money that formerly went to feed U.S. schoolchildren and other hungry people is being diverted to feed cattle," Bread for the World contended, based on a budgetary analysis of the livestock program.For the past six weeks, Thune and the Bush administration have used the special $752 million program to showcase Thune's ability to provide crucial, election-year assistance to beleaguered cattle ranchers without busting the budget or cutting back on programs.
And for your gut-punch of the day, here's the truth behind Sean Hannity's lie about Al Gore doing a "Willie Horton ad". It's not pretty. But here's just a partial list of reporters who have either accepted the lie at face value, or spread it without a second thought: George Will, Robert Novak, Paul Gigot, Bill Kristol, Roger Simon, Sam Donaldson, Ceci Connolly and Dan Balz. Mort Kondracke stood against the tide, even when Bill Bradley started dissembling during the primaries:
For the record, Kondracke wasn’t the only scribe who knew what Bradley had written. On January 14, the Boston Globe reported that the Gore campaign had distributed the relevant passage from Time Present, Time Past throughout the media. Major reporters were well aware of Bradley’s remarkable flip-flop. For reasons that are abundantly clear, they simply decided to ignore it.
BTW, saw this first at the great Rittenhouse Review.
Friday November 01, 2002
One of the sickest, saddest displays of our time:
Peggy Noonan attempts to channel Paul Wellstone
No class indeed, Peggy!
21 children confirmed dead so far in the school collapse in San Giuliano di Puglia, Italy. Berlusconi was booed by the locals when he arrived at the scene. The locals are blaming the government for constructing a shoddy school building, one of the few buildings to collapse in the quake. Was that booing tasteless, Rush? Jesse? Trent?
Paul Krugman: "The Pitt Principle"
NYTimes: "Pitt Under Fire for Not Telling All He Knew About Webster"
Here's the Bush administration response, and if it surprises you then I have a bridge I'm willing to sell you cheap.
"The president still has confidence in Harvey Pitt," said Dan Bartlett, Mr. Bush's communications director. "He does believe Harvey Pitt is the right man for the job."
Rittenhouse Review: "What kind of an idiot is Harvey Pitt?"
It surprises me that people are surprised at the righteous indignation that commentators like Rush Limbaugh showed towards the Wellstone memorial service. Rush and the others pointed to the booing of Trent Lott and Jesse Ventura as tasteless, and the other side pointed out that Rush Limbaugh and those same folks cheered the firefighters who booed Hillary Clinton after September 11th.
But don't you get it? These folks revel in this hypocritical muck. They've been behaving like this for years, displaying contrary ideas and motives, and they've been outed as hypocrites, and they keep doing it. Do you think that the irony of any of this is lost on any of them? They're happy as pigs in shit. Because they know that their audience just doesn't care. They get it. And they don't care.
Bush calls himself a compassionate conservative, but as soon as he's in office he sheds any sense of compassion and proceeds to push through the same tasteless Rightist trickle-down BS that his dad and Reagan were so keen on. The Bushies are pushing their positions through using the exact behavior that works for the Rightist propagandists like Limbaugh: lie and tell half-truths to cover your agenda, when your agenda is outed pretend that it's been that way all along, and when people inquire simply lie, ignore, intimidate, or bully.
These people aren't held accountable because a significant portion of our population doesn't want accountability, they want power. And they're willing to sacrifice honesty, integrity, logic and fairness in order to get it. And with many of the right's operatives being media moguls, and with a press corps that is unwilling to investigate the Bush administration and their own compatriots in the industry, the possibility that any of these people can ever truly be held accountable is slim.
And they all know it. And they're very grateful. Now shut up. No one's listening, and they have a war to prepare for.
