Thursday December 19, 2002
Not gonna blog for a while. Doubt you'll even notice :-)
Monday December 16, 2002
Why did Gore decide not to run? The one word that the press couldn't get enough of, the one word that they pulled out again and again, and again even as he started on his recent book tour:
Reinvention.
Why would anyone want to run when they'd have to run against a press so chock-full of childish morons?
Sunday December 15, 2002
The Bill Moyers interview with John McCain
Saturday December 14, 2002
I just watched "13 Conversations About One Thing", which the summary on the DVD box claimed was "a fresh and whimsical look at the invisible, everyday and destiny-shaping miracles that we've come to call 'fate."
Watch that movie then tell me: where the fuck is the whimsy?
Thursday December 12, 2002
So, Trent Lott has been outed. Apparently Republicans can't get away with everything. Although I bet he'll still be elected Senate Majority Leader.
Tuesday December 10, 2002
After the rest of the media accepted Trent Lott's comments about a utopian segregationist world under president Strom Thurmond, Paul Krugman still has something to say about it.
Monday December 09, 2002
If you had doubts about Poindexter's Army spy agency, read this article by the man who wrote two book-length reports on the Army's spying on civilians during the Vietnam War, Christopher H. Pyle, who consequently ended up on Nixon's "enemies" list.
Wednesday December 04, 2002
First Bush fights for the ability to fire and move people out of the new Homeland Security department, which will employ federal workers from throughout the spectrum of government works. Then he says that he's privatizing 850,000 federal jobs.
Next, he cuts the raise of federal workers down to a 6th of its original size, citing the costs of waging war against shadowy terrorist cells. And now he has reinstated bonuses for political appointees, a behavior that was stopped after abuses by his father's administration.
What kind of picture does this paint for you?
A reader pointed me to this article at the Washington Post: In Terror War, 2nd Track for Suspects.
The Bush administration is developing a parallel legal system in which terrorism suspects -- U.S. citizens and noncitizens alike -- may be investigated, jailed, interrogated, tried and punished without legal protections guaranteed by the ordinary system, lawyers inside and outside the government say....
Civil libertarians insist that the courts should searchingly review Bush's actions, so that he is always held accountable to an independent branch of government. Administration officials, however, imply that the main check on the president's performance in wartime is political -- that if the public perceives his approach to terrorism is excessive or ineffective, it will vote him out of office.
How convenient! Place the oversight in the hands of the people! It's not like their votes can be ignored by a Supreme Court decision. Why not place the oversight of this new alegal system in the hands of the Cubans? Or the Canadians?
This administration is making their dirty business easier by the day. Declare unending war. Deny the right of the public to information on the workings of our government (through denying Freedom of Information Act requests), start a cascade of alterations and repudiations of civil liberties, and then shift the checks and balances to the same people who are denied information about the government. And, oh, these citizens can be imprisoned indefinitely and without access to lawyers by same President that they are supposed to vote out of office:
Probably the most hotly disputed element of the administration's approach is its contention that the president alone can designate individuals, including U.S. citizens, as enemy combatants, who can be detained with no access to lawyers or family members unless and until the president determines, in effect, that hostilities between the United States and that individual have ended.
Sounds like a recipe for re-election. At what point does this threat of incarceration become coersion? Or is it already?
I'm ready to make a prediction now, two years ahead of the next election. We're going to see another Republican dynasty for the next 10 years at least. And there's not a damn thing we're going to be able to do to stop it. They're staying there whether we want them or not. All their actions seem to support that assumption, and paint a scary picture for the future freedoms of Americans.
Tuesday December 03, 2002
After writing a note to Salon explaining to them why I refuse to subscribe to their service, I received a polite response from their Sr. VP of Business Operations, Patrick Hurley, who told me that I was "throwing the baby out with the bathwater." Here is my reply:
Patrick,I understand your argument. But I'm not "throwing out the baby with the bathwater." You're telling me to support the moral equivalent of crackhouse drug dealers. I don't only disagree philosophically with their right-wing agenda, I am viscerally opposed to its callous negativism, corruption and authoritarianism. I just can't give 'em money.
Salon does some good things. But you do it while giving a soapbox to some of the most vicious alogical right-wing propagandists. What if you had weekly articles from Fred Barnes? Or from William Kristol? Strom Thurmond? Wayne LaPierre? Or, extreme for practically everyone, the head of NAMBLA? Is there a point where you would pause and say, "Do I want to finance and help promote *this*?" I reached that point with Andrew Sullivan. Actually, I reached that point with David Horowitz -- Sullivan is just an additional impediment. And if you've read their rantings and can't understand where I'm coming from, I'm not sure what's left to say.
Chris Nelson
If you don't think that the Republicans and today's conservative movement in America are extreme, you should have read the Wall Street Journal editorial to which Paul Krugman refers in his latest NYTimes editorial:
The Journal considers a hypothetical ducky who earns only $12,000 a year — some guys have all the luck! — and therefore, according to the editorial, "pays a little less than 4% of income in taxes." Not surprisingly, that statement is a deliberate misrepresentation; the calculation refers only to income taxes. If you include payroll and sales taxes, a worker earning $12,000 probably pays well over 20 percent of income in taxes. But who's counting? What's interesting, however, is what The Journal finds wrong with this picture: The worker's taxes aren't "enough to get his or her blood boiling with rage." In case you're wondering what this is about, it's an internal squabble of the right. The Journal is terrified that future tax cuts might include token concessions to ordinary families; it wants to ensure that everything goes to corporations and the wealthy. But the political theory revealed by the editorial — policy should be nasty to people with low incomes, lest they have any good feelings about government — may explain a lot of what has been happening lately.
...
What do we learn from this catalog of cruelties? We learn that "compassionate conservatism" and "leave no child behind" were empty slogans — but while this may have come as a surprise to the faith-based John J. DiIulio, some of us thought it was obvious all along. More important, we learn how relentless and extremist today's conservative movement really is. Some people — moderate Republicans who aren't ready to admit what has happened to their party, and Democrats who think their party can appease the right by making its own promises of smaller government — still don't get it. They imagine that at some point the right will decide that it has gotten what it wants.
Sunday December 01, 2002
Leave No Child Behind (in the foxhole)
