What if Adam Nagourney has to suffer New Hampshire?

Seriously, Iowa and its unrepresentative process should not settle anything. But the national press corps loves to get it over with so they can go home.

Tread marks everywhere

What is it about their motorized, climate-controlled 4WD sofas that makes people want to run over everything? I'm not opposed to fun, even fun whose appeal I don't understand, but why do we allow them to destroy what we hold in common for our descendants?

Bushist facts

There is no real controversy about whether waterboarding is torture. It is now when Americans do it, and it was when the Nazis, the communist Chinese, the Viet Cong, and the Soviets did it. It even was during the Inquisition, but the New York Times still says:

To the already fierce controversy over whether the Bush administration authorized torture has been added the specter of a cover-up.

Duhbya and Rummy (with Darth Cheney in the dark shadows) authorized waterboarding, among other tortures. There's no doubt about it. They had everyone ask mother-may-I from Rummy. They even had Gonzo and John Yoo write down their transparently bullshit rationales that add up to two giggle-provoking assertions newer before imagined to be plausible in American law:

1. The President can do whatever he wants, especially in wartime, but really anytime.
2. Every restraint of law, domestic or international, is quaint - after all, al Qaeda is so much more scary than the Soviets and their ICBMs that we should all wet ourselves.

The rest of the story is such good work that the sentence I quote above was probably added by a chickenshit editor.

Apologizing for daughters

Catching up on the dead tree edition of the Boston Globe...

This story on sex selection abortion gladdens my heart. Fingers crossed, it's a start on avoiding the military diaspora of Asian males that a lack of prospects for marriage and family that might otherwise be caused by the foolishly chosen scarcity of females.

One line half-way down the column buried the lead:

[M]others would often apologize for giving birth to a girl.

I think of the day my daughter was born, and I wonder how anyone could possibly apologize or expect an apology about such an event.

Of course, before I get too happy about the news from South Korea, there on the facing page is the Globalist Quiz, which has far worse news about India's cultural and institutional discrimination against women.

Pretzel logic

The EEOC is permitting corporations to put their retirees into two classes - never mind the equal in their very name. The two classes are the people the companies will continue to insure and the ones in Medicare. They're doing this because the companies really, really need it, or they'll have to dump health care for all their retirees. Or, even worse, they might join the lobbying war for national health care.

Single payer makes all this nonsense go away.

Two sides to every story

Every story has two sides. But there's so much to say about this story that makes me sick that I have to say that sometimes those sides are good and evil.

Here in the Christmas season, I'm supposed to be finishing up the regular work of disappointing my family, near and far, and myself and trying to finish my "joyful" shopping. Instead, I'm morose that anyone can defend keeping people in penury this close to bondage.

I'm outraged that anyone like Reggie Brown of the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange can utter so much bullshit in support of craven desire to exploit the poor:

• It's "un-American" to form anything that looks like a union.
• It's illegal to try to pressure buyers to force their suppliers to pay a fairer wage, yet it's fine for the Exchange to fine growers who agree.
• The pickers already get $12.50 an hour. (Oh, bullshit!)
• Readers should consider the free transportation to the fields from their American favela.

The quote that encapsulates the whole depravity of Reggie Brown and his tomato cartel, though, is this:

If we weren’t paying a very competitive wage and giving these workers enough money to send to their families in Mexico and Central America, we wouldn’t be able to attract a labor force...

He wants to pay third-world wages. It's his business model.

This is our economy. Brown is competing with Mexican and Brazilian tomatoes, which are picked under third world conditions. If his competitors held slaves, he would want to do so as well.

Can we stop claiming now that we live in a class-free society? Classless, sure...

Update: Now, this is rich. The Exchange has a website, where they claim:

The Florida Tomato Growers Exchange is an agricultural cooperative of Florida tomato growers who operate as socially accountable farm employers by participating in comprehensive programs that certify employment, health, housing and safety practices. The industry is strongly committed to supporting long-term solutions that improve the lives of their employees.

I love tomatoes. Now I know what they're fertilizing them with.

Texans determined to remain stupid

Can creationists really teach science that they actively disbelieve despite the evidence? Of course not, but they fervently want to get their fundie soldiers into position to poison the minds of children against reality.

For cryin' out loud, the ICR is a young earth creationist outfit. They've been purveying captious lies for more than thirty years in my own experience. They not only disbelieve biology, paleontology, and geology but also physics, cosmology, and astronomy. Maybe they believe chemistry. Maybe. They are lunatics.

(Not all Texans, mind you, just the ones in charge. Y'know, Duhbya's successors.)

Lessons of Watergate

Can anyone still believe that the White House was not involved in destruction of recordings of torture? No one who isn't in the middle of a do-it-yourself colonscopy.

Basically, this story describes Bandini, Lambert, & Locke negotiating with the CIA. Addington, Gonzales, and Miers were all involved. You know which direction the orders were travelling, even if they might have been in the form of nudge, nudge, wink, wink.

Update: Really from the New York Times, which finally lays out the prisoners' legal rationale for including these non-Guantánamo interrogation tapes in the order about Gitmo prisoners: al Zubaydah may have implicated them during torture.

January 2009

I once offended a local Democrat by deriding Joe Lieberman, and I haven't seen her at a meeting since. I wonder how she feels about Lieberman's endorsement of John McCain. I feel completely vindicated, much as when I pushed a racist voter away from my Congressional candidate in 1974.

My fervent hope is that the Senate Majority Leader who defeats Harry Reid in January of 2009 will drum Lieberman out of the Democratic Party caucus. Could it be more clear that he's not a Democrat? You have to wonder about Connecticut Democrats who voted for him.

He knows if you've been bad or good

Another quaint Constitutional right that the Bushists are shitting on:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Let me get this straight: Telecom amnesty is required because one or two phone companies declined an illegal Bushist surveillance program at some point? Telecom amnesty furthers the government's goal of spying on all of us in violation of the Fourth Amendment? And that's the reason I should support telecom amnesty?

They obviously think we're idiots.

Update: See Glenn Greenwald, who is brilliant as always. A sample quote:

The very nature of our country and our government fundamentally transforms step by step, with little opposition. We all were inculcated with the notion that what distinguished our free country from those horrendous authoritarian tyrannies, both right and left, of the Soviet bloc, Latin America and the Middle East were things like executive detentions, torture, secret prisons, spying on their own citizens, unprovoked invasions of sovereign countries, and exemptions from the law for the most powerful -- precisely the abuses which increasingly characterize our government and shape our political values.

Non-binding preamble

The world may think the Bushists just gave in on global warming and emissions targets. Huh-uh.

Those targets remain in the agreement — including a possible cut in emissions of up to 40 percent below 1990 levels by rich countries by 2020, and a 50 percent cut in emissions globally by 2050 — but they are now a footnote to the nonbinding preamble, not a main feature of the plan.

"Put Hans back on, Ellis. You have no idea what kind of man you're dealing with, but I do."

Stress positions

Maybe I've missed it, but I haven't seen much written about stress positions. If the New York Times won't call waterboarding torture, you know they probably would liken stress positions to having a hangnail. (I just found Slate.)

So, how do you think our interrogators get their victims into those stress positions? You think they use sweet reason?

Dispatch from Bushworld

The hardcore Bushists will view this acquittal and mistrial as proof that they were right to say that law cannot handle domestic terror. They will argue that only suspension of habeas corpus can work with "those people". Who needs evidence when they have their overwhelming suspicion?

The Bushists are anti-American; they don't believe in our founding principle of due process.

Republicans pro-torture

House Republicans are still carrying water for the Bushists, in this case carrying it over to the waterboard. The New York Times and the AP still can't bear to call it torture, but anyone whose head is not up his (or her!) ass knows it is.

At least half of Washington has gone drooling, gibbering, Freddy Krueger insane. When will the media notice?

Who says there's no good news?

Turns out James Watson is an octoroon! And if you know that old word with the bigoted one-drop heritage, you're either reading too much Faulkner or what? Bigots themselves aren't literate enough to remember it. Unless maybe they're James Watson.

(Hat-tip to onegoodmove.)

Politics 101

Harry Reid has not been as big a disappointment as Nancy Pelosi, simply because I didn't expect much from him. I had great hopes that she would bring some liberal sanity to Washington and, more important, that she would have the guts to make some things stick. Reid, I hoped, would at least tame the Bushist penchant for appointing extremists to Federal offices. Even with those low expectations, he has been underwhelming, though I was thrilled at his pro forma sessions.

Now, Mitch McConnell is dictating budget terms to the Senate Democratic majority! McConnell says:

I think we are being consistent here against higher taxes, consistently against greater regulation, consistently against creating new causes of action in bill after bill after bill...

Consistently against democracy, I'd say. Doesn't he remember who lost in 2006? Doesn't he remember his own anti-filibuster rhetoric in the previous years. Of course he does. His principle is winning, not consistency. He's playing hardball, while the Democrats play blind man's bluff.

The proper response to McConnell is not quite a Cheneyism, "Mitch, we're going to let you f--- yourself on C-SPAN every evening until you're too sore to go on. Have at it."

Then Reid has to do something besides sending tallies to the press about how many things the big bad mean Republicans have filibustered. He and the Democrats have to provide the media with pictures and sound bites. Make the smug and doughy face of McConnell represent the GOP's intransigence. Make them vote against cloture on TV every damn day. Put together a cogent video press release about it every day. The media are about as lazy as Duhbya - you've got to give them something that goes down easy.

Have a Democrat make a reasonable but obviously frustrated speech every day. Make the Presidential candidates do some of them. Tell them all to keep it short so you can control the message that winds up in the news. Podcast and Youtube the speeches. Tell the American public that the Democrats have a bill ready to negotiate but that the Republicans' position is that they'll hold their breath until they turn blue unless they get everything they want, even after losing in 2006.

If you have to twist some arms in your own caucus, do it. Tell Joe Lieberman his fucking furniture will be out on Constitution Ave. if he defects.

What's amazing is that the Democratic "leadership" has spent their adult lives in politics and yet have managed not to learn even the most basic facts about it. When your opponent is playing a vicious game, you have to show the electorate that in colorful, memorable, and sometimes vicious ways.

Let the Republicans shut down the government again. Just make sure the voters know who's doing the shutting. What you want is for Duhbya to veto the omnibus spending bill because it has something in it he doesn't like. That's what McConnell is protecting him from. So, tie the two of them together and pin the blame on them. They deserve it.

Shit, this is politics, not needlepoint.

They don't care

The Bushists will do whatever they want to do. They will accept no legal or practical restraint from democracy. The Congress has three powers that matter:

• Impeachment
• Impeachment
• and impeachment

There has never in my lifetime been an administration as corrupted by its own lust for power as the Bush administration. Ollie North was not this corrupted by power. The Bushists all belong in jail.

If we Americans actually gave a shit about self-government, we wouldn't stand for this.

Oh, and by the way, if Dana Perino says that Duhbya has "no recollection", then he ordered the destruction of the video evidence of torture.

Venezuela chooses

... against strongman rule - by a hair. Chávez says, "For now, we could not do it." (emphasis added)

My guess: He'll be back with another proposal that includes provisions intended to mollify just enough of the opposition coalition. All he needs is 50% plus 1, after all.

NYTimes off the reservation

The New York Times treads right up to the line and, though it doesn't quite say openly that Rudy Giuliani is a compulsive liar, cheat, and bullshitter, nowadays, that's close enough for plaudits.

Here's the clearest of many illustrations:

In a recent radio advertisement by the campaign about his health care proposal, Mr. Giuliani repeated another false statement that he had been using on the campaign trail.

Frank Luntz's take on the Republican attitude toward bullshit is also instructive:

“When he talks about New York, people see it,” Mr. Luntz said of Mr. Giuliani, “and they feel it, and if a number isn’t quite right, or is off by a small amount, nobody will care, because it rings true to them.”

Whether something's true or not doesn't matter. Only fooling the people with their feelings matters.

There's also some compulsive reportorial "balance". Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama get dinged. (I bet John Edwards wishes he were in the story, too, even to get corrected!)

Obama exaggerated the degree of increase in the public debt. He said "doubled". The Times should have served its readers better by noting the facts: From Jan. 20, 2001 to today, the national debt has increased from $5.7 trillion to $9.1 trillion, an increase of a mere 60%.

No time at the moment to check Hillary's NIH statement.

Update: Hard to be sure what Hillary said or meant to say without context, but it is true that NIH funding has increased in every area under Duhbya.

Perfect illustration

Hillary is toying with asking Colin Powell to help restore America's reputation. Huh? He had his chance, and he completely blew it. This is the perfect illustration why I don't like Hillary. For cryin' out loud, can we please have a goddamn change!