prosecution and standing against transparency on every front, the Obama administration is establishing a clear precedent that the law doesn't apply — that federal officials can get away with war crimes and constitutional violations, and really what else is there for the constitution to pretend to protect the people from? This is it, baby. This is where the glittery patriotic words meet the real world, and in the real America the constitution is a work of fiction. Call it the Obama Doctrine. He hasn't said it in so many words, but it's the unmistakable conclusion: Anyone acting on presidential orders can get away with anything. Period. So you'll be tortured if your leaders determine that you should be tortured, and you'll be allowed no legal challenges before, during, or after the fact. The precedent is set, and that's the Obama Doctrine.
Health care hell in America
♦ The proposal to expand Medicare availability to Americans 55 and older is a rather smart move, but of course the entry age ought to be a lot younger. Like birth.
♦ The anti-woman Ben Nelson (D-Nebraska)/Bart Stupak (D-Michigan) amendment seems to have been aborted, which would at least leave it possible for poor people to have access to insurance that covers abortions.
♦ Finally, a poll asks the question I've wondered about for months, and the answer is what I expected — and something the mainstream media would be loathe to report in a headline. About half the people opposed to the proposed health care reform are opposed for the same reason we are — they're opposed from the left, opposed because the alleged "reform" doesn't go anywhere near far enough in its reform.
♦ MoveOn (donate) wants you to e-sign its e-petition begging Congress to salvage "a real public option" instead of gift-wrapping billions for the insurance industry. I suppose e-signing an e-petition is better than doing nothing, and I assume you've already sent personal post-cards or letters to your Congresscritter and Senators and/or made a few phone calls and/or written a letter to the editor and/or held a picket sign and/or all the other slightly more meaningful acts that your Congresscritters and Senators will ignore as they cash their checks from the insurance cartel.
♦ When it comes to health care reform, the media cares (and wants you to care) about the silly political squabbles taking place behind the scenes (though curiously always in the headlines) and the push and pull of the bickering politicians. All that is of almost no interest to me, and of less interest week by week and month by month as what's called "the debate" continues. All meaningful health care reform was compromised away before this whorish process even began, and all the subsequent compromises have been only temporary, until the next compromise, which holds only until it's compromised away the next day. By this time next week "health care reform" will amount to a small discount on Band-Aids for terminal cancer patients and people with severe head wounds, and then they'll negotiate away the coverage for head wounds. Follow the politics if you wish, but for me it's too much, too infuriating. We all know that the fix is in and has been for months. We're just getting slowly screwed, and the only honest debate is about how screwed we'll be and through which orifice, and how many billions the insurance giants will make by screwing Americans. And again I say, flush it all down the toilet and try health care reform instead, but that strategy has never and would never be considered, by a Congress of, for, and by the millionaires.
♦ I still maintain that if this legislation passes — a law mandating the purchase of health insurance — it could be challenged in court with a reasonable chance of success, especially with the Federalist Society types who now populate the higher courts. To my knowledge Congress has never before demanded under penalty of law that Americans become corporate customers. In my opinion such a requirement just reeks of fascism. But our readers are usually way smarter than we are — does someone out there think such a challenge would be rebuffed?
♦ In June, Attorney General Eric Holder promised that an internal report on the participation of Office of Legal Counsel lawyers, including John Yoo and Steven Bradbury, in the Bush-Cheney administration's famous policies of torture would be released within a matter of weeks. It wasn't. More than a month ago, Holder promised that the report would be released at the end of November. It wasn't.
♦ Fouad Mahmoud Al Rabiah, a man probably innocent of anything scary, has been delivered to Kuwait after being held and probably tortured for almost eight years at Guantanamo. There's no report of any apology, of course, and nobody on the American side of this will face any investigation, charges, or punishment..
♦ Federal Judge Gladys Kessler (appointed by Clinton in 1994) has held the Defense Department in contempt of court, after DoD violated a clear judicial order to make sure that any further interogations of Guantanamo prisoner Mohammed Al-Adahi be videotaped. The order came down in June 2009, and the interrogation wasn't videotaped in July, so this is all on Obama's watch. Officials blamed "oversight and miscommunication" for what they called an "inadvertent" error.
♦ President Obama seems to have mastered the art of telling the Left what it wants to hear, while his underlings immediately undercut what the President says.
♦ The US has illegally been using Blackwater thugs as combat mercenaries in Afghanistan, and in Iraq, and in Pakistan. Should we pretend to be surprised? A meaningful question to ask might be, is Blackwater a subsidiary of thee CIA, or is the CIA a subsidiary of Blackwater?
♦ Canadian author Peter Watts was "beaten without provocation and arrested by US border guards" last week. Watts allegedly assaulted a federal officer, which is typically a charge fabricated in such situations, and is adamantly denied by Watts and the people traveling with him. Watts says on his blog, "And having been told that cameras were in fact on site, I look forward to seeing the footage they provide."
♦ The American Civil Liberties Union
(donate) has lost about one-quarter of its financial footing as one millionaire who's underwritten the ACLU to the tune of $20-million annually can no longer afford to do so. Our li'l weblog received a sizable donation last week — thank you, patron saint — and we've passed the bulk of it along to the ACLU. If you can help, now is the time.
(an unpaid plug)
"A mind-blowing mix of fact and fantasy, hard science and well-grounded speculation, with concrete how-to info to top it all off — resulting in some of the best and strangest stuff on Earth..."
♦ The ACLU says that Morris Davis, former chief prosecutor for the Guantanamo military commissions, was fired at the Congressional Research Service because of opinions he expressed in the pages of the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal.
♦ Three prisoners at Guantanamo who, according to the military, killed themselves in 2006, were more likely murdered by their captors. At the very least, an investigation by Seton Hall law school faculty and students concludes that there was a well-orchestrated cover-up of the facts.
♦ One of the major charges against attorney Paul Minor, who was seemingly railroaded by the corrupt Justice Department during the Bush-Cheney administration, has been overturned on appeal.
fascism : a political philosophy, movement, or regime (as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition
♦ Goldman Sachs has announced that it'll "scale back" its planned $16-billion in year-end bonuses. If the answer wasn't so obvious I'd ask again, why aren't these bastards in prison?
♦ President Obama met with House Republican leaders over jobs-creation legislation, and media accounts said there were some testy exchanges at the meeting. Ooooh, testy exchanges. I saw the coverage but completely couldn't have cared less, until someone emailed us with a comment basically praising the President for getting tough. Uh, no. Very no.
This isn't getting tough. This is Obama after almost a year of heavy petting in the back seat now saying he's not that kind of girl. If you don't want to be seen as that kind of girl, Mr President, start saying no and get out of the back seat.
♦ Breathe deep the gathering gloom: Virtually everywhere in the world people tend to be more educated than their parents. This is no longer true in the United States. A report by the American Association of State Colleges and Universities indicates that the U.S. is one of only two nations on Earth in which people aged 25 to 34 have lower educational attainment than their parents.
♦ I barely understand what Facebook is but I understand privacy, and Facebook is ramming the lack thereof down its users' throats. They're making "your post is open to everyone on-line" the new default setting.
♦ In battle after battle in Afghanistan, the Taliban keep dying at the hands of American forces, thirty at a time.
♦ Rachel Maddow brought on of those insane faux Christian kooks, this time to talk about how he's all about love, not at all about getting gays killed in Uganda. Maddow, of course, then raked him over the coals so gently that he didn't even know it was happening. There's a special place in Hell for guys like this, and by special, of course, I mean extra hot.
♦ And the next day, after weeks of "no comment" and pressure from real Christian leaders, anti-gay activist Rick Warren came out against killing gays. Thanks, Rachel.
♦ And a couple of days later, mere weeks after we first heard news of American Christian leaders urging the Ugandan government to pass legislation that would execute people for gayness, the Obama administration finally made a public statement against the idea.
♦ You might remember that a few weeks ago Israel was again claiming a freeze on new settlements, and we offered a ten-buck bet that this freeze, like previous freezes, would be bogus. We got no takers but the offer still stands. Meanwhile, construction continues on projects green-lit before the alleged freeze continues, and an activist group notes that the construction rate inside the occupied West Bank is higher than it is in Israel.
♦ At the heart of the rather longwinded and barely supportable "cap-and-trade" environmental legislation are carbon derivitives, which look and smell a lot like the credit default swaps (CDS) that helped bring down the worldwide economy.
♦ Editor & Publisher will be shuttered unless a white knight buyer can be found. Kirkus Reviews, too, which is a pretty good literary review rag, but Editor & Publisher, cripes, that one hurts. It's one of the best publications, maybe the best, that covers the publishing business. In my real life before the industry collapsed I was an editor, and I've always held E & P in high regard. It's still in our surf cycle for news gathering. And we'll miss it if it's really gone.
It made me stop and think
"If we're to believe the faux-outrage, [Sen Harry Reid's] reference to slavery was the rhetorical element that went too far. But this, apparently, is a new concern — the right has been far more direct in making the same comparison. Harry Reid was talking about key moments in history in which the right was wrong, but Michele Bachmann recently called the Democrats' legislative agenda "nothing more than slavery," and no one said a word. Indeed, conservatives routinely insist that the left is trying "enslave" America, and the political mainstream just shrugs its shoulders in response."
"I honestly don’t know why a lot of folks ever really believed that Obama was the second coming of FDR when all he really ever aspired to be was the second coming of Bill Clinton. The guy always presented himself as a middle-of-the-road establishment Democrat who eschewed populism in favor of “post-partisanship” (whatever the hell that means). And c’mon, people: how much change could you really expect from a guy who chose Joe Biden to be his veep?"
"
People feel betrayed, and they should, because Obama has signed on with giving trillions to rich people and screwing over the middle and working class. Trust me on this, that’s what’s happening and will happen. The next twenty years economically are going to be worse than the last twenty, and Obama had options which would have made that not so. Furthermore, only people who threaten to walk, get things. If you will vote Obama/Democrat no matter what, why would they give you anything? They wouldn’t, and they won’t."
♦ I've held the Pulitzer Prizes in rather low regard since learning a lotta years ago that newspapers and reporters nominate themselves. That's just not the way a serious honor should be structured. I've held the Pulitzers in lower regard since noticing that the best work isn't nominated, probably related to factor one, above. And now the Pulitzers have moved down yet another notch, with word that the Republican webrag Politico has been elected to the Pulitzer board, which I assume means, has bought a seat on the Pulitzer board. It's all a crock o' crap.
♦ This was one of the more impressive bits I've seen on The Daily Show, a deft expose of how a Fox Newscaster who seems very stupid is actually just pretending, because she's actually pretty dang smart. Makes me wonder, how much would you have to pay to play a stupider version of yourself on world-wide TV, five days a week? What's the price for that?
♦ ABC News, generally the worst of the non-Fox TV newscasts, earns that distinction anew by falsely clipping a Jon Stewart bit to make it look like Stewart is a global climate change denier. It's the same trick Fox pulled a few weeks ago.
♦ It was an outrage and a shame when the Washington Post dumped its fine on-line columnist Dan Froomkin. He quickly resurfaced at Huffington Post, but since arriving there he has announced that his primary priority is being Washington Bureau Chief for the Huffington Post. Maybe he's the best dang Bureau Chief in the history of Bureau Chiefdom, but there's been no noticable improvement in the HuffPo's generally shabby news standards, and Froomkin has written basically nothing of note since arriving at the HuffPo a few months ago. And so our once-weekly visit to his HuffPo page has now been deleted from our news-gathering surf cycle.
♦ What's the first response of Lynn Heider, the news director at a big-city TV station, to a blogger and tweeter who's looking for information on video of the station's anchors acting in a less-than-Cronkite manner behind the scenes? She threatened legal action.
♦ I always enjoy little tidbits like this, about and by old-time journalists from an era when there was journalism and reporters were supposed to report the news. .
♦ Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee sure is getting a lot of grace and understanding from the punditry after a guy released from prison by Huckabee's clemency program killed four cops in Washington. Don't you wonder what Mike Dukakis thinks? From what I've read about Huckabee's clemency program (no link, sorry, it's been a while) it started with prison conversions or the claim thereof. Inmates would say "I found Jesus behind bars", and spread that word to Christian leaders in the state, who then presented Gov Huckabee with a list of Christians behind bars, and he would give 'em clemency with little further research. Long lists of clemency Christians.
♦ Judge Nina Gershon (appointed by Clinton in 1996) has blocked the Congressional action stripping Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (donate) of its federal funding, of course and obviously. I mean, come on, Congress, this is Consrtitutrion 101 — you can't pass law that punishes a person or group guilty without trial. Bill of attainder much? Sigh... I propose that for passing obviously unconstitutional legislation, every member of Congress who voted "aye" be assessed his or her share of the resulting legal expense. Also, a report by the Massachusetts Attorney General's office reaches the conclusion that in those absurd fake-hooker videos that the right-wing has been obsessing over for months, reps from ACORN did nothing illegal, nothing beyond being stupid. To anyone with a triple-digit IQ who's seen the videos, this finding is not a surprise. Further, the bizarre tapes of a fake pimp and prostitute at ACORN offices were heavily edited and dubbed to make ACORN look worse, and again, no surprise.
♦ Congressman Steve King (R-Iowa), meanwhile, is furious that the White House served acorn-shaped cookies at a party. Seriously.
♦ The Republicans' obstructionism in Congress is really something to see. They're queuing up manually to vote on bills instead of using their electronic voting devices, just because it's slower and keeps the works gummed up a little longer.
♦ The Republicans are always fake-outraged about something, and then a few days later they're fake-outraged about something else. As I type this they're fake outraged because of something Senator Harry Reid (D-Nevada) said in the Senate, but it would be pointless to recap it in detail, as they'll be fake outraged about something else entirely by the time you read this. In the real world when someone's as touchy and easily fake outraged as the Republicans are, that's called being a drama queen, and the adjective fits.
♦ A right-wing hate group called Mass Resistance is largely responsible for the endless stream of smears and lies about Department of Education official Kevin Jennings. Despite months of outrageous lies about Jennings, his only "crime" seems to be being gay.
♦ Hard to fathom why it's taken so long, but Governor Mark Sanford (R-South Carolina) has finally been hit with divorce papers.
♦ Ex-Governor Sarah Palin (R-Alaska) transferred out of college in Hawaii because, her father says, Asians and Pacific Islanders made her uncomfortable. "They were a minority type thing", he says, "and it wasn’t glamorous, so she came home." And OK, we've reported it. But there are so many reasons to think Palin's a lightweight and a liar in the here and now, it seems unnecessary to wind back the clock to when she was a teenager. When you're a teenager you're almost supposed to say stupid things.
♦ A few grumpy personal comments, because I am generally a grumpy person. Apparently when I bought my (used) computer its operating system was thoughtfully set by Microsoft to automatically download Windows updates. In just a couple of months owning this computer, several times I've found a morning memo from Microsoft informing me that while I slept Microsoft had fixed a bug or something. And it sort of makes sense — Microsoft products are notoriously buggy and the bugs are famously huge, so when they figure out their major security blunders it might be a good idea to have Microsoft's half-assed patch installed pronto. So far, so-so. Well, last night Microsoft installed another patch and the proud announcement said that because the update involved urgent security issues Microsoft had shut down and rebooted my computer. In doing so they killed an open file with work in progress, something that'll take me two hours to recreate, but honestly, I'd find the notion of Microsoft rebooting my computer creepy as hell even if it hadn't caused me such grief. So I've changed my system settings, and from now on I'll only be informed about updates but nothing from Microsoft will be auto-updated. And again, Microsoft sucks. Again.
♦ Husband Harry offers an important lesson learned: When drying tighty-whities in the oven because you're unwilling to waste $1 on the dryer downstairs, anything higher than about 200° Fahrenheit will seriously singe the material.
♦ Now crossing the border from grumpy to schmaltz: I was the target demographic for this when it first aired on the telly. My dad wanted to see Bing, and I wanted to see Bowie. And yeah, the song was sweet but we only got to hear it once in those olden days. It was years before I really fell for it, and now it hits me every time.
♦ Unknown News is updated once weekly, usually on Mondays. Have a seat and some cheese puffs but please, no smoking. With a tip o' the hat to AK for free quick and efficient software assistance, and Daniel D. for restoring Christmas, JR Mooneyham, Sherri B., Cassandra, Joseph D., Joe G., Lon Garm, J.S. (not the Watergate felon) Magruder at Why Not Resist?, SirJ, Bill T., Wig, the letter Z, our first home at pitas.com (1999-2003, and still a great place for publishing your blog), and the love of my life (who prefers to remain anonymous).
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