Helen & Harry Highwater's cranky weblog of news and opinion.
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"News that's not known, or not known enough." Helen & Harry Highwater's cranky weblog of news and opinion. |
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• What's the point of the Obama administration pretending to have "the strongest ethics standards in U.S. government history" when the ethical standards are routinely waived? • After a couple of months of the dumbest debate I've ever seen on any issue — death panels, fer cripes sake — I am damned weary of it and beyond weary of its stars. I hereby pledge $25 I can't afford to any credible Democrat who runs against Max Baucus (D-Montana), Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), or Ben Nelson (D-Nebraska). Whether President Obama goes on that list depends on what he says in his big speech on Wednesday. The White House is being remarkably mum, apparently wanting the big speech to be a big surprise, so I'll only say this: If President Obama is actually going to stand up on national television tomorrow, as rumored, and tell Americans they'll be required by law to buy a health insurance policy without any "public option", it's going to be a political disaster for Democrats in general and Obama in particular. I have told the President's people exactly this and more, and I urge you to call the White House at (202) 456-1111 and tell them what you think. • President Obama doesn't much listen to the left, so maybe as right-wingers like George Will and Thomas Friedman start to notice the smell of a quagmire, the Obama administration will pause and think things through again? Unlikely, I know. • In the Afghan election, the base of re-elected President Hamid Karzai's support came from fake polling places where he won in a landslide. • The Justice Department is apparently serious about investigating police misconduct during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 ... and doggedly turning its back on eight years of misconduct at the Justice Department, in approving torture, railroading Democrats into jail, hiring and firing, etc. • GQ has a pretty good scoop that shows Russia's intelligence service was connected to several "terrorist" bombings in 1999. Unfortunately, GQ is published by Condé Nast, which has big money invested in Russia and wants the story to go away. It's already gone away from GQ's website, and Condé Nast is doing all it can to keep it hushed up. • For a year now, the US has held a Reuters cameraman, Ibrahim Jassam. No trial, no charges, no bail, no clue about why he was arrested at his home in his underwear, and no cake to celebrate the anniversary. The US military says Jassam is "a security threat to Iraq", which is allegedly a sovereign nation, but the Iraqi Central Criminal Court ruled last November there was no reason to hold him. • The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has declined to order a DNA test for Brett Hartmann, a man on death row who asserts that DNA evidence would show he's innocent. The court says Hartmann's assertion is "debatable", and I'm afeared I don't quite understand — of course it's debatable. If it wasn't debatable there would be no need for a test, but if it is debatable then a test is a good idea before frying somebody. • In Indiana, cops pulled over Jamie Lockard on suspicion of drunk driving, but he passed the Breathalyzer test. Officer Brian Miller "doubted the findings" and hauled Lockard to the hospital, where he was shackled and subjected to blood tests. When the blood tests agreed with the Breathalyzer that Lockard was in fact not legally drunk, the cop wrote him up anyway, for obstruction of justice. This seems, ah, more than mildly excessive. • At a high school in Atlantic, Iowa, five teenaged girls were forced to strip so that teachers could ascertain whether one of them had stolen some money. Un-named school officials say this was "allowable" under their rules. Obviously, the school board needs new rules, and new management. • These people got screwed a little worse than most Americans have been screwed by this country's stupid and heartless health care system. Their employer withheld health care premiums from their paychecks, but cancelled their insurance coverage. Like most of the luckier Americans, they trusted their employer with their lives ... • Amidst all the hyperbolic and generally faked outrage over the release of "convicted Lockerbie killer" Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, let's remember that his guilt was always in question, during and after his trial. • Joe Arpiao, who's inexplicably still the sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona (that's Phoenix and environs), continues his blatantly illegal sweep arrests, looking for illegal immigrants. When Arpiao ends up behind bars, which I dearly hope is soon, I don't want him forced to wear a pink tutu. I'd instead like to see him treated humanely and within the bounds of the law, as he's never treated the people in his custody. • I got a laugh out of this fair and balanced report on the alleged "controversy" about President Obama's televised speech to schoolchildren. • Edward R Murrow vs. Glenn Beck. • Global climate change will lead to "earthquakes, avalanches and volcanic eruptions as the atmosphere heats up and geology is altered. Even Britain could face being struck by tsunamis." But regulations to slow these effects could cost Exxon a fraction of a percentage point of its all-time record profits, so let's just do nothing. • You might not know about Mary Edwards Walker. • A tip o' the hat to They Gave Us A Republic, Cassandra, JR Mooneyham, and the letter Z. Updated today: Our bad cops page, daily dialogue, and mystery links.
• In a three-judge decision authored by Milan Smith (Bush43 2006), a federal court has given the green light to a lawsuit against former Attorney General John Ashcroft, who had Abdullah Al-Kidd and numerous others held as "material witnesses" after • The Obama administration is circulating a memo to Democrats in Congress that pushes its perspective on health care reform, and doesn’t mention the public option. Further evidence, as if it's needed, that the Obama White House is preparing to hand the insurance industry billions of dollars and call it health care reform. There's no guessing how many alleged progressives will swallow this and pat the President on the back, call it an accomplishment, and point with glee at whatever good things can be found in the legislation. Well, we're two progressives who won't. "Health care reform" that funnels billions of dollars more to murderous insurance conglomerates and requires by law that Americans send money to these insurance companies? That's not "reform", that's a deadly, despicable evil. If that's what President Obama is going to endorse in his big speech on Wednesday, then we're ashamed of America, and especially ashamed of America's President, and he ought to be ashamed of himself. • 3,000 people rallied in Seattle for meaningful health care reform, and their protest merited no mention in the city's only remaining newspaper. And judging by the media coverage, you'd think all the town hall meetings had hoards of raucous right-wingers demanding that the heads of any Congresscritters who back health care reform, but to no-one's real surprise that impression might not be accurate. Turns out many meetings were quite orderly, and got no press at all. • If the right-wing organ Politico can be believed, some of Obama's close advisors see political advantage to Obama in dumping the public option. Doing so, they say, would make Obama look good by showing that he's willing to stand firm against "his party’s liberal base". It's the old story that we on the left have no-where else to go, the theory that no matter how empty the suits that Democrats run for Congress or the White House, we on the left will vote against the right-wing's neanderthals, so the Dems get leftists' votes by default. It's an old story because it's true, and that's why most Democrats are empty suits, and that's why Republicans get their way 80% of the time regardless of which party is in office, and that's why left-leaning activists have to constantly beg and plead and cajole Democrats not to cave in on issue after issue after issue. • The Obama administration has decided that logs of who's visiting the White House to chat about policy shouldn't be kept secret after all. This is an about-face from the Bush-Cheney policy, and from the Obama administration's policy until now. • Diebold is selling its voting machine subsidiary to rival Election Systems & Software, Inc. (ES&S), a company of equal or greater well-earned suspicions of vote-manipulation. BlackBoxVoting.org, the group founded by Bev Harris, says it'll challenge the sale as a violation of anti-trust laws. • Shorter US military spokesman: Please disregard what appears to be US military warfare in the Philippines. We'd never do that. Oh, and look at that shiny bauble in the next room! • The Obama administration is cutting all non-humanitarian aid to Honduras, where a coup toppled President Manuel Zelaya a couple of months ago. • Israel is, of course, building more homes and apartments in the sprawling suburbs they've constructed in disputed territories. That's to be expected, as that's what Israel's been doing for a long, long time. What's almost comical is that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is dangling some future freeze of construction as if that's supposed to inspire Palestinians at some future "peace talks" that Netanyahu will, of course, do all he can to sabotage.
• Chris Christie, then a US Attorney and now the Republican candidate for Governor of New Jersey, drove the wrong way down a one-way street and hit a motorcyclist who required hospitalization. Christie wasn't ticketed, because he told a cop at the scene that he was a US Attorney. It's utterly typical — the laws that apply to little people never apply to the powerful. • Van Jones has been forced out of his job. You'll remember that Jones was a White House environmental aide who's been smeared by Fox News and Glenn Beck, as retaliation for the uproar about Beck calling the President a racist on Fox News. Apparently the tipping point for Jones' job came with revelations that he had once signed a petition that asserted that then-President George W Bush — brace yourself — "may indeed have deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen, perhaps as a pretext for war". • Disgraced former Congressman James Traficant (D-Ohio) has finished his seven-year prison term and been released. • You might not know about Ottmar Mergenthaler. • A tip o' the hat to Scott L., SirJ, and the letter Z. Updated today: Our daily dialogue, it's been debunked, and right wing calls to violence.
• The word from several sources is that President Obama has dropped the public option in health care reform same as you'd drop an ebola-dipped washcloth. Instead we'll maybe see a "trigger" clause that might (or might not) begin some debate (at a future date) over the (maybe, maybe not) creation of a public option then, if by some nebulous measurements the private insurance industry hasn't straightened up and flown right over the years between now and then. Does that sound like health care reform to you? Does that sound like change you can believe in? The public option was a half-hearted compromise from the common sense solution, single-payer, so this "trigger" clause is a compromise within a compromise. And there will, of course, be further compromises before any legislation is signed. While Democrats have the Presidency and big majorities in both houses, Republicans and Big Money still call the shots. Do I sound pessimistic? I'm pessimistic. If these reports of the President's plans are true, and if he doesn't reconsider before giving his big speech next week, he'll be feeding a big plate of nothin' to the people who supported him first and most strongly, and nobody's going to come back for seconds of nothin'. What the "trigger" clause means is, more Americans dead for lack of medical care, countless more driven to bankruptcy, and more enormous and obscene profits for the insurance companies. What it means is, the Obama administration will have marked itself as a bumbling failure. But perhaps even more disastrously for America, it means that the President will be conceding that vulgar, outrageous, bald-faced lies can overcome any proposal. Republicans won't abandon such a successful strategy, so outrageous lies will be used to defeat every proposal for anything liberals, progressives, or ordinary Democrats might want, for as long as Obama's in office. Pick a topic, any topic — war and peace, crime and punishment, the environment, labor law, civil rights, whatever matters to you — and know that the debate will be driven by lies from the likes of Glenn Beck, Betsy McCaughey, Charles Grassley, Sarah Palin, and random teabaggers. Forget everything you might have hoped for, because that's what the rest of the Obama administration will look like, if the President caves on this. This would be a good time to call the White House at (202) 456-1111 and tell them you're more than moderately displeased. It's not just health care reform — the whole ball game is on the line. Right now. We're in the bottom of the ninth inning, two out, two strikes, nobody on base, and Mighty Casey is looking at strike three with the bat on his shoulder. • While on his vacation at Martha's Vineyard, President Obama and the First Lady made a point of meeting with Lisa Xiarhos, the mother of an American soldier killed during the war in Afghanistan. Mrs Xiarhos said that the Obamas were very nice, and that they gave her and her husband and children great big hugs as they met at Coast Guard Air Station in Cape Cod. And that's really just swell, and I mean that seriously. But just like George W Bush, President Obama somehow couldn't find the time or interest to meet with the mother of another soldier killed in these damned fool wars: Cindy Sheehan was in Martha's Vineyard, but her pleas for peace are being ignored by another President who lacks the courage to listen to what she has to say. • Did you know that the occupying American forces in Afghanistan now outnumber the Soviet Red Army troops who were there at the height of Russia's war on that nation? The Soviet Union had 115,000 troops there at the peak of its disastrous nine-year war on Afghanistan. As of March — before the latest "surge" — the US had 52,000 soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines in Afghanistan, along with another 68,000 "contractors", for a total of 120,000. • Voters in Maine will decide this November whether gay people deserve the same rights as, you know, real people. • America's waterways and thus America's fish are heavily contaminated with mercury and methylmercury, which is really not at all good for you. • Racial profiling much? The drug warriors at the US Forest Service want campers to be alert for other campers who might "eat tortillas, drink Tecate beer and play Spanish music because they could be armed marijuana growers". • Congressman Charlie Melancon (D-Louisiana) has announced that he's running for the Senate seat of incumbent embarrassment David Vitter (R-Louisiana). Melancon, though, is yet another Blue Dog 'Democrat' who's flat-out opposed to anything even mildly progressive. He's dang near indistinguishable from a Republican, and he's not worth voting for, and not worth a $5 campaign donation. All things considered, I'd rather have six more years of Vitter, who's at least good for a laugh now and then.
• It's party time at the US embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan. • Netflix has issued a mass refund to customers who might have been inconvenienced by a technical glitch in its software that adapts video to subscribers' Xboxes. I don't even know what an Xbox is, but I know smart when I see it — this is going to earn Netflix a lot more in new subscribers, renewals, and general good will than it'll cost them in refunds, and this is why Netflix is probably going to survive while Blockbuster deservedly won't. • You might not know about Philippe Pinel. • A tip o' the hat to Booman Tribune, Ordog, Scott L., and the letter Z Updated today: Our bad cops page, daily dialogue, it's been debunked, and mystery links.
• As the government continues to protect "too big to fail" banks, while letting smaller banks fail and be swallowed by bigger banks, it inevitably means that the banks already deemed "too big to fail" are only getting bigger. The inherent stupidity of this policy has seemed self-evident since the beginning of this ongoing economic catastrophe. A bright high school kid could see the folly. I keep asking myself, rhetorically, is President Obama's economic team just about the dumbest bunch of bozos ever to run the joint? • With the health care reform debate growing too rancid for words, it appears that President Obama will finally take a leadership role. It's about friggin' time, and please, Mr President, this time don't forget your balls. Cut the crap about bipartisanship, start standing up for something, don't signal compromise on single payer, and start calling the opposition's lies what they are — lies. • The CIA really, really doesn't want you to know about its secret gulags and torture of prisoners. • The mercenaries at Blackwater (now calling itself Xe) have had another of their contracts renewed by the State Department. • Let's not feign surprise that Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal is keeping Mark Penn as a columnist, despite revelations that Penn has used his WSJ column to promote his PR firm.
• After sending forged letters to members of Congress arguing its clients' political perspectives, the PR firm Bonner & Associates claimed it had notified the victims of its deception. At least three of the victims say they're still waiting. • Separate studies by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the Australian Institute of Marine Science have both concluded that rising ocean temperatures will increase the death rate of the living organisms that make up the Great Barrier Reef along Australia's coast. • Here's the Washington Post providing a puff piece profile of the hate group National Organization for Marriage and its major domo Brian Brown, and here's the Washington Post offering another tortured defense of torture. • MSNBC's Pat Buchanan wants to give Adolf Hitler the benefit of the doubt. • Charlie Gibson is quitting, and Diane Sawyer will take over as anchor of ABC's insufferable nightly newscast that I haven't watched since Max Robinson sat in the chair. • Bank of America apparently requires a thumb print before they'll cash a check. That in itself would be enough to make me close my account, but it gets worse if you have no thumbs. • You might not know about Edith Cavell. • A tip o' the hat to Jonathan Turley, Kenneth L., and the letter Z. Updated today: Our bad cops page, daily dialogue, it's been debunked, and mystery links.
• Long-time Guantanamo prisoner Mohammed Jawad, now that he's been unshackled and freed, says from his home in Afghanistan that he's going to sue the US government. What Jawad endured for 6+ years was a crime against humanity and a crime against the US constitution and American law. Our sincere hope is that a court awards him the keys to Dick Cheney's house, and a few million dollars in spending money. As an added bonus, a long-overdue public apology from the United States government would be nice — not just for Jawad, but for everyone held at the Guantanamo concentration camp. • The Washington Post now argues that a special commission should be convened to research the efficacy of torture. The Post's editorial page editor, Fred Hiatt, wants Sandra Day O'Connor and David Souter to head the panel, which presumably would then offer its advice on the question of whether America should or shouldn't pursue torture as policy in the future. We've said this before, but I'll say it again: It's irrelevant whether torture "works". Slavery "works", and terrorism "works", but these things are wrong, barbarian, and illegal under international law. The fact of the Bush-Cheney administration's wholehearted embrace and bragging of torture, including torturing prisoners to death, is not grounds for re-opening any supposed "debate" about torture — it's grounds for prosecution of GW Bush, Dick Cheney, and their co-conspirators and fellow war criminals. • Unions aren't nearly as powerful as they were before being slowly strangled by law and Republican economics over recent decades, but it's still a realistic pressure point when the next President of the AFL-CIO says members of Congress who oppose a public option in health care reform "do so at your peril." • Luis Martinez is a Department of Homeland Security spokesman who told a newspaper reporter that it's illegal to photograph federal buildings. That's absurd. I know of no such law, and even after eight years of dancing toward fascism, such a law probably couldn't pass scrutiny in an American court. • Anti-rights activists in Washington have apparently gathered enough signatures to place an initiative on the ballot that would repeal selected civil rights for gays. As always, the underlying assumption is that gays are sick, weird, abominations, and less than human, so of course they deserve fewer human rights. And I grew up in Washington so it pisses me off a little bit more, the same way Jake and Elwood were extra annoyed by Illinois Nazis in The Blues Brothers. • Andre Bauer, South Carolina's flamboyantly homophobic Lieutenant Governor, has been outted as "a closeted anti-gay politician" by BlogActive. That's the same site that outted Larry Craig as gay and Mark Foley as "hitting on men half his age" before either man's proclivity was reported in mainstream media. • Sweden's central bank is introducing negative interest rates. It applies only to deposits with the central bank. Ordinary consumers aren't charged interest on deposits. • When he was in his early 20s, Van Jones was arrested in the riots following the acquittal of the cops who beat Rodney King, and he's described himself as a one-time communist (gasp). These seem to be fairly minor blips in the life of Mr Jones, overshadowed by his more recent work as a co-founder of Color of Change (an African-American advocacy group), his environmental activism, and his present job as a White House wonk for green jobs. I have a hard time seeing much of anything scary about Van Jones.
But Color of Change is the group that's led the move to have sponsors cancel their ads on Beck's Fox News show, so Beck has been demonizing Jones on national TV for several days. It's a curious response. From media reports, my understanding is that Jones hasn't been involved with Color of Change in any meaningful way since 2007. Presumably someone on Beck's staff did research on everyone connected to Color of Change, and picked Jones as a good target for retaliation? It's hard for me to understand what's going on in Beck's mind, which, I think, speaks well of my own mental health. Beck could apologize for calling the President of the United States a racist, the tirade started this whole ruckus, and most of the controversy would instantly fade. But Beck doesn't want it to fade, so instead he's smeared someone who seems to have had nothing to do with the boycott call. • As wildfires sweep through parts of the Los Angeles area, you might expect wall-to-wall coverage on local TV channels, but you'd expect wrong. Live coverage is expensive, especially on the weekend, so the denizens of L.A. got next to no coverage of the fires raging in their own communities. • Newsday, generally a pretty good paper by modern standards, has rejected an ad that criticizes Cablevision, which owns the newspaper. • Animal rights activists have video of chickens being ground up alive at an Iowa poultry factory. I'm not big on animal rights — we're going to eat 'em, after all — but even chickens have a right to live and die without intentional cruelty like this. Somebody needs to be arrested. • Senator Harry Reid (D-Nevada) says he wants the Las Vegas Review-Journal to go out of business. This is something most politicians aren't stupid enough to say in public about a home town newspaper, and the Review-Journal gives him a good smackdown. • And speaking of clueless Republicans, here's further evidence that former Homeland Security Czar Tom Ridge isn't very bright. No, not his gentle evisceration by Rachel Maddow, but the notion that he willingly went on her show. • You might not know the story of astrophysicist Fritz Zwicky, which gets mildly amusing in the last paragraph. • A tip o' the hat to Gerry Canavan, Sherri B., Joe. My. God., and Carlos Miller. Updated today: Our bad cops page, dialogue, it's been debunked, mystery links, and right wing calls to violence.
• The National Association of Manufacturers and the National Federation of Independent Business are launching a big ad push against the (mildly) green Cap & Trade legislation. The Cap & Trade bill is a rather half-hearted compromise between environmental destruction and common sense, but if these giant manufacturers' groups are willing to spend millions opposing it, perhaps it's better than I thought. • The Department of Homeland Security still claims the dubious power to seize and search laptop computers and other electronic devices at the border. Add this to the long list of things that remain unchanged from the Bush-Cheney era to the Obama administration. • After being held and probably tortured for six years at Guantanamo for nothing, Mohammed Jawad has finally been allowed to resume his life in Afghanistan. But in what Jerome Doolittle aptly describes as "one last symbolic kick in the nuts", Jawad was shackled and blindfolded by the US military for his flight to Afghanistan. In the endless war on terror, it's pretty damned obvious that there are no good guys. • The Pentagon has cancelled its contract with the Rendon Group, for screening and evaluating reporters seeking "embedded" status. Of course, that's not enough — the Pentagon's people responsible for the deal should be out on the asses. And of course, that simply isn't going to happen. • Utah's Republican Governor, Gary Herbert, says he will convene the first "legitimate" debate about whether humans contribute to global climate change. I'm a thousand miles from Utah and that isn't a complaint, so I've never heard of Herbert, who's been Governor for just a few weeks. You never get a second chance to make a first impression, though, and it looks like a new Republican laughing stock is making his grand debut. • Another poll shows President Obama's job approval slipping a bit further. I'm generally uninterested in such polls, as they're hyped far out of proportion to any actual impact, and the few times I've tried to track down some of the internal information that intrigues me (like, how's Obama faring among Americans who self-identify as leftists or progressives?) I've been unable to find it. • Disney has agreed to buy comic-book and movie giant Marvel, another seemingly obvious violation of anti-trust law that won't be challenged in the Justice Department. • Former Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge, who last week let it be known that he was pressured to alter the silly color-coded security threat system to bolster Republican political operatives, is now denying what he said last week. No surprise to see him backpedaling, of course. If the guy had any backbone or principles he would have quit at the time. • Smoking pot, even doctor-prescribed pot, will get you evicted from federal housing. Lord Almighty, what a stupid, stupid, stupid country we live in. • The Pope says atheists are to blame for global climate change. • Colombian President Alvaro Uribe has a touch of swine flu. He's expected to recover within a few days, because, unlike 45,000,000 Americans, Uribe has access to medical care. • And now, a moment of WTF: Every time I think Senator Harry Reid (D-Nevada) had hit rock bottom, he sinks a smidgen lower. Now he says he's OK with a public option — so long as it's privatized. Seriously. If the federal government enacts a public option, alleged Democrat Harry Reid wants it to be contracted out to a private insurance company. The daily double-cross that is Senator Harry Reid continues, and if some decent Democrat can't or won't challenge him in the primary next year, I'll be actively rooting for Reid's Republican opponent. I can even envision myself sending the Republican candidate a small donation. That's how much I abhor Hairless Reid. No matter how much of a cro magnon the Repugnants nominate to run against Reid, one thing he or she won't be is the Democratic Party's friggin' Majority Leader in the Senate. • A tip o' the hat to Bad Attitudes and Pharyngula. Updated today: Our bad cops page, the debunking page, dialogue, and mystery links.
• Navi Pillay, the United Nations' top authority on human rights, has critiqued US Attorney General Eric Holder's widely-publicized torture investigation because, by design, Holder's investigation will look only for CIA torturers who went beyond the Bush-Cheney administration's torture guidelines. The investigation, if that's the right word, isn't allowed to look at those guidelines, or the very concept of torture within guidelines. Pillay doesn't seem to be playing along with all this, and good for her. She says the investigation must go beyond Holder's announced and very narrow constraints. "That is international law on accountability — that you do not stop at the foot soldiers, you go right up to the ultimate authority that is legally responsible. And these would include those who devised the policy, those who ordered it." • A new survey shows that almost 80% of Americans want a public option included in any health care reform. Seventy-nine percent. Off the top of my balding head, I can't think of any other issues where 79% of Americans support something, but that something, whatever it is, somehow remains controversial. • Ex-Congressman Dick Armey (R-Texas) is leading the fight against that 79%-favored public option, against health care reform, and almost literally against health care for Americans. But when asked to explain his position to The Economist, he went off-script and used his own words, saying, "If you in fact freely choose to enroll in Medicare that's a wonderful gift, it's a charity, it's something I applaud. But when they force you in, that's tyranny." The Economist, being a British paper, is not constrained by American news media's unspoken rule of never explaining facts and merely reporting what people say. So after Armey said this, The Economist reporter points out that the choice (again, choice) of enrolling in a public plan is the Democrats' proposal, which Armey had effectively "applauded". • On what's allegedly the other side of the aisle, Senator Harry Reid (D-Nevada) is in favor of that 79%-favored public option, or he isn't, or he flat-out doesn't understand what a public option means. Reid is the Democrats' Majority Leader in the Senate, and he's allegedly in charge of plotting and enforcing the Democrats' strategy, but as a strategic thinker he's either a plant (meaning, a leafy ferny thing that grows in a pot) or he's a plant (meaning, a closeted Republican). Reid voted for the Defense of Marriage Act, and he's against a woman's right to choose, and he's big on the death penalty, and he was for the PATRIOT Act, he was for the war on Iraq and on and on... Reid's words and especially his deeds serve the Republicans' interest so often that it's a pleasant surprise when he occasionally stands up for anything that matters to Democrats. And he's the Dems' Majority Leader in the Senate, and every morning that remains a fact it says to me that Democrats aren't serious about accomplishing diddlysquat. • James David Manning is obviously a complete raving madman, another lunatic Christian preacher who'd probably make Christ himself melt into hysterical laughter. Ordinarily we wouldn't mention another nutball in a nation gone nuts — we believe in every American's absolute and unfettered right to be stark raving bonkers, and we don't generally point at the nuts unless it's for laughs as a mystery link. You ought to be aware of Manning, though, because his assorted videos have gone viral and they're being viewed by staggeringly huge numbers of people, presumably an audience comprised mostly of stupid white rednecks who go giddy at hearing their own obsession with hating Obama echoed back from a black man. Add it to the overstuffed file marked "This is getting scary".
• The "Grand Old Party" parties like it's 1949. Despite the growing inclusiveness of America and American politics over the past few decades, the Republican Party's members in Congress remain all white, straight, and Christian, and overwhelmingly male. 58 of the 75 women in Congress are Democrats, while the other 17 are Republicans. • Three more banks were closed on Friday, bringing the year-to-date death toll to 84. And a lot more banks are going to fail. • The school board of Sedalia, Missouri has confiscated a high school band's T-shirts because they seemed to endorse evolution. Sherry Melby, a school teacher, band parent, and thimble-brain, is quoted in her town's newspaper saying, “I don’t think evolution should be associated with our school.” Shouldn't a teacher be, you know, embarrassed to be quoted in the paper saying something that stupid? • The Washington Post continues its jarring descent, as what was once one of the nation's finest newspapers becomes something no self-respecting bird in a cage would poop on. Here's a lengthy account from Saturday's Post detailing the alleged success of the CIA's torture of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, thanks to extremely talky but always anonymous sources from deep in Dick Cheney's Rolodex. There are perfunctory nods to the conventions of real journalism, but the piece amounts to pure propaganda, a 1,400-word lie that pretends that CIA documents released last week show that efficacy of torture, a conclusion that simply can't be reasonably reached from the documents. And this isn't just another right-wing op-ed of the sort that now dominates the Post's editorial page — no, it's a news article, presented as fact, not opinion, in the news pages of the Washington Post. • The election in Afghanistan seems to have been somewhere between incompetently run and wildly fraudulent. • Jenna Bush Hager is The Today Show's new "special correspondent" on education. You can make up your own punchline, but what's sad is that Hager, who's actually a teacher these days, will probably be as informative or more so as anything else on that program. • Writing for a three-judge ruling, Judge John Tinder (Reagan 1987) has ordered a lower court to reconsider its big money fine and infomercial restrictions (but of course no jail time) for TV snake oil seller Kevin Trudeau. At the risk of sounding like somebody's grumpy Republican grandfather, I'll say that Judge Tinder seems awfully concerned about the fairness of the punishment given to a total scuzball, and a lot less concerned about that scuzball's hundreds, perhaps thousands of daily victims right up to today and continuing into the foreseeable future. • You might not know about J. Marion Sims, the father of gynecology. • A tip o' the hat to Dave B., Scott L., and lactose intolerance. Updated today: Our bad cops page, the debunking page, dialogue, mystery links, and the right wing hate speech round-up.
• The US military attacked a medical clinic in Kabul on Wednesday, and a "US Apache AH-64 gunship fired on the medical center after militants put up resistance". This is reported as if it's an ordinary day in the occupation of Afghanistan, and it probably is. Let's turn to the First Geneva Convention (1949), and read Article 24: "Medical personnel exclusively engaged in the search for, or the collection, transport or treatment of the wounded or sick [emphasis added], or in the prevention of disease, staff exclusively engaged in the administration of medical units and establishments, as well as chaplains attached to the armed forces, shall be respected and protected in all circumstances." And yeah, I'm aware that war is hell and sh*t happens, and I've read the article's confusing and, to my reading, contradictory versions of what went down. And yeah, I've heard all the Bush-Cheney era jive about how none of the rules of war apply if one side isn't wearing uniforms, so neener-neener — that's just empty and unprincipled rhetoric that embarrasses the US of A every time it's claimed, so spare me, please. It's going to be awfully hard to spin airstrikes on a medical center as something other than a war crime, but America's politicians and media can do it, 'cuz the bottom line is always que sera sera. And anyway, none of this will be mentioned on the TV news in the States, which means the same as if it never happened... except to the dead, the survivors, and the people of the rest of the world, who (unlike Americans) will hear about this. • Superman wants to tell you about universal health care. • Speaking of America's health uncare system, here's what 45,000,000 or so un-insured citizens of the USA can look forward to in the autumn: The latest swine flu estimate is that 90,000 Americans will be killed by the bug, and another 1.8-million will be hospitalized. On the first number, don't dismiss it as overhyped baloney. The flu epidemic of 1918 killed half a million Americans, and such catastrophes do happen once in a while. My fingers are crossed, but (in my mother's voice) take your vitamins and drink orange juice if you can afford it. On the latter number, 1.8-million Americans hospitalized — are there that many available beds in American hospitals? • In setting up its torture policies under the Bush-Cheney administration, the CIA reverse-engineered a safety manual's good advice intended to help people survive hypothermia. And none of the higher-ups who orchestrated this will face any punishment.
• Before being forced to resign and convicted, criminal Congressman Randall "Duke" Cunningham (R-California) was a key advocate of Dick Cheney's assassinations and death squads. • A Kentucky judge has smacked down a preposterous state law that required the Kentucky Office of Homeland Security to stress “dependence on Almighty God as being vital to the security of the commonwealth.” • Even disregarding her incoherent policy pronouncements that rarely amount to anything but lies, there's just nothing about Sarah Palin that's even, well, competent. For at least the fourth time since she emerged on the national scene just a year ago, Palin is leaving event planners stranded, claiming that she'd never agreed to appear at an event where her presence has been widely promoted. • You can buy a retired caboose for $15-$20,000, delivered. When I was a few decades younger, I might have pondered what it would cost to buy or rent a little land, hook up sewage and water and electricity, install a toilet and a stove, and call it home. • It's only been a few days, and it thankfully won't last as long as the endless coverage of, say, Michael Jackson's death, but enough already about Senator Edward Kennedy. He was often described as the leading liberal in American politics, and I'll admit, that's why I was never a big fan of Kennedy. He was the face of liberal leadership through decades dominated by conservative politicians I abhorred, from Nixon to Reagan to Bush and Bush. For me, Kennedy was the face of failure for liberal politics. And if that's not enough, he helped bring down President Jimmy Carter in 1980, with primary chllenges that led directly to the disaster named Ronald Reagan. Thanks for that, Senator Kennedy. Then again, I'm not smart enough to argue with The Rude Pundit, and I've probably pissed off all three of our readers, so maybe I'm just plain wrong. I'll say this for the departed: I've been an activist for all my life, and I don't remember cursing Teddy Kennedy's name like I've cursed at most Democrats and Republicans under my breath and at the top of my lungs. So I'll shut up now, read a little more about Kennedy's career over the weekend, and maybe I'll have an apology by Monday. • A tip o' the hat to Majikthise, Oliver Willis, They Gave Us A Republic, and Wig. Updated today: Our bad cops page, dialogue, mystery links. • Housekeeping: We've been at this for more than ten years, and we have thousands of old pages on our website — old pages that get very little traffic, and have pushed us toward a price increase in our web hosting bill. Therefore we'll be deleting most of those thousands of pages at the end of this month. It's a little sad, but when push comes to shove and the bills come due, we're a lot more about news in the here and now, than about history and archives from years gone by. So this is advance warning: If there's an old article on our website that means something to you, now is the time to snatch a copy.
Recommended sites for gathering unknown or underreported news: Media Matters Pro Publica ThinkProgress Washington Monthly TruthOut
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