Lost in Tarnation

Earthbound Explorers Prepare for Vacuum of Space, Void of AM Radio

2010-06-04T21:34:00.007-05:00

The six explorers faced a roomful of reporters, answering questions with steadied calm that soothed the tension before the beginning of a journey that some called an important lesson in living without benefit of the normal ties to civilization and sanity that we take for granted, and that others called a sheerly mad stunt.

"I am very happy to be part of this project," said Diego Urbina, the Colombian-Italian and most extrovert member of the crew.

And yet the brave adventurers knew they were embarking on a mission from which not all of them might return: to spend 520 days locked in a chamber with only food, water and AM radio to sustain them. Then, to prolonged cheering, the astronauts of the mind closed the portal to their isolation chamber with its giant wire exercise wheel, its monotonous routine of dishes to wash and beds to make, tubes of dreary, tiresome homogenized pork produts to consume, and endless hours of hysterical crises to digest unbuffered by factual content or coworkers with access to the BBC’s website.

“Anything could happen,” gushed chief engineer Romulus Morrison. “Personally I’m betting that halfway through the experiment the crew will believe Mexico has invaded America and that President Obama surrendered immediately, that the rich have fled to a cloud city hovering above Dubai, and that most of the world ekes out a Mad Max style existence selling dietary supplements and cheap jewelry to each other on eBay. By that time, they’ll have forgotten that their capsule is in a warehouse in Russia and they’ll actually refuse to come back to Earth.”

As they entered the interconnected modules that would be their home for a year and a half, all six adventurers must surely have thought of their ill-fated predecessor, the Beck 500. Confined for the same amount of time listening only to Glenn Beck, the surviving members of that expedition have yet to sufficiently remaster the art of human speech to describe their horrific descent into madness – the only testament to their ordeal is a silent but utterly unapproachable pile of diapers fashioned out of handmade Gadsden flags. And the mute remains of their deceased comrades, found floating in a wine sauce seasoned with tarragon and basil. A wine sauce.

Those Who Can't Do Teach

2010-05-18T02:10:00.004-05:00

Bristol Palin has just signed with a representation agency to give speeches about abstinence for $15,000-$30,000 a pop. Presumably she's for it, although it's hard to imagine why -- if she had practiced it nobody would care who she was right now. So it's sort of like hearing a lecture on the value of hard work by a guy who won the lottery right before his trust fund dried up.

Not that Bristol doesn't deserve a chance to influence young impressionable minds about how they ought to work hard and stay in school -- leave the unprotected sex to the girls whose moms can put them on the lecture circuit: that's a lesson little girls can't hear too soon or too often. And in the maelstrom of confusing messages kids get exposed to now, what harm could one horribly unfortunate example do on top of all the others? Nothing that'll make the papers.

No, the real tragedy of Bristol Palin parlaying her lack of attentiveness in health class on the day they were slipping the condom over the banana into a shameless speaking career is that somewhere out there Michael Brown is kicking himself for not having failed enough. You know you're doing something wrong when an anchorman won't even refrain from correcting you out of politeness. Some people have the touch for turning idiocy into gold and some just don't. But fear not -- Mike Brown will say something stupid at the next colossal screw-up as well, just as surely as hopping on one leg after intercourse prevents pregnancy.

Remedial Re-Education Camp Is Filling Up Quick

2010-04-16T03:01:00.004-05:00

It truly saddens our new socialist overlords when the citizenry doesn't even seem to be trying. Come on, people -- how hard can it be to copy a picture? Then again, it probably occurs to our overlords that half of freakin' Texas flies its flag upside-down. And as they silently calculate how many times a day they might have to differentiate sarcasm from ignorance, they also realize that some sort of aspirin subsidy might be in order.

We Hold These Untruths To Be Self-Evident

2010-04-16T02:40:00.003-05:00

One of the interesting attributes of the Tea Party crowd in Richmond yesterday was the Founding Father worship, possibly an offshoot of Confucianism based on the premise that the framers of the Constitution spoke to us directly in aphorisms suitable for printing on t-shirts and scrawling on patriotically-themed hand signs. Ultimately the Tea Partiers hope to collect a sufficient number of aphorisms so that every situation, from the humdrum to the critical, from the personal to the national, can be governed by reference to the most appropriate Founding Witticism.

Of course in building any collection, it’s essential to discard the inauthentic. Take the one in the picture above: “The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.” And while it seems practically made for our very time and situation, maybe that’s because its first appearance in print was in 1986 and it has never shown up in any of Jefferson’s known writing.

It’s rather fortunate that Jefferson didn’t say it, really, as talk of earning one’s living through the sweat of one’s brow falls a little flat when the speaker owns hundreds of human beings who cook his food, make his bed, tend his crops, keep his stables and – almost certainly – sleep with him and bear his children.

Another quotation was indeed correctly attributed to Jefferson: “Never spend your money before you have it.” But the man who wrote this advice died in such debt that he was unable to free his slaves due to his inability to pay off the loans he had taken out against them – though it would still be good advice even if every person who passed it on died woefully broke. That it’s too general to be of much practical value while also being annoyingly unworkable only adds to its charm.

Anyway, the assemblage of the Jeffersonian hadith seems well underway, if beset by a few questionable sentiments and confused by occasional gaping chasms between his statements and his ideals. On the bright side, beating the plowshare of Jefferson’s profligacy into the sword of a fiscal conservative will seem like a piece of cake compared to the effort that’ll be required to turn him into a Christian.

So How’s He Recovering, Then?

2010-04-12T23:05:00.005-05:00

I’ve heard you can supposedly reverse homosexuality and even get your virginity back, but this is a new one – Governor Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota has proclaimed April to be Abortion Recovery Month. Now on first impression, the very name connotes ghastly images of fetuses being fished out of a dumpster somewhere – obviously the kind of holiday that could only be thought up by a male pro-lifer, the kind of idiot who thinks babies are produced the way it was portrayed in 1950s movies, after about fifteen minutes of a man pacing outside a delivery room door while smoking a cigar. I mean, what could these sick bastards possibly want with your old abortions?

But wait – it’s not that at all. Apparently Abortion Recovery Month is designed to honor all the abortion recovery programs in the state of Minnesota – which must surely have no other concern than for the mental and physical well-being of patients who have undergone abortions, right?

Well probably not. Just like those Crisis Pregnancy Centers that promise objective compassionate assistance to young pregnant women and then do everything they can to cajole, terrify and guilt-trip them into carrying their pregnancies to term, the abortion recovery counseling programs I Googled seem like religious rackets with a pro-life agenda, sometimes in the open and sometimes not so obvious.

Worst of all, they certainly doesn’t seem to be offering real counseling. If a therapist were to say to me, “In America we have a big drug problem, and we don’t realize it’s because of abortion,” I’d conclude that person was in more need of help than I was, starting with what constitutes a provable statement and what doesn’t. But these same counseling organizations offer certificates in abortion counseling after nothing more than a fraction of a semester of completely religious training.

Maybe Pawlenty’s proclamation really does honor some few souls out there who specialize in helping women get over the emotional trauma of abortion – and they doubtless deserve recognition. But right now the field seems dominated by proselytizing vultures who, with no actual secular training, descend on hurt and confused young women intending on converting them to faithful guilt-ridden tithing machines who can be counted on to vote against letting anyone else have the choice they felt was necessary at the time. And those charlatans don’t need recognition, because their reward is in heaven – whatever simpleminded, dogmatic, shrill millstone of a heaven happens to take them.

Republican Leaders Charge: Obama Met with People Who Want Our President to Fail

2010-02-26T03:38:00.005-05:00

Shortly after the conclusion of the combative healthcare summit today, GOP leaders assembled for a press conference to assert that they had overwhelming evidence that President Obama had recently met with an organization that wants our president to fail.

"We wouldn't be here announcing this if our concerns weren't serious," intoned Senate Minority Leader John Boehner, whose color-coded political threat tan was at the critical level.

"The fact of the matter," added House Minority Whip Eric Cantor, "is that President Obama has now gone far beyond his egregious apologies to the rest of the world for things Americans should be proud of, like torture and The New Adventures of Old Christine. He is now actively consorting with factions within our own country who are right now plotting the downfall of the current government. We know, and we have the commemorative cocktail napkins to prove it," he said, waving what appeared to be an embossed bevnap.

"While it pains us to level such grave charges," continued Boehner, "Mr. Obama knows what he needs to do in order to set things right with the American people. A comprehensive program of tax cuts and tort reform should be an important first step in rectifying the serious damage done to our great nation."

Cantor chimed in, "And some tickets to the Britney Spears concert wouldn't hurt either."

Talking To Your Children about Scott Brown Winning the Massachusetts Special Election

2010-01-20T23:27:00.006-05:00

We live in troubled, frightening times – our world seems on the brink of disaster, millions of people fall prey to random unimaginable horrors, pernicious exploitative evils, and the ravages of unscrupulous deceptive leaders while the forces for good are scattered, tied into moral knots or lulled into complacency. And that’s before they turn off Glenn Beck and have to deal with the real world.

And we all know that just recently a terrible disaster hit us seemingly out of nowhere. And while it hurts us all, sometimes the most vulnerable are the ones who get the least attention – our children. Because they can’t easily make heads or tails of momentous events, they tend to be more easily frightened and more likely to feel helpless. Worst of all, when young ones are emotionally scarred, they tend to compensate by taking on odd beliefs or practices that make them feel in control of the world – things like arson, self-mutilation or reading the works of Ayn Rand.

So for confused children – and parents just as confused about what to tell their children – here are a few sample lines of thought parents might use to help their children make sense of a frightening situation. You may need to substitute your own specific examples. And where possums aren’t common, armadilloes or even capybara will do just as well.

“Look, Che and Evita, calm down. Mommy and Daddy didn’t mean for you to see CNN call the race. Not that we didn’t think Martha wasn’t gonna get creamed – I mean, we hoped that she would honor Ted Kennedy’s legacy by fighting for the seat instead of accepting it the way a dowager empress accepts the gift of a chewed-up skink from her favorite cat – but when we considered the possibilities over the pre-dinner bong hit, Daddy thought he’d at least be well into his post-prandial coma before ol’ Mondale McKerry went tits-up in the koi pond.

“Alas, it was not to be – she put up a fight that made George McClellan look like Sigourney Weaver in Alien – and not those sequels where it was all body counts and teeth dripping with acid – I’m talking about the original Alien where the giant space cockroach never dies and you think when the ship finally reaches earth Sigourney and the alien are going to be clinging to the outside of it, slamming the hatchway door on each others’ fingers. But she finally kills the damn thing anyway, through sheer guts and perseverance and inner strength – in exactly the same way that Martha Coakley did not hit the giant puff pastry of this election right out of the park.

“But what we want you to know is that even though bad things happen sometimes, the world is still full of good people doing good things. And we can trust most people most of the time – in fact, some of the poorest people are the most trustworthy. Like remember when Mommy told you that if you get lost, to ask the nearest homeless person for help because you can’t trust clowns, priests or people in BMWs? It’s just like that. So don’t lose your faith in human goodness is what I’m saying. But feel free to ditch your faith in a complacent Boston aristocrat who sends her chauffeur out to shake voters’ hands at the mall or who thinks popular appeal is an ironically named entry in the regatta.

“Most importantly, keep your eyes open. We know what happens to people who steer calmly onward into disaster – James Cameron makes horribly expensive, overwrought soap operas about them and you have to spend three hours listening to Celine Dion. And then you say mean, petty things about Leonardo DiCaprio when his lifeless corpsicle is bobbing around in the Atlantic and you have a fight instead of getting laid. The next thing you know, you’re on the street corner holding a misspelled sign about death panels when your HMO won’t even pay to have someone look at that weird blue mole on your arm. Now be a good girl and fix Daddy a gin and tonic – and slice the lime lengthwise this time, not in itty bitty pieces like yesterday.”

War on Christmas Over -- RNC Surrenders

2009-12-25T18:40:00.004-05:00

Good news, everybody -- the War on Christmas 2009 seems to be over. You might think that after retail boycotts and even attempted legislation (Sorry, Rep. Brown, your bill might be considered after the recess, ha ha) that the advocates of mentioning Christmas in every other sentence had carried the day. After all, we're a Christian nation whose Constitution is based on the Ten Commandments, and it was likely Jesus himself who came up with the bicameral legislature (although the three-fifths compromise was clearly the work of the devil, or at least ACORN).

But no -- I recently received this in my inbox from the Republican National Committee -- entitled Holiday Greetings from the RNC, it doesn't even mention Christmas -- the very day it was sent.

Clearly this means that the Republicans have finally given in to that perfidious godless secular minority who are hell-bent on dooming our citizens to a lifetime of casual, meaningless sex, rampant drug use and evolution -- or else they never really bought into the seething rhetoric of the Torquemada wing of the Republican Party, but just used them to spur on the masses who respond to knee-jerk sentimentality that lacks any basis in the tenets of liberal democracy.

Either way it doesn't look good for the party that routinely appeals to family values and religiosity as some sort of evidence of its ability to lead -- they're either acknowledging that they've lost or that they're dragging their base along in a cynical ploy for their loyalty.

So anyway, I'll be anxiously awaiting the AFA boycott and the calling-out by Bill O'Reilly.

Happiness Is Being Snowed in with Two Gallons of Apple Cider and a Bottle of Jack Daniels

2009-12-19T02:27:00.009-05:00

A little nor'easter blew up from the gulf coast today, and smacked into some cold air coming in from the north and we ended up with tons of snow that started falling around 5:30. By 11:30 I wandered outside and took some pictures. The streetlights, swirling snow, softened contours and the snowfall's luminous reflectivity made the familiar landscape fun to look at again.

There were tons of accidents on the road. Sirens blared on Semmes for most of the time I was outside. So stay off the damn road if you don't need to be driving around. Walk to the convenience store for your six-pack. On your walk back you can contemplate those mottled gray cylinders revolving on the rack of greasy rollers under the heatlamp. By the time you get home you will be aching to start on that novel you always swore you would write.

The wind was a howling
And the snow was outrageous
Okay maybe the wind wasn't so bad
But what do I know -- I'm excavating
A pyramid in Alaska.

Lightness on lightness
Covers the trees and chassis --
Rust melts under snow.

Plastic Chemicals "Feminise Boys," Britify Spelling

2009-11-17T02:37:00.005-05:00

A study has just shown that certain types of plastic can cause feminine behavior in boys who are exposed to them in the womb. This leads to a number of disturbing questions – for instance, are our E. Coli infested meats and vegetables now so dangerous that mothers have taken to eating plastic instead?

The alarm only increases when you see the type of plastic these women have been eating: Phthalates. Why, just one look at that word and you can’t help but wonder why anyone thought something that starts with four consecutive consonants could possibly be safe for human consumption. I mean, look at that damn thing – it’s a veritable Burmese tiger trap of a word, bristling with danger between its beginning and the safety of the vowels beyond. Pronouncing it could only be the act of a madman, so no wonder that prolonged exposure could leave young boys unwilling to play with trucks and guns, causing them to sit instead in contemplation of the cruelty of the universe.

The study (which, frankly, doesn’t seem that impressive) was published in the International Journal of Andrology, which I imagine looks something like this illustration below:

Maybe other studies will confirm that exposure in the womb causes boys to roughhouse less. The pharmaceutical industry might embrace these results as a more dangerous alternative to Ritalin with far more unforseeable long-term side-effects. Already several major players are believed to be doing research on creating problems that this behavior-altering form of industrial waste could be a cure for. When the brilliant minds who brought us restless leg syndrome catch the scent of a winning idea, you never know where they’ll end up.

As Ye Have Done unto the Least of These, My Children...

2009-10-16T03:07:00.004-05:00

It's going to take a long time before our part of the civilized world is as equal and prosperous as it has always promised to be. But at least -- and finally -- the person in charge knows what's important.

Secret of Jesus' Name Revealed -- the H Stands for Humanity

2009-10-14T22:13:00.009-05:00

The Baffling Argument of the Week award goes to Justice Antonin Scalia, who last Wednesday argued, in a separation of church and state case involving a cross on Federal land, that the Christian embodiment of Jesus' death and resurrection isn't a religious symbol but actually a commonly-recognized symbol for "dead person under here:"

Justice Antonin Scalia disagreed. "It's erected as a war memorial. I assume it is erected in honor of all the war dead." Eliasberg objected. "I have been in Jewish cemeteries. There is never a cross on a tombstone of a Jew," he said.

Scalia shot back angrily, "I don't think you can leap from that to the conclusion that the only war dead that the cross honors are the Christian war dead. I think that's an outrageous conclusion."

Well sure -- Jesus did allegedly die for all mankind (humankind, even, if we're going to get all PC and declare the inerrant word of The LORD some sort of living document) even though not everybody (i.e. communists, terrorists, The Dixie Chicks) are exactly delighted with the gesture. Who else would throw such pearls before swine?

Okay, maybe Brahma would, since many Hindus consider their religion to be universal as well (hey, you -- put the hamburger down -- your new secret religion demands it).

So, Justice Scalia -- try one of these on for size. Brahma might not have died for your sins, but hey -- He considers you one of his own. Which is a lot more than most of sane society is willing to do.

Muslim Monster Deity to Terrify Nation's Children on First Day of School

2009-09-05T02:18:00.002-05:00

Families across America are up in arms today over news that President Obama, Marxist Demon-Lord and Bearer of the All-Seeing Eye, will commence the Indoctrination of the Innocents at an unprecedentedly early date, addressing the nation’s last great hope on the very first day of school.

Wailing mothers beat their breasts in public, sobbing together over the cruel fate that was to befall their sons and daughters, exhorted by a foreign-born absolute monarch to help him rip America from its very foundations by studying hard and setting goals.

Stylus Newington from Hialeah FL summed up his plight as he stood by the side of Interstate 95 in his pajamas, talking frantically on his cell phone while several children, the seed of his loins, bearers of his lineage and his pride and joy, peered anxiously out the windows of his Ford Explorer. “At this point I don’t know what I can do to keep ‘em from brainwashing my children by talking to ‘em on the teevee. I’m currently wavering between jumping off a cliff with them Okinawa-style or just selling ‘em into prostitution and hoping for the best.”

Protestations from the White House that the president was merely going to urge America’s children to strive to do great things and use his own life story as an example seemed to fall on unsympathetic ears. Wynona Mulligan, in the midst of refueling her Hummer H-3 before heading for the hills, gestured to the three children and two Wiemerauners asleep in the back. “If Obama’s rhetoric infects my children and little Placenta, Pikachu and Palin2012 become socialists, I – I won’t know what to do,” she confessed in a breathy sob.

Several counties have already announced they will be seceding from the Union for the duration of President Obama’s speech in order to avoid being sent to internment camps for refusing to broadcast the terrifying epistle. “It seems like an extreme step to take,” said Harper Burnside, superintendent of Pomade County, Illinois, “especially since we have to vote to rejoin the union after the speech is over, and with this bunch you never know. But it’s a chance we’ll have to take if we want to keep the next generation from being enslaved with universal healthcare and such.”

Throughout the nation the usual good spirits of the long holiday weekend have been ruined by the anticipation of the demise of freedom as we know it. A suburban couple who refused to be identified stood in front of their house and displayed to us a cooler that had, on past Labor Day weekends, brimmed over with ground beef, t-bone steaks, bratwursts and giant turkey legs. Today, instead, fish heads and gristle swam in a solution of ice, squid ink and blood – a dinner of penance and gnashing of teeth. They held each other, cold in their simple burlap shifts, and cried.

"The Dream Shall Never Die."

2009-08-26T21:37:00.006-05:00

Late last night Senator Ted Kennedy died of cancer. While his career in the Senate was illustrious and his personal failings and hardships are well-known, his dream of the last decades of his life remains unfulfilled: that every American should have the benefits of the greatest healthcare system in the world without regard to their income or their station in life.

Right now we stand on the cusp of fulfilling that dream – a dream that would make America a more equitable nation where opportunity is not constantly overshadowed by the specter of crushing debt – or worse, life cut short – due to a person’s station in life or his bank balance when confronted with the awful choice of having expensive medical care or going without.

One of Kennedy’s great friends is Utah Senator Orrin Hatch, who co-wrote the above tribute to his friend and colleague. And yet Senator Hatch stands on the opposite side of Kennedy in the struggle for health care equality, still determined to thwart the ideal that all Americans should have access to the benefits of modern medicine that every member of Congress enjoys.

So here’s what I’m asking: Go to Senator Hatch’s YouTube page where he posted this song. Leave a polite and respectful comment urging Senator Hatch to fulfill Ted Kennedy’s legacy by voting for healthcare reform that would make the best of our national healthcare available to all. Please don’t argue with the folks who will disagree with you – this is Senator Hatch’s page and his personal tribute to his departed friend, and it wouldn’t be right to tarnish that. But one of the most ardent opponents of healthcare reform needs to hear our voices.

There’s no guarantee that it will change his vote. But if Senator Hatch hears our voices it will make it harder for him to vote against it, knowing he’ll be choking down the will of the people and forsaking a chance to make this land’s opportunity available to all of its citizens equally. And what a tribute it would be to see his friend’s dream realized.

Obama, Harper, Calderón Announce Socialist Monarchy, Ban Texas

2009-08-10T22:09:00.005-05:00

The three leaders of North America got together in Guadalajara today and, in a surprising move, suspended their nations’ constitutions and announced the formation of a socialist monarchy to be called Weedfarmgodblessamericacokedoutviolenceistan. The three co-kings then crowned themselves in a brief ceremony before appearing before the press in a hall decorated with their likenesses. Stephen Harper was portrayed as a crusading knight with some sort of implement – a rudimentary prosthesis? A primitive plumber’s helper? – across his knees to symbolize, one supposes, the primitive, Dark-Ages technology and state-of-nature brutality of your typical socialist regime, to which we can all look forward.

President Obama chose for his likeness a barely-clad Roman gladiator, wearing nothing but a few leather straps and a shortsword, and with a seemingly transparent left leg through which his femur, patella and tibia are clearly visible. It was not explained whether this was some sort of Muslim, neo-pagan or Masonic imagery, and the cowed press was too busy suppressing the truth about the president’s birth certificate to be bothered to ask.

And Mexican President Felipe Calderón, in perhaps the most audacious self-portrayal of the three, had himself represented as a shimmering luminescence that seemed to fill the hall with its Platonic idealization of the narcoterrorist corrupt socialist failed state.

As Harper explained during the Q&A session, “We just sat down and looked at each other and said, ‘You know, the time is right – let’s strike while the iron is hot.’ And so we just threw away the script and decided to unite in the name of long lines, labyrinthine bureaucracy, and driving the sick and the old to the depths of despair.”

“Now we each have different ways of achieving this,” boomed the resonant tenor of President Obama. “But the important thing is that we all learn from each other, so that we can build an enslaved populace with careful appreciation of the needs of each individual. Thus the Canadians can be lulled into a state of indifference with BC bud, curling and free doctor’s visits. The Mexicans can have a fiesta of maquilladoros, crappy beer and illiteracy. And we Americans can slowly numb ourselves with the rich blessings of pork rinds, pro wrestling and the Michael Jackson death investigation.”

At this point Mexican President Felipe Calderón said something, but as a citizen of GodBlessAmericastan, I haven’t bothered to learn a word of his native tongue, which I am pretty sure is not called Mexican. Let’s just say it sounded like he ordered every damn thing off the menu at El Rio Grande and move on.

And in another surprise move, the three monarchs announced that Texas was going to be expelled from North America. “Socialism, as we know,” explained King Barack I, “comes from the Greek term for surrender to the weak. For too long the rugged individualism of the great state of Texas – embodied by such larger-than-life heroes as Ronald Reagan, John Wayne and Antonio López de Santa Anna – has stood in the way of the success of the poor and lazy. We just couldn’t compete. But we would like Texas to know that we wish it nothing but the best, and know Texas will have nothing but success in its future endeavors. And we hear the Middle East is nice this time of year.”

It Was 48 Years Ago Today

2009-08-05T02:10:00.003-05:00

Happy Birthday, President Barack Obama. In honor of the day your first birth certificate was forged in some rudimentary hut in the wilds of the Rift Valley, I hereby present this family portait of the formidable forces of Truth and Justice arrayed against you.

Go easy on them, okay?

Appeased Opponents of Healthcare Bill Still Hate It

2009-08-01T01:08:00.010-05:00

He was only five-foot-three
Girls could not resist his stare --
Henry Waxman was never called an asshole...

Well the healthcare bill finally passed a vote in Henry Waxman's Energy and Commerce Committe. And you know who was still complaining about it? If you guessed that liberal Democrats were whining about there not being a chain of national organic cafeterias or a clause requiring a five-month wait to set a broken leg, guess again. According to The Huffington Post, it was the Republicans. Apparently the bill doesn't suck enough:

Republicans expressed disappointment that the Blue Dogs were unable to water the bill down more or cut the public option entirely. "You allowed them to pick the color of the lipstick that's going on this pig," Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) grumbled to Waxman shortly before the amendments were added to the bill.

Maybe this type of gratitude will finally convince the remaining Democratic holdouts that there's a difference between reaching across the aisle and surrendering to the losers.

Strategy Comes to Afghanistan

2009-07-01T23:38:00.004-05:00

The US Marines have launched a major offensive in the southern Afghan province of Helmand, officials announced this morning. About 4,000 Marines and 650 Afghan soldiers and police will spend the first 36 hours of the operation inserting into position with the use of 50 aircraft. The purpose of the mission, named Operation Khanjar, or Thrust of the Sword, is to secure areas under control or threat of control by the Taleban in the lower Helmand River valley.

General Stanley McChrystal, who took over as allied commander in Afghanistan in June, described the essential thrust of counterinsurgency operations during his confirmation hearing:

"Although I expect stiff fighting ahead, the measure of success will not be enemy killed. It will be shielding the Afghan population from violence.”

At long last our focus is turning towards Afghanistan, and better yet, towards the right approach there. For too long the strategy seems to have been to keep a lid on things and insist that our NATO allies carry more of the burden. In spite of success in Afghanistan being so obviously achievable – all we had to do was offer the people a better and safer life than they had under the Taleban – the war there has slogged on for eight years. Let’s hope this latest effort is the most sincere and effective in bringing security, stability and democracy to the Afghan people.

In view of that, there are two important things we should be concerned about.

Are we coordinating this offensive with Pakistan? Part of it will be along the Pakistani border. If instead of crushing the Taleban in Helmand, we just push them back beyond the Pakistan frontier then we haven’t fixed the problem, only moved its consequences somewhere else.

Do we have enough troops and support to do the job right? Too often a military operation in Afghanistan has dominated the headlines only for the real objective to fade away, either from lack of support or lack of commitment to the operation. Ultimately it’s the Afghan people who suffer and who lose respect for allied troops, ensuring that operations in that area are more difficult next time.

If President Obama and General McChrystal’s strategy is supported by the resources and determined focus of the United States, it will bring the Afghan people the better life whose promise has hung over them like a tantalizing fruit for almost a decade. Let’s hope it’s not too late.

Red Alert -- Flying Stingrays!

2009-06-30T22:53:00.007-05:00

Now we're just plain doomed. Stingrays can fly.

Okay, I sort of knew this before, mostly because a woman was killed by a flying spotted eagle ray about a year ago. But hearing about it is one thing -- actually seeing a stingray flapping for its life is entirely another. This one, apparently, was being chased by a pod of orcas.

This flying stingray was trying to avoid the attentions of the aptly-named killer whale, which was ready to take a bite out of the fish when the stingray made its leap for safety.

This all happened in Auckland, New Zealand, and to the delight -- and I'm sure a bit of horror at seeing animals eat each other -- of a school full of children, who rushed out of class to watch.

Surprisingly, nobody seems too concerned about the potential rain of terrorist poison darts from the sky. If only we fools had listened to Dick Cheney.

Location of St. Paul's Grave Less Certain than Evolution

2009-06-29T21:44:00.004-05:00

Some bone fragments inside the purported tomb of St. Paul (aka Saul of Tarsus) have been carbon dated to the general time period of his death. This, according to Pope Benedict XVI,

“…seems to confirm the unanimous and undisputed tradition that these are the mortal remains of the Apostle St. Paul.”

Well, no – they don’t confirm anything. Rather, they’re consistent with the assumption that the remains are those of Saul of Tarsus. They could also be the remains of his neighbor, his papyrus deliveryman or some farmer who happened to die around the same time. It rules out that these were the bones of William Shakespeare, Helen of Troy or any of the billions of people born in the last few hundred years. Of course, since the sarcophagus stands in the Basilica of St. Paul, originally built by Emperor Constantine over the saint's purported grave some 250 years after Paul’s execution, this doesn’t really tell us anything more than we already knew. And the pope would know that if he knew how science worked.

Unfortunately, the head of one of the world’s largest denominations thinks that science should be secondary to faith. Not that this is surprising – it’s the error committed by most faith-based thought, from religions to political philosophies to fads like The Secret and numerology. But science starts with facts and only declares an overarching concept valid if the facts are preponderantly in its favor, and only then on a probationary basis pending any contradictory evidence. Religion and other forms of sloppy thinking start with the overarching concepts, then pick and choose the facts they want to support their idea. One of these ways of thinking has found out more in the last 400 years than the other has done in the last 10,000 – you decide which should trump the other.

So if the pope wants to learn something about religion, he should start by trying to understand science. And if that leads him to understand how religion can be so consistently wrong about so many things for such a long time, then so much the better.

Unattended Conference a Huge Success

2009-06-28T15:56:00.002-05:00

Climate change activists must be thrilled to finally be getting their point across. The House of Representatives just narrowly passed an emissions cap-and-trade bill; automakers finally seem to be taking hybrid cars seriously; and climate scientists have stopped flying to climate-change conferences.

The BBC is reporting that Dr. Larch Maxey of the University of Swansea, Wales, has turned down an invitation to fly to Washington DC for an international conference, citing the carbon cost:

He said the plane journey across the Atlantic would use several years' worth of his carbon share and now others invited to attend have followed suit.
Instead they taking part in the event via video link.

It's wonderful that Dr. Maxey is actually living by his principles. And while it's unfortunate that he's showing up everybody who would love to attend the next such global-warming blowout in Aruba or Pango Pango or Goa, it does tend to lend credibility to your concern if you opt for the video link over the free trip.

So cheers, in this month of scandals, to someone who isn't a hypocrite. Now here's a real moral dilemma: would it be worth the carbon costs to have him fly over here to teach that ability to Mark Sanford and John Ensign?

The Triumph of Everyday Communication

2009-06-22T22:24:00.009-05:00

As the Iranian government has rushed to close off avenues of communication to the outside world, internet-savvy Iranians have countered the isolation by appropriating channels used for the most mundane information. Twitter, so often a font of regret to politicians too willing to share their every thought, has come into its own as a way of telling the world about the atrocities the Iranian government is perpetrating up its citizens.

So much so that Noam Cohen wrote yesterday in praise of the usefulness of Twitter and Blogger and other such online tools -- not because they are specialized, but because they are general. When the election in Kenya in 2007 resulted in riots and death, the Kenyan blogging community got the news out to the world.

It turned out, he said, that “Kenya has the second-most bloggers in Africa and that mostly they are not writing about politics; many are writing about rugby.” There was, he said, “a fascinating latent capacity — people who knew how to use the tools, knew how to write well, to tell a story with words and pictures.”

Now the same thing is happening in Iran. And the people covering it are the Iranian bloggers and twitterers who had to find their own ways of getting in touch with the world. And the ones who shared recipes and LOLcats and stories of someone almost getting abducted at the nearby mall, who were cutting their teeth on the mundane, were suddenly prepared for the extraordinary.

Does this mean that The Last Starfighter is in some way prophetic? No, that's too awful to think about. Let's just take pride in the human spirit, urge our fellow beings on, and not worry about bad science fiction. Tomorrow we can go back to making fun of Pete Hoekstra's abominable twitters -- today we celebrate the desire of everyone to be free.

Free Energy Too Expensive

2009-06-17T04:17:00.006-05:00

For decades every geek has dreamed of a world powered by fusion – the conjoining of atoms under intense heat and pressure that, due to the relationship between energy and mass, produces a huge amount of power – the nuclear physics equivalent of a marriage between Donald Trump and Richard Simmons. A constant supply of energy would be available practically for free for the benefit of everyone: since there would be no emissions, there would be no greenhouse gases; since it fed on cheap hydrogen in a self-sustaining way, it would pay for itself; and since it took energy out of the global power equation, it would reduce intenational tensions.

Now, though, after almost 80 years of research, that impression might be trapped in a blind alley. Expenses and technical hurdles threaten to hold up progress on workable fusion reactors, if they don’t send them the way of the flying car, the self-regulating finance market or the cheap, light suspension bridge. A meeting of the governing council of Iter, the world’s largest fusion reactor, could scale back the planned machine. In the face of a combination of cost overruns and huge technical challenges, fusion itself might suddenly be decades further from realization.

While the money – $16 billion – isn’t peanuts, it shouldn’t be impossible to find. Fusion could make its inventors filthy rich and save governments many times their initial investment. That it’s a huge source of clean energy means it would pay for itself in lack of environmental degradation alone.

Technical problems, though, might stymie the project forever. As a research director opposed to Iter’s direction summarizes:

"The most difficult problem is the problem of materials. Some time ago I declared that fusion is like trying to put the Sun in a box - but we don't know how to make the box.

"The walls of the box, which need to be leak tight, are bombarded by these neutrons which can make stainless steel boil. Some people say it is just a question of inventing a stainless steel which is porous to let these particles through; personally I would have started by inventing this material."

Of course if scientists and engineers insisted on solving the most difficult problems before tackling the easier ones, we’d still be poking twigs into anthills to get our dinner. Progress in science is a steady expansion, not a series of giant technological leaps – the physicists who’ve been working on fusion for decades can tell you that.

If it’s funding they need, then $16 billion can be scrounged from somewhere. Hell, that only comes to five years of Merrill-Lynch bonuses. And if the engineering problems prove insurmountable, then fine – but at least we should prove they’re insurmountable before we give up.

Democracy Still Worth Fighting For

2009-06-15T02:45:00.003-05:00

As someone who watched with a sick dread the 2000 election results and the sorry spectacles of the states-rights, anti-litigious Republican party taking a lawsuit from state court to the Supreme Court to stop the Florida recount, I feel a real admiration for – and am definitely shamed by – the protesters after the very likely stolen election in Iran. A sufficient number of protesters in the streets of Tallahassee demanding the full recount take place might not have tipped the balance in 2000 at any point. But I feel bad for not at least trying. And I’ve since tried to make up for it, so there’s that.

But here are people with a legitimate grievance. Their government has defrauded them, stolen power and made up a story about it, and is physically cracking down on anyone who says so. And yet the Iranian citizens, openly flouting all restrictions on freedom of expression, fill the streets to demand justice. They endure horrible beatings and some may be dead – yet the demand for justice, equal representation and the rule of law still impel people forward regardless of the risk.

Or maybe in response to it. It’s often when freedom of expression is threatened by force that freedom of expression shouts the loudest. One of the greatest advances of Humanism – the idea that all humans are inherently equal and start with the same basic rights – is the idea that revolution by persuasion can be at least as effective as revolution by violence. Peaceful revolution is inherently humanist because it seeks change without violating its own principles. It has won revolutions in the Soviet Union and almost all of its client states and former members, India and South Africa – which is an especially clear example because it wasn’t the ANC’s violent tactics but rather the organized peaceful protests that so captured the world’s imagination. Violent acts are easily condemnable and rob any group of its legitimate focus in its grievances. ETA, the Basque resistance group that operates around the French-Spanish coastal border, increasingly loses support for its legitimate claims about guarding the autonomy of one of Europe’s most unique cultures by its acts of violence. When the government oppressing you has the choice of calling you a freedom fighter or a criminal, which do you think it’s going to choose? So why give it the opportunity to justify such a claim?

Humanism – including treating people fairly and all that sissy-ass hippie soft-on-terrorism, soft-on-crime, assuring-people’s-basic-rights stuff that Dick Cheney so insists is making us less safe – happens to be the basis for our Constitution. And although the Constitution as originally written was based on the social contract – that government should serve the governed – it took enough states insisting on a Bill of Rights that carved the government’s limits in stone to get it ratified. All those hippie ideas like search warrants and freedom of the press that led to the abominations of Miranda rights and FOIA began with the impetus of the next tier down from the ruling class protecting its own interests. That they become universal rights is the logical culmination of humanism: the glaring contradictions become increasingly evident in a society that espouses equality but doesn’t practice it or even fully comprehend why it should.

Which is why President Obama’s election is such a triumph for humanism and equal treatment. With his emphasis on ending the extrajudicial treatment of the Guantanamo and black site inmates, on government transparency, opposition to Bush-era secret treaties, civil unions, a better-regulated economy and other issues, his general direction is towards a government for the benefit of the governed and an economy for the benefit of the consumer. That conservatives tend to call this class warfare neglects to mention that the war is being conducted by people who have been robbed of something that was theirs: the faith that a well-regulated economy was not in fact dominated by cheats, number-shufflers and MBAs who favored getting around the law over operating within it.

Additionally the overt clumsiness of the Iranian government’s reaction testifies to its unpreparedness for this vast electoral uprising – not to mention its intellectual laziness and consequent need to be given the heave-ho. The majority of the people have clearly understood that the moral authority that Ayatollah Khomeini carried into the Iranian revolution in 1979 never went so far as to authorize Sharia to be extended as far as it did. Iranian history since then has been a tug-of-war between religious fundamentalist potentates and a populace that still remembers any sliver of liberal freedom it read about or even personally enjoyed.

And now it has come to this: An Iranian populace that would rather shout from the rooftops than quietly admit it has been robbed. The greatness of the liberal humanist idea of government for the governed planted this seed. Last week President Obama reached out to the Muslim nations in a speech from Cairo. He gave Iranian voters a Great Satan with a smile on his face and an extended hand – and removed the saber-rattling, us-or-them exceptionalist adversarialist brinkmanship that has bullied the world into a passive-aggressive resistance.

This removed a major tool of the Ahmadenijad electoral impetus – that the United States was threatening war and needed to be stood up to by a unanimous opposition. Sound familiar? Yeah it’s amazing how much an imminent threat – either real or manufactured – can motivate a populace into thinking out of fear and not reason. Especially if they’re not taught reason in the first place, but let’s not worry about that for now.

President Obama’s speech in Cairo made two innate promises to the Iranian people: that we would engage honestly with the Iranian people and that we would try to advance equality and the rule of law everywhere. Given that, the Obama government should press for complete transparency in Iran’s election process. Iran does not currently allow independent election monitors, which is evident of a systematic mistrust of the electorate. President Obama, as a Constitutional scholar, should know that it’s never in the people’s best interest to blindly trust their government. The people are better off the more the government’s actions are available to public examination.
This has been the main course of the Obama candidacy and the Obama presidency – that America succeeds best when it represents its own values. It should always be reminded of – and never dissuaded from – doing this. As such, we as a nation should demand from Iran the openness and accountability that its civilians are being prevented from demanding of their civil service. We should push for it to acknowledge the legitimate results of the contest even its oppressive election councils approved of. Ayatollah Khatamei should concede that he left the door open to reform and should now admit it needs to take place. And if we’re going to negotiate with a government it might as well be the honestly elected one.

POTUS Is Just Another Four-Letter Word

2009-06-11T02:07:00.007-05:00

Just cold chillin' with your homies, a sixpack of Sierra Nevada and the solution to the Palestinian problem sketched out on the back of a napkin? That's the time to choose 1600 -- a complicated and nuanced fragrance by Obama.

You may think that a personal fragrance is the sum total of its creator's experience. You may be right, you may be wrong. All we know is that we have made mistakes. And we've learned from them. And the subtleties of the resultant fragrance are demanding yet fair, complex yet understandable. This isn't an apology -- this is a fragrance that is determined to restart the conversation.

1600.

Another Failed Bismarck with Delusions of Wisdom

2009-06-08T02:50:00.005-05:00

Henry Kissinger has, in The Washington Post, a classic case of neoconservative amnesia: he imagines, incomprehensibly, that there is a demand for his advice, while stealthily dropping hints that the Obama administration wants to let North Korea keep its nuclear weapons. Best of all though, Kissinger hews to a few clangy old ideas that happen to be drug out by every neocon as foreign policy panaceas: increase missile defense and fight terror.

One thing’s for certain: Kissinger deserves credit for sticking his horrible wares out there in the free market. Somewhere in Egypt there’s a guy trying to sell sketchy-looking pigs who realizes his might not be the toughest sales job in the world. But to insist, after a thorough repudiation of neoconservative brinksmanship, that “the issue for diplomacy has become whether the goal should be to manage North Korea's nuclear arsenal or to eliminate it” and then make sly innuendos that President Obama will adopt “acquiescence” to North Korea’s nuclear ambitions – when that country tested its first nuclear bomb in 2006 – seems like a huge display of historical revisionism if not simply mad cow disease.

In spite of the facts, Kissinger frets. “The negotiating process is on the verge of legitimizing North Korea's nuclear program by enabling Pyongyang to establish a fait accompli while diplomacy runs its stately course,” worries the great statesman. He seems unaware that North Korean nuclearization has been a fait accompli for about three years now. But he has suddenly discovered that the status quo is unsustainable:

Furthermore, some public statements imply the United States will try to deal with specific North Korean threats rather than eliminate the capability to carry them out. They leave open with what determination Washington will pursue the elimination of the existing stockpile of North Korean nuclear weapons and fissionable materials. It is not possible to undertake both courses simultaneously.

So the United States must pursue either an elimination of North Korea’s nuclear weapons or – um – deal with its various actions after they’ve happened? The neocons have finally discovered the ominous mushroom cloud of their speeches and dreams – in the rogue nation their sabre-rattling has long nurtured.

And how would our master diplomat, advisor to Dubya about Iraq, architect of the lasting peace in Vietnam and offerer of unsolicited advice handle such a threat? With missile defense and – um – a global response to terrorism:

The enhanced role of non-state actors with respect to terrorism would have to be addressed. The concepts of deterrence against state actors are familiar, though not in a world of multiple nuclear powers. They have little or no relevance to non-state actors operating by stealth.

So our reaction to North Korea must somehow involve an emphasis on non-state terrorism? It sounds curiously disconnected from reality that the most isolated regime in the world might somehow develop ties with fanatical Muslims in southwest Asia. But stranger things have happened. In an odd bit of symmetry, eight years ago the previous administration was focused on North Korea and missile defense at the exact same moment that it should have been focused on terrorism.

Maybe Mr. Kissinger is just trying to rectify that past miscalculation. Or maybe he’s continuing Dick Cheney’s legacy of advocating extralegal wars fought in the shadows. Either way, it’s a good reminder when the man most associated with the secret bombing of Cambodia so much as suggests sinister clandestine operations why we are overwhelmingly mistrustful of unchecked government authority. And in that sense it’s fitting, really, that Henry Kissinger will always stand as a powerful argument against his own advice.

Dick Cheney and the Christmas Pony

2009-06-02T04:09:00.007-05:00

Dick Cheney made a slight bit of news yesterday, and not by delivering his campfire-horror-story-style defense of his sanguinary, fact-free and failure-ridden approach to national security. No, it’s because he delivered a tepid endorsement of gay marriage while managing to frame it in terms of finding it utterly horrible. Said the master of tact:

“I think that freedom means freedom for everyone,” Cheney replied. “As many of you know, one of my daughters is gay, and it is something we have lived with for a long time in our family.”

It’s sweet that he manages to talk about Mary Cheney’s sexual orientation as though it’s leprosy and has afflicted the whole family with its terrible shadow. The Vice President is nothing if not resilient, though, and has borne up well under the strain. If a man can survive five draft deferments, he can survive the shame and humiliation of his daughter choosing an un-American lifestyle. Fortunately he has another daughter who is active in the fields of opposite marriage and ensuring that her daddy stays out of any war crimes trials.

It might be nice if Cheney’s strengths – his sullen and ruthless infighting, his ability to justify anything as long as it meant personal gain to himself or a loved one, and his tyrannical micromanaging of any task until it’s seen through to completion – would benefit humanity, if only for once. Besides, it would be ickily ironic if most states legalized gay marriage not for the right reason – that everybody deserves the same rights – but for the wrong reason – that children of privilege nagged their daddies until they got what they wanted.

Not that he seems inclined to apply such energy. Cheney shows all the enthusiasm of a hippie whose daughter wants a gun for Christmas – if he plays along for a while, she’ll probably forget the whole thing. So put whatever you want in that letter to Santa, Mary Cheney. Daddy’ll get around to it when the Lord stops afflicting him with your homosexuality.

How To Succeed in Bosnia without Really Lying

2009-05-21T01:40:00.006-05:00

My new favorite prognosticator of cooked-up Obama administration controversies, TheFoxNation.com, is now seething over a report that Vice President Biden, in speaking to the parliament of Bosnia-Herzegovina, recalled being fired upon during a 1993 visit to the capital, which was then under siege.

According to a reporter at the speech, Biden "recalled his trip to the country in 1993, and how, flying in at the time, his plane was fired upon, and bombed-out homes with snipers inside could be seen." And the eyes reflexively roll. Ah, Joe -- always out with something ridiculous.

What's funny though is that the statement doesn't sound like one of Joe Biden's typical gaffes. Biden just doesn't deliver the Hillaryesque landing-under-sniper-fire embellishments that start with a basis in reality and add on something unbelievable. No, his semantic seizures usually tend to be dumbass mistakes like telling a guy in a wheelchair to stand up, or reveal his inner unvarnished hick, such as when he said that you can't go into a 7-11 in Delaware without hearing an Indian accent. But making stuff up out of whole cloth? That's not really him.

And in fact the White House prepared statement doesn't mention Biden being shot at. Now maybe he mentioned having his plane shot at in a departure from his prepared statement. Maybe he made a joking reference to Hillary's famous remarks. Maybe the reporter simply misheard him -- or maybe the account is accurate. Since no video is currently available, the Times account can't be verified, nor can Biden's actual speech be viewed or understood in context. But the FoxNation folks haven't let that stop them -- expect this to be a right-wing meme, whether true or not, for a while.

Oh, and there's one more thing. Biden, in a moment of bracing diplomatic bluntness, told Bosnia-Herzegovina's assembled lawmakers that their best bet was to knit themselves into the European community, but that they were still on the wrong path to doing that. This forwardness is the privilege of Biden's being engaged in the region for almost two decades; and his pragmatic advice has the credibility of the diplomacy that culminated in the Dayton accords. But don't expect Republicans to notice that -- they're too busy trying to make tea party hors-d'oeuvres out of the crumbs of a successful foreign policy.

Chatter and Verse: Donald Rumsfeld's Bible-Themed Propaganda as an Art Form. A Bad, Tendentious, Horrible Art Form.

2009-05-18T01:04:00.005-05:00

In the latest bit of surprised-but-not-quite-shocked news, photographic evidence has emerged that while he was defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld used to decorate his briefings to President Bush with tasteful warrior photos captioned with Bible verses.

GQ, of all sources, released the information that Secretary Rumsfeld “appreciated” the cover designs. One might assume that Rumsfeld condescendingly figured Dubya would more readily agree to a plan, no matter how harebrained, as long as a Biblical verse was affixed to it. Having to explain why the Iraq situation was getting worse after six years probably went down a lot easier when the president saw a picture of American soldiers kneeling in prayer with an accompanying reassuring verse from Isaiah – these challenges are meant to test us, and let us not lose our resolve, came the message. The subsequent and detailed bad news was probably drowned with syrup, butter and small talk.

And yet the overwhelming reaction on viewing the images is that they’re just craptacular. Let’s be honest – if you’re going to put together a spirited, patriotic, Jesus-referencing, crying-eagle-on-a-rock type of cover, you could do much better than this slop. Henceforth are some suggestions.

Ol’ Ecclesiastes was the liberal elite of his generation – always talking pretty and making the impetuous and belligerent look stupid. He hated America waaaay before it was cool, so he’d be into this. Is there a time for war crimes tribunals?

Samuel was pretty much the Bismarck of his time – on the cusp of forming a nation. Unfortunately the nation was being built on the remains of the people who lived there before, so Israel’s various neighbors had to go. Since we don’t have that excuse in Iraq, maybe we should invoke a pointless biblical parallel instead and hope for the best.

“Let’s be honest here. I don’t know what Daddy did or why he did it, but I promise I’ll do more of it. Except anything that Reagan wouldn’t have done. And then some. But you’re not gonna believe that shit. Just hold on to your britches.”

Which makes me appreciate all the more what some of the newer briefings might look like:

Pete Hoekstra’s Vapid Attack

2009-05-14T02:33:00.005-05:00

Well it’s happening again. The Republicans, beset on many fronts by the successes of the Obama administration and torn from within by arguments over whether their party should try to live in the present or just close the curtains and pretend every day was Januay 19, 1989, have opted to attack when the situation calls for retreat and have thrown a bucket of mud on Nancy Pelosi – specifically, Representative Pete Hoekstra (R – MI) released a document on May 8 that he said proves the speaker of the House is lying about when she knew the administration was practicing torture: “The bottom line is she and her key staff, they all knew about it,” Hoekstra said.

The only problem, however, is that a reasonable person looking at the document sees no terribly compelling proof. The alleged record is an image of a spreadsheet, with names and dates and often just the vaguest summary of what took place at a meeting. The relevant briefing in question is described, in its entirety, as “Briefing on EITs* including use of EITs on Abu Zubaydah, background on authorities, and a particular desciption of the EITs that had been employed.” Yet it has no author, no date of publication, no sources, and offers no proof of anything. There are no signatures or initials of attendees and not even a mention of how long the meetings lasted. It looks like the world’s most-hastily-assembled CYA memo.

Even the Director of Central Intelligence, Leon Panetta, refuses to vouch for its authenticity. In a cover letter that was often mentioned in articles but surprisingly hard to track down, Panetta declares that “this information, however, is drawn from the past files of the CIA and represents MFRs** completed at the time and notes that summarized the best recollections of those individuals. In the end, you and the Committee will have to determine whether this information is an accurate reflection of what actually happened.” Basically this is the CIA’s best guess at the past.

And it’s apparently not much of a guess, either. Already Pelosi has cast doubt on the sweeping conclusion that Hoekstra derived from the meeting summary’s single sentence. She has insisted that while torture techniques were discussed, they weren’t mentioned as actually having been used, only approved for use, and that waterboarding wasn’t mentioned at the briefing she attended. In addition, Senators Jay Rockefeller and Bob Graham have both come forward disputing the content of the report with respect to briefings where they are mentioned. Graham says that waterboarding wasn’t mentioned in his briefing, and Rockefeller didn’t attend his briefing at all.

If the accuracy and credibility of this report weren’t questionable enough, there remains the fact that regardless of what was disclosed to Pelosi, there was very little she could do about it – she wasn’t allowed to take notes or consult a lawyer about the briefing. To argue that this redress-bereft acceptance of knowledge represents complicity requires a Madoffian level of intellectual accounting.

The final insult, of course, lies in the fact that Representative Hoekstra implied with his accusation of Pelosi: that to be told a fact, after the fact, implies a shared responsibility that would cause the speaker to back down from pushing any torture investigations. As though her role is so similar to the John Yoos and Jay Bybees and Alberto Gonzaleses of this episode to give her some pause. As though she wouldn’t know the difference between the criminals and the witnesses.

The hearings should be very clarifying, Mr. Hoekstra.

*EIT stands for Enhanced Interrogation Technique – or, as I like to call it, Elsewhere It’s Torture.
**Memorandum for the Record.

Def Takes a Holiday

2009-04-29T00:51:00.006-05:00

This evening I had the pleasure of sharing an after-dinner beverage with Wonkette’s two associate editors, Jim Newell and Sara K. Smith. They both blogged that they were trapped in a hellhole in the deep south among the cattails, humans incapable of motion under their own power, and Lincoln among the Cupolas. I thought the scene looked familiar and after a few arrangements we met in front of the Berkley Hotel, where our exhausted heroes were disgorged after a grueling three-hour tour at one of Richmond’s better-known dining establishments. They had arrived discussing Tycho Brahe, and whether the story was true that he had died of a burst bladder. Not an auspicious beginning.

And then they would be off the next morning at a ridiculous hour, as though half a day in Richmond gave any sense of its history. You can walk across Richmond in half a day – to talk abou it could take a year straight without any interruptions, corrections or going back over known territory.

We talked for a while about scandalous stuff. I’m too incapacitated to remember any of the details, but there was lots of it. You would be shocked.

And then suddenly the waiter began muttering “get the fuck out of here” as he walked past us. It seemed like we should go. Outside we chatted with a nice couple from Vladivostok about the standard of living in DC. I slipped into my car wondering if I had made a good impression. If I don’t hear from the CDC tomorrow I’ll call it a yes.

Like a Rock: If You Thought GM's Stock Sucked, Just Look at Their Pension Fund

2009-04-24T03:02:00.007-05:00

You might think our recent economic trouble – whether you call it a recession, a depression, or enforced cannibalism – has hit bottom and is about to start turning around. Recently President Obama saw a glimmer of hope in the economy – mortgage refinancing is up, for instance. And even though it’s a small and subjective measurement, things have been looking up. Alas in the economy, as in many hospitals, a patient in critical condition can perk up right before he rolls over and dies.

Unfortunately the bailouts and potential bankruptcies of General Motors and Chrysler have revealed a long-standing and disturbing truth – their pension funds are short about $49 billion, and our choices, as the responsible corporate socialists that we have become, are both few and painful. We can either spend money bailing out the pension and health plans that the auto companies have underfunded for decades, or we can let retirees work as Wal-Mart greeters and sell their kidneys for spare change.

Reasonable peole might look at the books of major corporations with pension plans and wonder how we arrived at this ugly impasse. After all, the greatest minds of several generations were allegedly focused for decades on making the United States the world’s economic powerhouse, churning out goods faster and cheaper than anywhere else in the world. Turns out that most companies just made big promises and hoped they could keep them years down the road.

When the brilliant people in charge of your corporation’s pension fund didn’t meet their projected growth rate – or, heaven forbid, lost money – they would compensate with what’s popularly known as the gambler’s fallacy. They would put more money on riskier bets in the hopes that they’d strike it big and everything would work out:

On the investment side, pension plans cover over their funding shortfalls first by assuming future returns on equities that, while possible, are not guaranteed. The assumption makes funds look healthier than they are, and drives their investments deeper into the stock market.

Is it comforting to find out that people with years of training and allegedly great financial acuity were acting like drunk vacationing neophytes at a Las Vegas craps table? Then you’ll be thrilled to know that the people who guaranteed that money did the same damn thing.

Maybe the people protesting President Obama’s acquisition of corporate power are rightly afraid that the federal government is a bad manager and not really responsive to the interests of the people. If that’s so, then they’re a few decades late in looking out for the little guy. Right now we’re all the owners of a hundred billion dollars of IOUs for the retirement and health care plans of our friends, families and neighbors. We’re going to have to pony up somehow, and it’s going to be painful and expensive. But at least the worst alternative – which the free marketers keep advocating in spite of the facts – is one we can eliminate quickly. The people who lost all our pension funds in the first place have absolutely no business managing them anymore.

Torture in the Cathedral: How Petty Politics Subverted Our Best National Character

2009-04-22T02:34:00.003-05:00

NOTE: This is an analysis of the just-released report of the Senate Armed Services Committee's report on detainee abuse. I have limited my coverage to a section of the Executive Summary, although there's much much more to go through. As limited as it is, the story of how an unprepared bureaucracy was used to justify torture is worth telling. The Committee's report can be found linked in two parts at the bottom of this page. All citations are from part I of that document unless otherwise noted. Any spelling or grammatical errors are likely mine in transcribing it from its original pdf format.

Late in the evening of April 21, 2009, the Senate Armed Services Committee released its report on detainee abuse. This report focused on the chain of events that led from Donald Rumsfeld’s authorization of torture (i.e. harsh or otherwise euphemized interrogation tactics) to the spread of such tactics throughout the theaters in the Bush War on Terror, including Abu Ghraib prison.

The report’s executive summary and conclusion sections by themselves are a cold foray into the banality of evil. From its evidence a careful reader can glean traces of the internecine bureaucratic battles between Donald Rumsfeld and his allies and the established forces that – in this case at least – tried to preserve the rule of law against the buildup of an autocratic feifdom. From nearly the beginning of the War on Terror, Secretary Rumsfeld sought for the military unprecedented and clearly illegal leeway to use torture on detainees. The Senate Armed Service’s Committee’s report documents, in rather bland and acronym-heavy language, how the administration carried out this task, propping up a flimsy legal framework when it could and simply ignoring other legal hazards when it had to.

The story begins three months after the September 11, 2001 attacks, with a relatively small arm of the Department of Defense called the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency, which is charged with “training American personnel to resist techniques considered illegal under the Geneva Conventions.” Its most famous activity is the SERE school, which stands for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape. Soldiers going through SERE school are subjected to the kinds of rough treatment they might expect to endure if they had been captured in 1950s Korea – brutal uses of force intended to break them down and elicit false confessions to be used for propaganda purposes.

For some reason, JPRA was the group that Rumsfeld turned to when the US captured several high-value detainees, among them Khalid Sheikh Mohammad and abu Zubaydah. According to a McClatchy article, the adminstration’s goals were twofold – to find out what other al-Qaida plots were in the pipeline and to uncover the fabled Iraq-al-Qaida connections that could be used to justify the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. The continual lack of good information – especially of the latter type – spurred the use of harsher techniques.

A month after Rumsfeld solicited JPRA’s assistance with developing torture techniques, President Bush signed a memorandum stating that the US was not going to abide by the Geneva Conventions in the case of al-Qaida and Taleban operatives (p. xiii). Rumsfeld was set to shove his interrogation tactics through that open door and set up whatever justification was necessary to make it look acceptable.

In the process of appropriating JPRA and the SERE school techniques away from their original mission to one of interrogation, a number of red flags went up throughout the military establishment. First of all (p. xvii) “SERE techniques were ‘developed to better prepare US military personnel to resist interrogations and not as a means of obtaining reliable information.’” Furthermore, the Committee concluded that JPRA had never conducted any investigation into which, if any, techniques garnered reliable information.

Not that that seemed to matter. In the months that followed, JPRA, in conjunction with other elements of the military and the CIA, drafted plans to use SERE school techniques, including waterboarding, on the high-value detainees. Meanwhile, at the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel, Jay Bybee was assiduously redefining torture to accommodate whatever new techniques would be tried out on America’s captives (p. xv).

With the groundwork now set for the application of torture, the first place the Defense Department would try them would be at Guantanamo Bay, where a makeshift prison camp for enemy combatants had been set up. On October 11, 2002, Major General Michael Dunlavey, in charge of the Gitmo detainees, formally requested use of the SERE school techniques. His backing legal analysis came from Lt. Col. Diane Beaver, who fully expected a more comprehensive rationale to be executed by a higher authority. General Dunlavey’s request worked its way up to the General Richard Myers, head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who solicited opinions from throughout the military (p. xvii).

The reaction was swift and certain: Objections to Lt. Col. Beaver’s analysis, as well as to the techniques themselves, came from the Air Force, the Navy, the Marine Corps, DOD’s Criminal Investigative Task Force and the Chief of the Army’s Internal and Operational Law Division. General Myers’ chief legal counsel, then-Captain (now Rear Admiral) Jane Dalton, initiated a thorough legal review of the proposed procedures in light of the avalanche of troubled responses from the military establishment. According to her testimony, she made DOD Chief Legal Counsel Jim Haynes aware of her actions (p. xviii).

Shortly afterwards, however, General Myers put a stop to Dalton’s review, apparently at Haynes’ request. The Committee’s evidence points to Secretary Rumsfeld growing impatient with the review and pressing for a recommendation before the investigation was stopped. However, only Captain Dalton seems to remember Myers and Haynes calling a halt to her analysis. The general and the lawyer expressed no recollection of the events, although they didn’t object to Dalton’s testimony.

Haynes then issued a one-page memo allowing the SERE school techniques on the Gitmo detainees. When asked by the Senate Committee what his legal basis was for his conclusions, he cited only Lt. Col. Beaver’s legal analysis, which legal authorities throughout the military had called “woefully inadequate” and which she herself had expected would be supplemented by more thorough studies.

Thus did Donald Rumsfeld and the advocates of torture roll over decades of civilized advance in the conduct of war, in the process severely tarnishing America’s image abroad, not to mention turning back the clock on the history of humanistic principles. You might imagine such a momentous decision made only after thorough deliberations by the most erudite minds of the nation in a time of great peril. And while the peril existed, it’s shameful to see that threat held up not as a pretext for fighting a great and principled battle, but as an excuse to trash the values we hold dear.

Determination and fortitude will be necessary to uncover and undo the damage that Rumsfeld and other petty bureaucrats have wrought over the previous eight years. And after that, ideally, prosecutions and convictions will convince anyone longing to follow in their footsteps that this country won’t stand for it.

You Can't Even Torture Some of the People Some of the Time

2009-04-17T04:32:00.010-05:00

Hey everybody, there’s good news on the torture front. First of all, we definitely do not torture. This is the official opinion of the Bush administration on August 1, 2002, in a memo released just yesterday by the Obama White House.

The August 2002 memo’s author, Jay Bybee (who is a federal appellate judge now, if that makes you feel any better) was head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel at the time. The OLC originally functioned to advise the president on the legality of proposed actions; however during the Bush years it turned into an apologist and justifier for the most sordid form of American exceptionalism: that because our nation advocated human rights and liberty, anything we did in their name was justified. Essentially, since we’re the world’s supernanny, it’s okay if we beat the children.

Bybee served for two years as the mind behind this ethos of exceptionalism – and while his 2002 memo is not brilliant work (an NYU law and ethics professor called it “abysmal”), it gave the executive branch enough wiggle room to say it was justified in using several dicey techniques against al-Qaida travel agent abu Zubaydah, including sleep deprivation, slamming his head against walls, forcing him to stand for days on end until he risked embolisms and renal failure, and other practices classified as torture under the Geneva Conventions.

Advocates of torture have long argued that today’s circumstances call for extraordinary measues in dealing with detainees. Today’s religious fanatics apparently put SS troops, kamikaze pilots, Ghurkas and berserkers to shame. The only way to deal with al-Qaida and its associated threats (including innocent cabbies and people whose relatives we killed) is with some sort of muscular pose hastily ripped from a 24 episode’s rough draft. Unfortunately the memo’s prose doesn’t come from the sort of bloody-knuckled streetfighter you would imagine favored torture – rather, it exhibits the logical contortions of an oleaginous schoolboy trying to kiss up to the headmaster while hiding from ideas he does not fully understand. For instance, here is Bybee’s take on pain and suffering:

“Pain and suffering” as used in Section 2340 is best understood as a single concept, not distinct concepts of “pain” as distinguished from “suffering.” See Section 2340 Memorandum at 6n.3. The waterboard, which inflicts no pain or actual harm whatsoever, does not, in our view inflict “severe pain or suffering.” Even if one were to parse the statute more finely to attempt to treat “suffering” as a distinct concept, the waterboard could not be said to inflict severe suffering. The waterboard is simply a controlled acute episode, lacking the connotation of a protracted period of time generally given to suffering.

All clear now? Bybee shows an immense faith in the idea that future legal scholars will be embroiled in a debate over whether torture had to constitute both pain and suffering or merely one item. While Bybee might be capable of regurgitating dogma about the Transubstantiation if spoon-fed it slowly enough, it is clear that his mind is not capable of arriving at the truth when armed only with facts.

And maybe the Bush administration sought to keep this work of legal ingenuity secret for so long because they knew what an embarrassment it would be if publicized. Either way, the fact that the Obama administration released it with almost no redactions whatsoever shows two things: that the memo held no critical national security secrets, and that the Bush administration’s arguments that revealing such memos would somehow compromise the deterrent effect of torture was an empty one.

Bybee exhibits a corrupt peanut plant inspector’s disregard for oversight when he cites the CIA’s own research into the safety of sleep deprivation: “Your review of the literature uncovered no empirical data on the use of these procedures, with the exception of sleep deprivation for which no long term health consequences resulted.” In fact, the CIA published a manual in 1963 outlining the debilitating effects of such treatment. Accounts by people who suffered sleep deprivation have been around for decades before that. John Schlapobersky was tortured using sleep deprivation in South Africa in the 1960s, and described its effects vividly:

“I was kept without sleep for a week in all. I can remember the details of the experience, although it took place 35 years ago. After two nights without sleep, the hallucinations start, and after three nights, people are having dreams while fairly awake, which is a form of psychosis.

“By the week’s end, people lose their orientation in place and time—the people you’re speaking to become people from your past; a window might become a view of the sea seen in your younger days. To deprive someone of sleep is to tamper with their equilibrium and their sanity.”

Bybee, acting as Dubya’s legal enabler, justified sleep deprivation for up to eleven days – well into the realm of causing deep psychosis. And while later accounts bear out that most of the information extracted from abu Zubaydah was useless, the relentless torture did at least succeed in revealing one deep, dark national security threat – that we, as a people, are almost as barbaric as the ethos we profess to fight. Ideally, bringing these torture memos to light will inspire us not to abandon our defense of our civilization – but to renew it from behind the bastion of our humanist values and not just our basest fears.

Ghost in the Graveyard: Is the War on Terror Really Dead?

2009-03-31T02:07:00.004-05:00

Jake Tapper, Teddy Davis and Kirit Radia at ABCNews.com think the War on Terror – the phrase at least – might be over. Or not. While there is no apparent continuation of its use since the previous administration, it doesn’t seem to be officially banned either. The sole shred of evidence of its demise is a context-free memo asking an unnamed recipient not to use it. Tapper and his colleagues have either a mako-like acuity for tiny concentrations of blood in the water or else they’re stumbling around in the dark looking for their car keys.

Although in fairness the term deserves to be cut loose to languish in some historical backwater – for it was a McMansion of a phrase: an ugly brick fortress rising up over a garage and swallowing a moderately-terraced entryway, dotted throughout with a hodgepodge of bay windows, turrets, the occasional exposed rafter, a kitchen bar and butcherblock table opening onto a tiki-themed Florida room. It was a meaningless pastiche designed more to frighten and impress the neighbors than to address any single goal. Most egregiously, cloaking the strategic blunder of invading Iraq, its horrible planning, the White House’s inability to adjust to evolving battlefield conditions and the institutionalization of abhorrent practices were given cover of the entirely rational attack upon the Taleban and al-Qaida in Afghanistan after September 11, 2001.

The War on Terror is not the naming of enemies, like the Franco-Prussian War or the French and Indian War. It does not name a purpose the way The War of Spanish Succession or the War for Independence does – these tell you at least what the war is about. The War on Terror almost reeks of a semantic cover for something much nastier and controversial coming up. Having bought the loyalty of the frightened, The War on Terror told us the government was about to make us watch it beat up a kid and take his candy, otherwise we were out of the club. And we knew as we watched, sick to our stomach, that it was only going to get worse.

As a name, The War on Terror buys into the jingoistic hoopla that comes out of the mouths of fourth-graders building a fort in the backyard. Tapper reminds us of an incident during a Democratic debate in which there was a show of hands asked of candidates who believed there was a Global War on Terror. Was is really only two years ago that legitimate reporters were asking this question? Now it seems that we’re concerned with strategic alignments of tribes in Pakistan’s Baluchistan and how much infrastructure to invest in schools and roads in Afghanistan. The difference? We’re not constricting our thinking in the moral straitjacket of some Tom and Jerry plot, where opponents trade blows with hammer and chainsaw until one is eventually beaten into submission. Free to handle tactical problems as tactical problems, the coalition in Afghanistan can attempt to win the battlefield – which in a guerilla insurgency is always the population – in practical steps rather than bullying our way into the hearts of the Afghan people. The War against The Taliban and al-Qaida is now something to win, rather than amorphous cover for a snakeball of cockeyed global domination projects.

If this is a return to sanity, then, let us make the most of it – you never know how long these things last. Any old alcoholic can wake up shivering on a curb, in his bare feet, covered in his own filth and swear never to end up that way again. It’s the serious ones who find a way to stay on the wagon. We as a nation need to re-establish the checks and balances among the three branches of government. Never again should the executive be allowed to claim sole power and determine that it should oversee itself. This is just as bad an idea in government as it is in the derivatives market.

Finally we should prosecute the people who led us down this road of madness in the first place: those who authorized torture and warrantless wiretapping, who manufactured evidence to lead us to war, who covered their own ineptness with official secrecy, who wilfully flouted the laws of civilized behavior, and who used the Constitution as though it were the Lead Pipe of Freedom, a self-rationalizing cudgel whose bearer could do no wrong. Many of the architects of Bush’s administration admired the Nixon White House’s approach to the world – and if they’re not thoroughly repudiated, they’ll stand as a shining example to the next generation of oversimplifying, paranoid Napoleons waiting to take their turn wrapped in the flag.

When Awful Things Happen to Terrible People

2009-03-29T03:41:00.010-05:00

Spring, that heartening season when life returns to the world, brings on a wonderful sense of renewal and restoration of a long-lost balance: migratory birds start arriving home, bugs and flowers peep out of the ground and begin celebrating the warm, moist days – and a Spanish prosecutor contemplates indicting Alberto Gonzales for war crimes.

Gonzales has garnered himself a coveted niche in the annals of American jurisprudence – he rose from a hapless Texas yes-man to then-governor George W. Bush to the yes-man for the Bush administration’s initiatives to keep Afghan prisoners out of the reach of any criminal authority in his stint as legal counsel to the president, and from there ascended to Attorney General, inspiring many Americans to do something they never thought possible: miss the wisdom and sober judgment of John Ashcroft.

Currently Spanish judge Baltazar Garzon is considering an indictment against Gonzales and others in the Bush Justice Department for authorizing torture – a term which elicited, in a White House noted for its disdain for such fancy ideas as ethical relativism, an almost reverential degree of nuance, ambiguity and downright confusion. On January 25, 2002, Gonzales issued a memo calling a long-standing treaty against abuse of detainees “obsolete,” while in its defense the Bush administration adamantly declared, “We do not torture.” As though, possibly, the legal opinion that the Geneva Conventions were outmoded was really only a commentary on their oh-so-1950s typeface.

Then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, another cautious and deliberate figure when it came to matters of law, issued a memo the very next day that Afghan detainees would receive protection only "to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity." While there is no evidence that Rumsfeld also issued thumbscrews and fireplace pokers to relevant combat units, this was probably an oversight on his part, as he was extremely busy underequipping and underplanning the subsequent invasion of Iraq because of the urgent fear that Saddam Hussein might commit more human rights abuses.

Subsequent investigation has shown a direct link between Gonzales’ authorization of policies that go beyond limitations of US law to cases of torture and abuse that riddled the military for years afterwards, from the waterboarding of high-value detainees to the torture of prisoners held without charge at Guantanamo Bay to the beating to death of a cabbie in Bagram in US custody to the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

You might think that after creating such a memorable legacy, your average sadist would rest on his laurels (i.e. the skulls of little children) and spend some time congratulating himself on the vast swath of unspeakable horror he’s managed to exsanguinate onto the Constitution. But that would be to misunderestimate Gonzales. It was he, after all, in his previous capacity as legal counsel to then-Governor Bush, who had formulated a memo summarizing the clemency petition of death row inmate Terry Washington – a memo so cursorily penned that it barely mentioned the mitigating factors in Washington’s case – among them that the mentally-retarded 33-year-old had the developmental abilities of a seven-year-old and that he and his siblings had been frequently “beaten with whips, water hoses, extension cords, wire hangers, and fan belts.” Bush denied Washington’s petition on May 6, 1997 and he was executed that same day.

If anything could further exacerbate Gonzales’ fetishizing of human suffering and his Rumsfeldian inattention to obvious facts (besides a passion for clown paintings and a large crawl space, that is), it was his ambition to play out his medieval sense of right and wrong on a larger stage – as Attorney General or even as a justice of the Supreme Court. Fortunately Gonzales’ own ineptness, partisanship and downright stupidity kept him from that particular appointment – instead, after a scandal involving the firing of US Attorneys and his subsequent Congressional testimony that displayed equal parts ignorance, corruption and condescension, Gonzales announced his resignation on August 27, 2007, and has since spent his time puzzling over his inability to land a job.

In spite of Gonzales’ horrific performance as Attorney General, equal to the legacies left by previous Republicans such as John Mitchell and Ed Meese, it’s Gonzales’ sycophantically eager authorization of torture and other war crimes that did to American justice what a bus driver with macular degeneration and the DTs might do to a schoolyard full of children and puppies. His conduct has rightfully earned the attention of Judge Garzon – if not, alas, that of serious legal authorities in this country. And while his ambitions to the highest court in the land were thwarted, there is still hope that some sort of international tribunal can find him the lifetime appointment that would cap off his brilliant career.

Cotton Candy for the Republican Soul

2009-03-27T01:46:00.006-05:00

Abraham Lincoln is reputed to have said, “It is better to be thought of as a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.” Now, however, Republicans (i.e. the Party with the Same Name as the Party of Lincoln) have decided that since their credibility is already in a hole, they may as well keep digging in the hopes that they strike oil.

What they’ve emerged with, though not any kind of Texas tea, is certainly a viscous, smelly mess that nobody wants to touch. Behold – The Republican Road to Recovery. The most obvious fact about this document is that, were it ever to be a bill on the House or Senate floor, there would be absolutely no excuse for not reading the entire thing. It’s a massive 19 pages from beginning to end – but you can leave out the front and back pages, which, though some very pretty shades of blue, are devoid of any substance.

Not that you should only read the substantial pages – that would leave you with nothing but a few connected circles you might want to color or doodle in. Essentially the entire plan promises to cut taxes, cut the deficit, create jobs, increase access to health care and limit lawsuits. Sound familiar? It’s as though someone dug around in Ronald Reagan’s old campaign closet, took out all the “evil empire” references and updated the years, and the result was this candied, empty-calorie glop. It’s like Captain Queeg trying to relive his glory days tracking down the quart of strawberries.

Of course there’s nothing preventing the Republicans from coming up with any actual ideas – nevertheless, they insist on sticking to tax cuts (which they call, cleverly, “cutting taxes and creating jobs” because, you know, the two go hand-in-hand) and reducing spending. Granted, no Republican has reduced government spending in decades, but this doesn’t prevent them from advocating it with an endearing tenacity. They are content to stick to a good, morally sound idea despite its untenability – just as the Wright brothers decided to forego learning about aerodynamics but instead kept glueing feathers to their arms and jumping off cliffs until only Orville and Wilbur were left and they had saved up enough insurance money to afford that wind tunnel.

Unfortunately a wave of pity has overtaken me and I can’t help but offer these poor bastards some ideas. Not because I feel any empathy for Republicans – but just in case they manage to purchase another election, they might be armed afterwards with something other than their neolithic talismans and hoary shibboleths to confront the real problems that might be lying in wait tomorrow. What they do with these suggestions is up to them.

Sell Encyclopedias
I was going to start off with actual education, but it’s probably an acquired taste, and it seems a bit much to force the party that believes the current economic downturn is somehow Adam and Eve’s fault to jump in to the fact-based world headfirst. So maybe putting some Republicans next to some actual facts would be a good start. I went this route myself for a little while after college, and while I never made any money at it, I did learn that the poinsettia was named after the first US ambassador to Mexico. Laugh if you want to, but I’ll bet that’s how Einstein got started.

Have a Car Wash
Now who doesn’t love to stop at an intersection and look up from fiddling with the radio to see a bunch of earnest young people waving car wash signs at them? It hearkens back to everything that makes America great – warm summer days on hot asphalt, making almost no money, chasing the girls with the hose until the big redheaded chick locks you in the trunk, and the violation of countless child labor and safety laws. If that doesn’t get this country back on its feet, at least it’ll give the parents an afternoon to get loaded without having the kids around demanding to be fed.

Export Something
One of the best ways of making money for your country is making something that other countries need but don’t have. Unfortunately, the only thing Republicans have been good at exporting lately are credit-default swaps, and the bloom seems to be off that rose for now. The only other two exports the party is good at are missionaries and “America – love it or leave it” themed country songs. The first tend to get eaten, and the second, like many fine wines, don’t travel well. It’s too bad there isn’t a country out there that’s in dire need of education and frequent car washes that Republicans have been longing to improve anyway. Oh, wait – problem solved.

When Is a Campaign Contribution Not a Campaign Contribution? When It’s a Bonus.

2009-03-20T00:46:00.007-05:00

It’s fun to watch the birth of a meme. I don’t know if it began with this essay by Dan Spencer at examiner.com, but his was one of the earlier ones, at least. Spencer has checked out OpenSecrets.org, a collection of campaign data including breakdowns of the 2008 presidential race, and announced this gleaned fact:

Senator Barack Obama received a $101,332 bonus from American International Group in the form of political contributions according to Opensecrets.org. The two biggest Congressional recipients of bonuses from the A.I.G. are - Senators Chris Dodd and Senator Barack Obama.

He then goes on to call these contributions “bonuses” and wonders if, given Obama’s outrage at bonuses for AIG executives, he’ll be returning his own bonus.

The issue has since ben raised elsewhere, and even ABC News ran a similar story in its Politics section that, in some feint at balance, also mentioned how much Senator John McCain got in AIG contributions before turning back to Obama. Mysteriously, the ABC story didn’t bother to link directly to its sources, or even provide a link to OpenSecrets.org, the Center for Responsive Politics’ site that seems to be the original source of this information.

Which is odd, because it doesn’t take long before this scandalous little fact turns out to be a fairly thin slice of the big picture. And after a little poking around OpenSecrets.org, the thin slice apears to get almost transparent.

First of all, you can only search their database by donor or by donor’s employer. For what little effort I’ve put into it, there doesn’t seem to be a way to differentiate between donations from individuals who happened to be employed by AIG and donations resulting from a corporate effort by AIG or its subsidiaries. To the contrary, OpenSecrets makes clear that is does not have any data that would distinguish one type of giving from the other. In truth, neither Spencer nor anyone who has repeated his story has any way of knowing how much of that $101,322 was from any direct effort by AIG to influence an Obama administration’s treatment of it.

But there are other, more detailed slices of this pie that Spencer doesn’t care to mention. While searching by supporter’s employer doesn’t seem to clearly state whether a set of contributions came from a party representing a specific interest, OpenSecrets has another category that might: Bundlers. They are, apparently, “people with friends in high places who, after bumping against personal contribution limits, turn to those friends, associates, and, well, anyone who's willing to give, and deliver the checks to the candidate in one big "bundle."

So Bundlers might be even more indicative of who was getting contributions from interest groups than Employer turned out to be. Because clearly if I was going to seek out money for my candidate, I’d seek it from people who held views in common with mine. They might be creditors of the same company or on the same board of directors – nevertheless, they would probably have more in common, as a group, than would people with the same employer.

And guess what: when we look at campaign contributions by bundlers, Barack Obama raised $63,200,000 of his $745,000,000 total – or less than ten percent – from bundlers. John McCain, on the other hand, raised $207,200,000 out of a total of $368,000,000, or fifty-six percent, of his campaign contributions from bundlers. When John McCain outraised Barack Obama from special interests by a ratio of six to one, it makes it appear that the $101,332 from AIG employees is a fig leaf hacked out by the Republicans because they simply have nothing else to use to stall President Obama’s legislative agenda.

I’m frankly not surprised that Mr. Spencer’s allegations turn out to be nothing more than a narrow interpretation through a particular statistical prism. Beginning with Joe McCarthy’s lists of known communists in the US government and culminating in their current redefinition of socialism as a tax rate 30 percentage points below the one they just approved, House Republicans have often chosen a strategy of slander over rigorous analysis as a measure of success. This latest episode is just more evidence that they are wise to do so.

Kill the Patient, Reward the Disease

2009-03-17T00:28:00.003-05:00

So President Obama, confronted with the actual sordid behavior of those who pretend to live by the free market, is now going to try to reverse the $165 million in bonuses that AIG managed to pay its worst employees as the country was bailing it out to the tune of $170 billion.

The ironies inherent in this whole fiasco are, of course, delicious – or they would be, if the slathering greed of the principles involved hadn’t cost millions of people their mortgages, jobs and life savings. First, every time there’s a booming market we’re subject to endless paeans to the corporate executive, the stock trader and others who allegedly risk losing everything at the hands of the mighty economy so that they might stand a chance of winning the world.

The truth, however, seems to be a little more complicated – the everything they risk isn’t usually theirs, and if and when they do fail, they go running to Uncle Sugar (whether that’s investors, other corporations or – as a last resort – the government) crying about how they got a boo-boo and need a billion dollars or so. Then – humbled by said experience – they pack themselves off to a spa in Arizona and sit by the pool congratulating themselves for a week. Or they keep giving themselves fat bonuses. After all, a derivatives trader can’t be denied the hookers and blow to which he’s become accustomed, can he?

Even more egregious is who’s getting the bonuses:

The bonuses will be paid to executives at A.I.G.’s financial products division, the unit that wrote trillions of dollars’ worth of credit-default swaps that protected investors from defaults on bonds backed in many cases by subprime mortgages.

In other words, they’re going to the same bunch of commission-happy yahoos whose recklessness brought AIG to its knees in the first place. Oh, and they’re retention bonuses – because you don’t want bright minds like these getting snapped up by the competition. Or maybe becoming more willing to talk to the SEC, for that matter.

Unfortunately the Treasury’s hands might be tied on this one – apparently AIG is contractually obligated to make the payouts and they were already agreed to by the previous administration (who shall remain blameless).

Still, is it too much to hope that some lawyer somewhere can come up with a good justification for not giving more money to people who already proved themselves incapable of handling it carefully? Hell, it would be better spent retaining the services of the thousands of mail clerks, secretaries and other drones who make any organization function and who not only suffer low pay and parsimonious benefits, but also have to show deference to the yellow-tied assholes who have been the reason for so many secondhand toys this Christmas. Especially if, as in the case of AIG’s financial products division, they’re probably still strutting about like Napoleon on St. Helena, demanding to be addressed as "your majesty" and complaining about the food.

World's Smallest Whale Shark Caught by World's Largest Dwarf

2009-03-12T00:48:00.004-05:00

On the southern tip of Luzon island in the Philippines, an ecotourism trade is steadily growing -- participants swim with whale sharks, who congregate there from December through May.

Recently the WWF documented the inadvertent capture by fishermen of a whale shark, and as the officials raced to investigate and free the animal, they got quite a surprise:

They expected to see a giant animal helplessly stuck, its tall dorsal fin and tail sticking out of the water. But there was nothing there. All they saw was a stick, stuck in sand, with a small rope leading away from it, into the water. Elson walked up to the stick and was amazed to find the smallest whale shark he had ever seen – a mere 15 inches long!

This part of the Philippine archipelago is apparently a hatchery for whale sharks as well as a congregation point -- something that nobody had known for certain until this pup was discovered. Although whale sharks -- or butanding, as they're called in the Philippines -- are the world's largest extant fish, they're not well understood. It's still not known, in fact, whether whale sharks incubate their eggs inside their bodies or are free-floating.

As much as people get aesthetic pleasure and unique experiences out of ecotourism, it's cool to see that its controlled expansion into new areas can also add to our knowledge of biological life. Who knows but that a few years earlier, a specimen like this tiny whale shark pup would have ended up not in the ocean, but in a much less hospitable environment.

Excommunication Breakdown

2009-03-08T18:47:00.012-05:00

Too often in America we see faith portrayed as an unmitigated virtue, a means of making us good people even though our understanding of what makes up that goodness only reaches about the third grade level. Christians accept Jesus’ assertion of “love thy god with all thy heart and love thy neighbor as thyself” is the basis for all of the law, although this makes little sense alongside some of the more bizarre proscriptions in Deuteronomy or the salacious rantings of Saul of Tarsus. Ultimately a morality based solely on circular reasoning and argument from authority, as most faith-based moralities are, leads at best to confusion and opportunism. At worst, faith manages to take the misery of the human condition and use it as an excuse to inflict even more pain and suffering.

Such is the case with a nine-year-old girl in Brazil who was repeatedly raped by her stepfather for years. Recently, on a doctor’s visit after complaining of stomach pains, it was discovered that she was four months pregnant. With twins. She was given an abortion because even under Brazil’s restrictive abortion law, which allows the procedure only in cases of rape or danger to the mother, the girl met both conditions.

The laws were applied and the girl was given an abortion while her abusive stepfather – who is also suspected of molesting the victim’s physically-handicapped older sister – was arrested as he was trying to flee town. And then, from the 14th century, the Catholic Church weighed in and excommunicated the girl’s mother and doctors:

Now a Church spokesman says all those involved, including the child's mother and the doctors, are to be excommunicated.
The Archbishop of Olinda and Recife, Jose Cardoso Sobrinho, told Brazil's TV Globo that the law of God was above any human law.
He said the excommunication would not apply to the child because of her age, but would affect all those who ensured the abortion was carried out.

In the ensuing row, Brazil’s President Luiz Ignacio Lula da Silva, also a Catholic, disagreed: “In this case, medicine is more right than the church,” he said. While the qualifying “in this case” seems pretty superfluous – in what instance has faith shown to be better than science at finding anything out? – Lula’s sentiment is reasonable if not painfully obvious. The Vatican, however, has backed up Archbishop Sobrinho. The cardinal in charge of Latin American bishops, Giovanni Battista Re, justified the decision on the grounds that the fetuses were innocent and had a right to live. Even if a nine-year-old girl suffered and died as a consequence. And even if her twins ended up dying as well.

And as a final illustrative outrage comes the complete silence on the church about the responsibility of the girl’s rapist stepfather. While it’s obvious to the archbishop and cardinal – and their brethren with a long institutional history of enabling and covering up pedophilia – that any Catholic performing an abortion deserves excommunication, the pedophile father who put a minor, her mother, and several doctors in this situation seems to have escaped the church’s attention entirely.

It’s certainly true that human laws can be draconian and outrageous. But at least human laws have in them an inherent basis for change. An informed electorate can overturn them; judges can overrule them; even in a dictatorship, another arbitrary leader can come along and negate them. Not so with the Catholic Church and, to extrapolate, all other societies where morality and law are identical and morality is handed down by revelation from an uncontactable being that won’t explain itself.

Think about that the next time some religious fundamentalist argues that the United States is a Christian nation and that the Constitution ought to be brought in line with the Bible. The Enlightenment Humanism on which our Constitution is based is vastly more compassionate, reasonable, and egalitarian than a concept of morals that deems itself “above any human law.”

Update: Archbishop Sobrinho actually did think about the father -- and concluded that his crime was less serious than getting an abortion: "'It is clear that he committed a very serious sin, but worse than this is the abortion,' Sobrinho said." How such barbarians have any claim to morality is one of religion's great mysteries.

President Obama Announces Website For Holdout Opponents

2009-03-03T23:02:00.001-05:00

On the same day that President Barack Obama announced a new logo to highlight the impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, our most internet-savvy president also announced the launch of a website dedicated to “those who have yet to realize that the tide has changed.” The website, known as IWonBitches.gov, is intended, according to Mr. Obama, “to reach out to those lost souls who are like that last Japanese soldier hiding in the Philippine jungle until the 1970s because he didn’t believe the war was over.”

In a speech today at the US Department of Transportation, Obama implored those opposed to his economic stimulus package, his foreign policy and other aspects of the platform he ran and was elected on to peruse the new website.

“Before you write your congressperson – or if you are a congressperson,” said the president before an enthusiastic crowd, “before you let some AM radio loudmouth whip you into a frenzy about us talking to the Iranians, check out IWonBitches.gov. It has a helpful page called There’s Nothing Stupider than Threatening to Beat Everybody into Submission Unless They Do What You Say. It explains, in terms even Ann Coulter can understand, that if you thought Iraq was easy – well, the rest of the world is a lot bigger, and so we’d better find a less expensive way of getting other countries to cooperate. I’m not sure this has gotten through to some people.

“And,” he continued, “If you’ve been told that my new budget proposal is a conspiracy to expand the size of government, you can go to IWonBitches.gov and click on the page called Private Industry Just Lost Three Million Jobs So Somebody Better Start Hiring People. It’s full of information on how maybe having millions of poor and unemployed people running out of money to pay for food and shelter might not be such a good idea.

“Opposed to gay marriage, or don’t-ask-don’t-tell? Click on IWonBitches.gov. There’s a page you can go to called Maybe That Gay Friend, Relative or Neighbor Won’t Secretly Hate You Anymore If They Have the Same Rights as You Do.

“Worried that some bureaucrat is going to dictate what kind of healthcare options are available to you? On IWonBitches.gov there’s a link to a very useful section entitled Some Bureaucrat Already Decides What Kind of Healthcare Options You Get and If You Don’t Believe That Try Getting an Expensive Disease – But Only If You Already Have Healthcare To Begin With, Because Otherwise You’re Just Going to Die. It describes, point-by-point, the advantages of not letting some people leave their tuberculosis untreated.

“In conclusion,” said the president, “IWonBitches.gov is an essential site for anyone who is still afraid that a government that actually does things that help you is somehow going to destroy America. With sections ranging from If Abstinence Education Really Works Then Why Is My Virgin Daughter Pregnant? to such interesting reading as If Letting the Finance Industry Regulate Itself Was Such a Good Idea Then the Collapse of Every Major Investment Bank in the Country is Obviously a Statistical Fluke, IWonBitches.gov is an invaluable resource for everyone who still doesn’t understand why the direction this country is going now is such a deep departure from eight years of unmitigated calamitous failure.

“And for those of you who feel that, after reading about all the reasons we’re doing things on IWonBitches.gov, you would still rather go back to the way things were, there is final section that you will find particularly appealing. Just click on the link at the main page that takes you to If You Really, Really Must Live in a Country with a Limited Government, Where Nobody Whines about Their Civil Rights, Where You Can Own All the Guns You Want, Drive the Biggest Hummer You Can Find, Start Any Business You Can Dream of and Nobody Taxes Your Hard-Earned Profits, Then Have a Great Time in Somalia.”

Rick Santelli Isn't Happy

2009-02-23T02:18:00.002-05:00

I had never heard of CNBC loudmouth Rick Santelli before last Thursday, but his little rant about President Obama’s homeowner relief quickly became the hottest thing on the internet. Standing on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, Santelli blasted the $75 billion that the administration plans to spend on restructuring the loans of people who now can’t afford their mortgages. Santelli called these people losers and wondered why he and others who were careful with their money (i.e. who are rich enough to pay cash for the typical house) had to pony up to get them out of hot water. Ideally, he argued, they should be allowed to go bankrupt and the market would correct for the failure.

Of course free-market advocates tend to be selective in their protestations. While the $700 billion bailout for the banking industry, passed by the allegedly free-market advocating Bush administration, drew widespread outcry, at least as much of that was due to its opacity, lack of detail and rewarding of banks like AIG whose investments in mortgage-backed securities and subsequent misstatement of their losses brought immense harm not only to themselves but caused a chain-reaction that brought the world’s economy to a screeching halt. On top of this was the realization that the lifting of regulations and gutting of oversight bodies that set the stage for this economic calamity hadn’t been addressed. And when Secretary of the Treasury Hank Paulson’s beneficiaries slathered giant bonuses on themselves, it became evident that personal responsibility was about the only luxury the rich couldn’t afford.

The poor and middle class, however, were another matter. While Obama’s detractors have cried “socialism!” since well before the election over his plan to let the Bush tax cuts for the rich die a natural death – letting the rate go up to the 39% allowed by that commie, Ronald Reagan – Santelli and others seem intent on dragging the blame-the-poor myths out of the Republican toybox and bitching about how their taxes are going to coddle the poor and irresponsible.

Well, Mr. Santelli, a portion of everybody’s tax money goes for shit they don’t approve of or wouldn’t pay for themselves. Hell, my tax money has paid to get American soldiers’ legs blown off in Iraq so Halliburton could have no-bid contracts to send pancakes by armored C-130 to Baghdad, which I’ve also paid for. I’ve paid to stop gay people who love each other and are in long-term relationships from getting married. I’ve paid to enforce an embargo against Cuba long after the cold war ended. I’ve paid for the Pakistani intelligence service to give money to the Taleban who gave it to the people who perpetrated 9/11. Then I paid to give money to Pakistan again so they could buy weapons that they pointed at India, who I also paid to arm. I paid to teach abstinence to — and withhold information about abortions from — people in Africa, many of whose children will die of AIDS because they never heard of birth control that could prevent its spread. I paid for George H. W. Bush to send troops to Somalia, then I paid Bill Clinton to pull them out, then I paid the salaries of the grandstanding assholes who laid the blame for al-Qaida on this and other actions. I paid Ken fucking Starr’s salary for the years he investigated and impeached Bill Clinton. I’m paying for miners to dig in our national parks, for cows I will never eat to be packed into filthy feedlots you can smell a mile away, and for rich bastards to run people off their land so they can build stadiums there instead.

Paying to give a second chance to some poor shlubs who bought into the American dream and were conned into biting off more than they could chew? Sign me the fuck up.

I Can Hear the Ocean!

2008-09-24T01:10:00.003-05:00

U.S first lady Laura Bush listens to the address by her husband U.S. President George W. Bush to the 63rd United Nations General Assembly at U.N. headquarters in New York September 23, 2008. Reuters Pictures

Would it be wrong of me to presume that Laura Bush is having her husband's speech translated into English?

A Position of Strength

2008-08-12T21:04:00.004-05:00

So the last time we couldn’t leave Iraq, it was because (among other things) we couldn’t let someone like Moqtada al-Sadr believe that he had defeated us. If he thought he won, the argument went, then he would be emboldened. Al-Qaida would be emboldened. Rogue nations around the world would be emboldened, and suddenly the forces of Good would have no safe haven, while legions of little Hitlers seized power all over the world and mad scientists worked feverishly to plant death rays on the moon.

Of course this opinion wasn’t universally shared. There were some (i.e. Democrats, traitors) who argued that a) the terrorists weren’t going to follow us home, b) we were part of the problem in Iraq, and c) we could deal with other problems better if all our troops weren’t tied down in a war whose planners don’t regret a thing, even though they admit their initial cause didn’t exist and they can’t agree on a retroactive cause now.

This would be wrong, said the war planners. To deal with a host of threatening nations, the world must know that we have force and the will to use it and to do so even if it’s irrational or downright harmful. After all, it’s well known that the rest of the world is composed mostly of inscrutable foreigners – various hordes, despotisms, satrapies and emirates, all shouting out ultimatums and entreaties and demands in their strange staccatos and clicks and ululations. There would be no way to bring this wretched refuse to order unless you were prepared to stomp on one – hard – and tell everyone else that this is how it’s gonna be.

And since we chose Iraq as the example we were going to set, and our various continued successes have kept us gummed up there for five years, we’re told we cannot extricate ourselves because it might give someone the wrong idea. And yeah, there might be a point to that argument. But in order to do a real cost-benefit analysis, you have to weigh the risks of the action against its benefits. And the main benefit is that we would actually have the resources to deal with another problem in the world. Even a petty tyrant from his overstuffed couch in his harem is enough of a strategic genius to know which of our actions frees him up to invade the neighboring chiefdom’s hippo wallow and which doesn’t.

And this is what brings us to the occasionally-independent nation of Georgia and its ever-looming neighbor, Russia. Last week Georgia invaded its semi-autonomous region of South Ossetia – on the Russian border, mostly ethnically Russian, and manned by Russian peacekeeping troops. It was probably a bad idea, to say the least. Russian army, navy and air forces sprang on the Georgian troops like a bear trap on a puppy.

This hasn’t been going over well with the Bush administration, which has taken the time to register an opinion even though most of it is on vacation. One brave soul who’s carried on vacationing, however, is Secretary of State and alleged Soviet expert Condoleezza Rice. Rice’s absence means that she’s either given up entirely, or it’s a signal to Putin that no matter what Bush or Cheney say, the US isn’t going to jump out of its hammock and put a stop to this invasion anytime soon.

And hell, even if we wanted to, we couldn’t. We don’t have an infantryman to spare, and even if we did, it would require a huge number of troops constantly at the ready to guard against any re-invasion. The fact of the matter is that Georgia stinks as a defensive position. That’s too bad, really – because ever since September 11, this administration has been swearing that its highest ideal is democracy and that exertion of military power gives it a strong bargaining position. And now here we are – faced with the option of defending a democracy that we have nurtured and set up as an example, fighting for its life in a military conflict. Oh, and we sorta told them we had their back, too.

The only problem is, we’ve got nothing. We need the Russians at least as much as they need us. Our NATO allies, who live a medium-range missile trajectory away, don’t see the fun in poking Russia with a stick. Whether this amounts to appeasement, they know one thing – Russia’s getting whatever it wants in Georgia, and no amount of US righteous indignation is going to change that. Georgia’s president, Mikhail Saakashvili, was educated in the US. He speaks fluent English. He instituted democratic reforms and rooted out corruption in government. And he’s probably toast, because we’ve foregone every option except the military one, and we clearly don’t have that either.

So Putin looked at the US military situation, added up the figures, and was apparently emboldened by the fact that we hadn’t left Iraq, not cowed into submission by our great display of will there. No doubt other military geniuses are awakening to the fact that, in the last months of the Bush administration, the world’s ass-kicker is tapped out, unheeded, unwanted and practically unbearable. And with the world’s economy in the toilet, this is an even better time to impress the populace by getting them that annexation they’ve always wanted.

We’ve spent the past seven-and-a-half years trying to solve every problem by menacing it with a six-shooter and showing it that we’re willing to put up with more crap than it ever dreamed of. Unfortunately we’ve spent so much on the example that we’re too beat to reap any of the rewards of the violence and insanity we’ve spread. It’s a shame, really – you spend the best years of your life beating your subjects into submission, and then they all rise up against you while you’re reloading.

Maybe a cleverer leader than George Bush would have tried to make more friends than enemies. Tried to solve problems in the age-old way of tedious negotiations, planning years ahead for diplomatic triumphs rather than kicking in every door and tasering the people on the other side. On September 11, 2001, the neocons claimed we were engaged in a battle of biblical proportions armed to the teeth. And yet today we find ourselves in a tragic comedy weilding only the jawbone of an ass.

Hot Geeky Chick in Spaaaaaaace!

2006-09-18T01:15:00.000-05:00

It’s a great day for space geeks everywhere, as Anousheh Ansari, sponsor of the Ansari X-Prize, telecom entrepreneur and all-around admirable woman, blasts off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan to rendezvous with the International Space Station. Yes, she paid $20 million to go as a tourist, but unlike some other potential applicant for the trip – whose closest approach to space was having his poster next to a bunch of glow-in-the-dark stars on many 12-year-old girls’ bedroom ceilings – she’s earned it.

Ms. Ansari will be blogging her 10-day jaunt, assuming she has the time. Aside from participating in some vaguely-described experiments about back pain, she’ll likely be goading the men into arm-wrestling matches, Lysoling the Space-o-Let (I’ll bet it’s disgusting) and studying the effects of weightlessness on potpourri. Seriously though, I wish her and her fellow voyagers, cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin and US astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria, a safe excursion and many happy returns. Same goes for all those other folks in orbit right now – space is currently more crowded than Whitney Houston’s paraphernalia drawer. So remember folks – use your turn signals and don’t go any faster than 17,000 miles per hour.

Forward to the Past?

2006-09-15T23:07:00.000-05:00

So suddenly we’re all familiar with the Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologos, thanks to the Pope, who quoted a particularly undiplomatic passage of a recorded dialog between the emperor and a Muslim scholar at the end of the 14th century. Manuel dismisses Islam by telling the scholar, “Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.” Manuel certainly had his reasons for objecting to the violent spread of Islam – notably, his empire was getting the tar whipped out of it by the Ottoman Empire after the failure of the latest crusade to spread Christianity by force.

What’s interesting is that the Pope’s speech doesn’t really have anything to do with jihad and violence so much as it deals with the compatibility of faith and reason. In this sense, it’s very much like a palm reader attacking those charlatans at the Psychic Friends Network for just making stuff up. Benedict wanted to make an abstract point and just chose a quote that he figured wouldn’t bother anybody in the room. Someone should tell him that with the internets (brought to you by reason) nobody’s ever just preaching to the choir anymore.

Granted, Manuel’s quotation is inflammatory, though the outraged reaction of some in Islam is equally ridiculous. Even more ridiculous, though, is the Pope’s central point, which has become lost in the subsequent brouhaha. For the Pope concludes that science is rightly subservient to faith: “Modern scientific reason quite simply has to accept the rational structure of matter and the correspondence between our spirit and the prevailing rational structures of nature as a given, on which its methodology has to be based.” (emphasis mine). While such a statement might be warmly embraced by the Kansas school board, any scientist can tell you that religious revelations have only hindered the pursuit of empirical knowledge.

Religion deals with humans’ relation to God. Science deals with empirical, testable reality. While 4,000 years of Judeo-Christian inquiry has brought us such wonders as the Kabbalah, snake handling and the strappado, modern religion seems no closer to enlightened understanding than its ancient forbears. Science, however, has in its meager four centuries seen 13.5 billion years into the past, split the atom and fed billions who would otherwise be starving. Of course science doesn’t have all the answers – acting ethically is still a mystery to most humans, for instance (although a rational, non-religious approach to ethics could likely help). But for science to subvert itself to religion, as the Pope insists, is to hitch its wagon to an anvil. Muslims might be outraged by one quotation in Benedict’s speech – but the scientific and rationalist community should be pointing out the idiocy of the whole damn thing.

For when the giant bugs take over the earth

2006-09-14T01:26:00.000-05:00

I just want you to know I like you guys. Really, I swear. And I only call you bugs in the vernacular, knowing that many of you (including Mr. Annual Cicada here) aren't true bugs. So I hope that's not taken the wrong way or anything.

But who am I kidding? You're not going to reason with a class of animals for whom a brain is a few knots of nerve cells -- even if they did come up with a female-dominated socialist society millions of years before our giant craniums envisioned Forbidden Planet.

Yet I can't help but hope that one day we'll realize we have more similarities than differences. That we'll look beyond your freakish exoskeletons, six legs and compound eyes to accept a higher truth -- that we're all just bouncing around inside a giant lampshade somewhere, flailing helplessly as we struggle with the evolutionary hurdle created by the 60 watt light bulb. Some days I think we're going to make it -- you, us, the bryophytes, the ring-tailed lemurs, and maybe even certain Texans. At least until the Ambien wears off, and I find myself standing on the edge of someone's swimming pool, looking down at my car shimmering in the deep end and wondering why I'm holding a set of soaking wet bagpipes. Then it seems more of a crap shoot.

Those Magic (Everything) Changes

2006-09-10T23:35:00.000-05:00

Once again we commemorate September 11, 2001 – a day imbued in our collective memory with grief, confusion and inchoate rage – and strangely enough called Patriot Day. I have no idea how the name Patriot Day came about unless it just bubbled to the surface of a conversation at a DAR potluck one Wednesday night and caught on through phone trees and work email until it had become a fait accompli. Our gang wrote over the “Terror Day” tag of the gang down the street and now we get to celebrate Patriot Day with solemn readings and brass bands and F-15 overflights and the latest American Idol winner singing such a jazzed-up version of “America the Beautiful” that the melody reminds you of a greased pig at the state fair.

I don’t know where the name Patriot Day came from, but most holidays are polite enough to be named something that sorta reflects the nature of the holiday. Halloween and Independence Day and St. Patrick’s Day are all pretty clear, and will be a hundred years from now. But what would an alien or a person from the distant future make of Patriot Day? A sharp mind might deduce a corellation with flag decals, and that would be about it. But nowhere in that name is the idea that we couldn’t bring ourselves to call it what it was: 3,000 People Killed at the Office Day.

And that’s why I doubt another one of the grandiose ideas about that day – that somehow Everything Changed. If we don’t have the intestinal fortitude to understand what happened to us (we could call it Terrorist Attack day, too, if the first suggestion was too pitiless – although it makes a point) then maybe everything didn’t change enough. Maybe there are some more things that need to change before Everything Is Quite Done Changing. Maybe the time for easy clichés and cheap platitudes is over – and what we really need to do is pull our socks up, reach deep within ourselves, and take it to the next level. And here are a few suggestions how.

The Civil Liberties Pass
Air travel used to be so easy – you checked your pistols and detonators through at the counter and a bored clerk in a polyester jacket watched the x-ray picture of your pocketknife, your mace and your bag of weed zip through in your carry-on luggage. But now it’s all so complicated – take off your shoes, ditch your hair gel and your mango tango bubble bath and be prepared for the third degree if they notice your copy of The Management Secrets of Suleiman the Magnificent. Shouldn’t there be an easier way to get from Pittsburgh to San Diego? Now there is with the Civil Liberties Pass – a simple microprocessor embedded in your skull transmits a constant stream of sensory input to the Transportation Safety Administration. Just have your chip scanned at the express gate, and an ultra-fast computer connection verifies that you haven’t been near any dangerous substances, harbored any evil thoughts or filled in an absentee ballot and you’re whisked past security like a VIP – that’s a Virtually Inspected Pre-terrorist.

The God Bless America Tax Cut
Isn’t it time we stopped sticking it to the rich – who, after all, are responsible for creating jobs, keeping Hollywood cops fully employed, and exploring the vast uncharted territories of Caribbean tax shelters? In an age when the poor and middle class are paying less than their fair share in taxes, why are the rich left to find as many deductions as they can using only an army of accountants and a few shadow corporations? The rich deserve a reward for their ingenuity – and under this new program any graft is tax deductible as long as it’s over a million dollars per fiscal year. We could lower the limit, but deductions for cheaters who can’t think big would just be the soft bigotry of low expectations.

The Cusp of Victory Voluntary Draft
The all-volunteer army has been one of the must successful innovations in the free world – at last we have a military comprised entirely of willing recruits who are skilled, motivated, and who came to serve out of an abiding love for the ideals that made America great. And that was cool and everything, but this touchy-feely nonsense needs to stop. Effective immediately, all patriotic Americans will throw their names into a hat, and anyone who can’t afford a lawyer or a ticket to Canada will volunteer for two years of service or until we decide you can come home. All unpatriotic Americans must report to California, where they will be detailed to jump up and down on the San Andreas fault.

Islamoconfusion

2006-09-04T00:11:00.000-05:00

The worst possible news for the proponents of the Iraq war has now come to pass – for the next two weeks President Bush, Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld will be criscrossing the nation, explaining why we’re there. This is a bad idea because they can never keep their explanations straight. Sure, it wasn’t about the first few reasons, they’ll admit – awfully smug of you to bring it up, by the way – but really, is the reason important? The real reason is that we’re there to honor our war dead. No wait – the real reason is that we’re there to transform the Middle East. But the best reason so far is that Iraq is part of the decisive struggle of the 21st century.

You get the idea. And you’ll notice that as the explanations grow increasingly desperate they become increasingly abstract. The facts, having become impediments to the general progress, are tossed aside, much the way a lost navigator might hurl his sextant into the ocean and start cutting up bird entrails. It might not help any, but you’ll have certainly shut up those traitors who said you didn’t know how to use the damn thing.

And also – you might not be the best person to explain something if you resent the idea that you’ve been asked to explain it in the first place. It looks a little testy when the first argument for the war out of your mouth is that anyone who demands an argument is a traitor or an appeaser. Maybe this sort of strategem worked for the tobacco lobby, or maybe it’s something you learn in CEO school – when you’ve got nothing, accuse your accusers. By the time the ink clears, you and your tentacles have squirted under the nearest rock.

But now we’re coming into the home stretch and the old BS just isn’t working anymore. I’m not sure our leaders have faced that, though. When the Middle East stubbornly refused to magically transform into DemocroExxonDisneyland, Rummy, Bush and Cheney insisted that magical, sudden transformations take time. And warrantless wiretapping. Now even after all that, the traitors are still coming out of the woodwork – the Pentagon, of all people, recently released an assessment of Iraq that says the country is sliding into civil war. If the military brass doesn’t have the will to ignore reality, then what hope is there for the rest of us?

But don’t be afraid, voters. It’s natural for the reasons we’re in the Middle East to be a little confusing sometimes. Hell, even the people who make this stuff up can’t keep it all straight. Right now, in fact, the big reason – the overarching theme – the leitmotif – as it were – is the battle against Islamofascism. Islamofascism is one of those axis-of-evil kinda terms that means the most when you define it the least. Like pornography and weapons of mass destruction, we won’t wait till we see it, but we’ll know what it is anyway.

It’s only too bad that Iraq – a Stalinist state, if the giant bronze artwork is any indication – had nothing to do with Islamofascism before it suddenly became a seething hotbed of the stuff. It’s not like we used that as an excuse to go in before, and even when we did, it was wrong (damn that faulty intelligence). But now the real reason has suddenly become clear, and while Iraq is the definitive battlefield, its neighbor is the center of the evil. So does this mean we’re in the wrong country? Oh, shut up.

See – if you take all the explanations as though they were supposed to fit together into a coherent whole, it makes no sense whatsoever. That’s how clever our enemy is. The trick is to take a particular idea that you like and repeat it over and over again. And when that fails, pick another one, and so on as needed. This is called “staying the course.”

And if the people don’t understand that, be patient with them. They just need one more whirlwind speaking tour to convince them that their only options are following the president into a world of moral clarity and factual pandemonium, or joining the silent majority of vicious traitors and misguided cowards.

But the person who put the choice in its starkest terms this past week was President Bush, who said, “If we give up the fight in the streets of Baghdad, we will face the terrorists in the streets of our own cities.” See – our borders are so porous that 20 million armed Iraqis trying to sneak into the country wouldn’t raise an alarm at all. So if that doesn’t prove we got into that country just in time, nothing will. Just imagine what could’ve hapened if all those people had the bomb.

Let us momentarily turn from satire...

2006-08-29T20:44:00.000-05:00

Because I just felt like publishing something pretty. This is a monarch butterfly drinking from some sorta flower (aced entomology, not so hot on the botany) in my front yard about a week ago. Its proboscis is extended into the flower, and I'm assuming its front legs are folded up under its thorax, 'cause it's only showing two pair here. It's the dazzling and serendipitous moments of beauty like this that remind me, after all the crap and cynicism and lying, what life is really about -- getting as much nectar as you can because tomorrow you could wind up flattened in the grille of a Subaru.

Today in All-Too-Recent History

2006-08-28T22:56:00.000-05:00

August 29, 2006
Today marks the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, which devastated the Gulf Coast, flooded New Orleans for two months, and made plain the deep class rift that is the great unspoken cancer on America today – unless of course you’re rich. The victims and survivors of this disaster will be honored in memorial services and solemn ceremonies. President Bush will attend many of these events on the following Friday.

Survivor -- Burbank Boardroom

2006-08-27T23:09:00.000-05:00

Did someone forget to tell Survivor executive producer Mark Burnett that The Office is not in fact a documentary, and that Michael Scott is not a model of how to address diversity issues? Because this week Burnett announced that, in order to address complaints that his game show’s previous contestants haven’t been racially diverse enough, the next season of Survivor would be dividing its contestants into four teams based on race.

Oh.

I never see these things coming, but in a country that allows the sale of an asthma drug that increases your chances of dying of asthma, where cigarette taxes pay for anti-smoking campaigns and state lottery funds go to education, I should’ve expected this. That a year after Katrina left whites and blacks with vastly differing opinions of this administration’s compassion for all of its citizens; a few weeks after some bomb scares turn every Middle-Eastern or Indian (most Americans can’t tell the difference – sorry, but true) person with a cell phone into a potential bomber; a few weeks after senatorial candidate George Allen calls a native Virginian an obscure racial epithet and welcomes him to America; and Andrew Young resigns for channelling Archie Bunker, Burnett (who, by the sheerest coincidence turns out to be a rich white guy) decides to apply his great wisdom to the racial divide by following the example set by South Africa.

I can just imagine how this went down at the producers meeting. Burnett’s stocky frame faces his team of producers. Arrayed around the table facing him are a gaggle of identical white men wearing pinstriped jackets and black muscle shirts. A few of them are jacked up from the pre-meeting lines of coke and primal scream therapy they like to call “The Fight Club.” Burnett announces his plan in a macho, burly presentation accompanied by a dazzling video set to the Survivor theme song, the national anthem of bland multiculturalism. As the lights come on, Burnett’s toadies rise as one, applauding his cultural genius. Later that evening as they drive their Ferraris back to their gated communities in the Hollywood Hills, they feel a renewed touch with the common people. Maybe tonight they’ll have the maid order Thai.

So there’s no way this could possibly go wrong – unless they give the blacks the crappiest island. Or everyone else gangs up on whitey. Or the races stick together. Or they don’t. Actually, in a few short minutes of examining the possibilities, the only way it can turn out well is if the show is so bland that viewers forget the apartheid aspect of the program straightaway.

And that might be the way to bet, because for such a diverse cast, the Survivor crew has managed to select a remarkably un-diverse group of people. More than half have show business credits, including one Emmy award and one Oscar nomination. The gritty working-class representatives include a heavy-metal guitarist who professionally wrestles under the name “Spanish Fly” and a police officer who’s done consulting work for movies and made several television appearances.

Not that this denigrates the contestants’ achievements – but it calls in to question the insularity of a group of people who, when called upon to scour the nation for people who look like America, come up with a bunch of actors, musicians, make-up artists and lawyers. If you’re losing ratings because you’re not appealing to the masses, maybe it’s not the racial component that’s the issue. Maybe a show that requires you to have the know-how to produce a video and the freedom to spend more than a month on a desert island isn’t going to come up with a contestant base that most of us can identify with.

And that’s the sad and wonderful thing about seeing only racism in a society that has been balkanized in so many other ways too. When George Bush wants to show people he’s not insensitive, he points to John Yoo, Condi Rice and Alberto Gonzalez. Bush and Burnett have managed to get the skin color thing down without having to travel too far afield of their own set of beliefs. I guess we should congratulate ourselves on how diverse we’ve beome when racial minorities can be found among every insular cultural demographic. Or maybe we’ve just outwitted our better selves by finding new ways to stay apart.

And what’s sad is that while one doltish rich white guy thinks he’s heroically addressing a problem (while cynically exploiting it as well, but that’s what executive producers do), everyone who’s ever been discriminated against is thinking, “here we go again.” Here we go again with the “where is that name from,” the “what do your people think of that,” and the “what are you going to do with that chicken” questions that, for all our cultural diversity, never seem to go away.

Maybe in the future we’ll live in a world where each of us enjoys the same opportunities, rights and privileges whether we’re standing in front of a judge, an ice cream vendor or a real estate agent. Maybe someday we won’t look at a crowd of multicultural show-biz types from New York and California and mistake it for diversity. And maybe someday rich white boys from the suburbs won’t describe themselves as ghetto. That day may or may not arrive, but if it does, there’s one thing I know about it for sure – the Mark Burnetts of this world will not be in charge.

Brother, Can You Spare a Pluton?

2006-08-24T22:51:00.000-05:00

It was a plucky little planet – I’ll miss it.

I’ll probably choke up on my next visit to the planetarium as the astronomer, tracing the paths of the planets with his laser pointer, comes to Neptune and, after the briefest pause, describes it as “the outermost planet.”

Sure, there will be explanations. We’ll be told that the International Astronomical Union voted to kick Pluto out of the group of objects formally known as planets, even though it’s still there and still orbiting the sun. It’s just that if we let in one icy, far-off body, we have to let all the others in too. And rethinking the universe sounds neat and all, but we’d rather just watch someone else do it on TV.

But then I had an epiphany. I thought, “this is America, dammit. Am I gonna let a union of international astronomers tell me what to think? Hell no. If I don’t like the facts, I’ll make up my own.”

So screw you, Commiestronomers. You can imprison my dwarf planet, but you cannot imprison my mind!

Update -- Comments enabled

2006-08-23T12:52:00.000-05:00

It's all so complicated, this managing a blog thing. Sure, it would be easier if I actually read the directions, but that would violate a longstanding tradition of floundering around until I found my way. Anyway, I realized that my settings didn't let anyone comment unless they had a blogger account. That's changed now, and anyone can post comments. Of course I assume you'll all be perfect gentlepeople and maintain the level of civilized and respectful discourse that made this country great. Carry on....

Caption Contest: Why Are These Men Smiling?

2006-08-23T01:12:00.000-05:00

I was out of town all weekend -- and while I tried to write something funny and coherent Sunday, and then dragged it on into Monday, by tonight I decided I should just post a funny photograph taken on my perambulations and solicit reader input (there's a first time for everything).

So I came across this little tableau hiding in plain sight, and couldn't resist snapping it. The following day I watched the first two episodes of Spike Lee's "When the Levees Broke" and it was a Jell-O shooter of the entire two-weeks-or-so when, without anyone's having predicted it, a fragile urban environment in one of the poorest states in the union suddenly became a third-world disaster area. And so I ask you -- where was Sri Lanka when it was their turn to step up?

Anyway, these men hit the trifecta. They've earned their pensions, their secret service protection and a few fat speaking engagements a year. The only thing missing is your witty summation and maybe a few Photoshopped Tweety feathers coming out of their mouths.

To get the ball rolling, here's my entry:
"Not pictured -- Pestilence."

Have at it.

Viva -- cough, cough -- Fidel!

2006-08-14T02:40:00.000-05:00

Fidel Castro, the world’s longest-serving dictator, celebrated his 80th birthday today by announcing that he was improving after his surgery, but warning his people to expect bad news. For the Cubans in Florida, the news that Fidel was still around was bad enough. For many Cold Warriors, Fidel remains at the helm of an embarrassing outpost of a dead system that he took over from the playground of the jet-set during the last Long War.

If the fifties rich-and-famous folks could be said to have their own diaspora, it was when their Moses, Fulgencio Batista, was overthrown by about eleven amateur politicians and an Argentine dental student. Their leader, Fidel, transformed overnight from a charming ex-pitching prospect for the Yankess to a ruthless authoritarian. He executed generals, he closed the casinos, and he kicked out Frank Sinatra. Sure, making friends with the Russkies was bad, but after he sent the gangsters and the lawyers and the politicians packing, the damage had already been done.

As the Cold War fizzled on, you could sense the developing sense of injustice among the bald and calculating geniuses in the Pentagon as Cuba’s little bunch of hirsute guerillas persisted at their own version of Marxism-Leninism, despite the US’s best efforts at bullying, threatening and outright assassination attempts. Again and again our presidents cursed the Soviet Union, certain in their belief that when the Russian Bear fell, its little commie satellites would topple like so many shoddily-built Soviet apartment blocks.

Now all the old commies have died off – except for China of course, but hey – the cheap labor wing of the Republican party needs some love too – and yet Castro still sits there in his tropical paradise, devoid of any exports except molasses, cigars and doctors, hanging in space without comprehensible means of support, like the boy in the Indian rope trick. How the hell did we put him there? And better yet, how the hell do we get him down?

It’s possible that Castro’s grown old and ornery on the nurturing spite of the capitalist classes. If so then it’s been a mutually beneficial relationship. Old Cold Warriors like Jesse Helms, Strom Thurmond and Ronald Reagan have also made it to ripe old ages. It’s possible that ideological struggle can increase longevity – and this could raise some disturbing questions. For instance – does this mean Dick Cheney will live forever? And another one – if certain struggles prolong the lives of the combatants, then doesn’t that extend the duration of the combat itself?

We already know that certain kinds of conflicts are more expensive than others. And when we’ve got a country that’s so good at so many things, why do some ideologues only opt for the most expensive option in special cases? Why, in a war against a notably inferior economic and political system, do we insist on using not our economic or political advantages, but our weaknesses in those areas? Had we fought the Cuban theatre of the Cold War not with blockades and threats (oh yeah – and an invasion) but with Levis and Marlboros, is there any doubt that Paris Hilton would be exposing her panties in a Havana nightclub at this very moment?

Let Pat Robertson decry moral decay all he wants, there’s one thing that our enemies in Long War I and Long War II have in common – they’re ridiculously uptight. Commies and Islamic fundamentalists, like totalitarians everywhere, enforce ignorance and prudery. And yet, when we feel that our values are threatened, do we turn to the parts of our society that make us unique? Do we call up our rock bands, our film directors, the guys who spritz water on models’ asses, our designers, our civic planners and our enterpreneurs? Actually, yes we do – but then we put them in National Guard uniforms and tell them to train Iraqi policemen.

What we should be doing is letting the American Revolution export itself. In the old Soviet Union, American goods were luxury items and primo bribes – American clothes, American whiskey, American technology and just plain American dollars are in demand everywhere in the world. If we built up our reserves of American know-how, compassion and optimism, we could conquer the whole planet – and we could do so with weapons that would be welcomed as liberators even where American soldiers and bullets aren’t.

So happy 80th birthday, Fidel, whether that bad news is that you’ve been dead for two years or that you’re going to live to be a hundred. The survival of your little sugar plantation and its rundown beaches stands as mute testament to all the wars we’ve fought with the wrong weapons and for the wrong reasons. And as we stumble blindly into the 21st century, fighting enemies we’ve already isolated economically and politically (thus removing our best weapons before the battle has even begun), we would do well to remember the longevity we’ve imparted to you and your homegrown totalitarianism. It seems ridiculous that an octagenarian in baggy fatigues could hold out for decades against the nation that gave us Miami Vice – but we chose the weapons, so we probably deserve it. A wise president could’ve airlifted some hot pants and XBoxes into Havana and had you in his back pocket decades ago – but that would’ve meant fighting dirty.

Transformation

2006-08-07T00:04:00.000-05:00

So the secret’s out now – remember those invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq? Well it wasn’t by coincidence that they’re in pretty much the same part of the world. Ever since Israel invaded Lebanon again, our fearless leaders have suddenly dropped the terror ruse and started talking about the transformation of the Middle East. Condi Rice spoke of the Lebanon war as the “birth pangs of a new Middle East.” Nevermind that Lebanon was already supposed to be part of a new Middle East – apparently you have to transform the Middle East with the democracies you have, not the democracies you’d like to have. If one of your blossoms of freedom votes for the terrorists, then blow it up and start all over again – once you’ve cowed the free people into submission, they’ll vote for whatever democracy you tell them to vote for.

Or at least that’s the theory, I think. But really, how do we know? George Bush certainly didn’t run for president on the platform that he was going to use the military to bomb the Arabs into the twenty-first century, even though it’s certain this was on the agenda at the first National Security Council meeting in late January of 2001. There’s a whole trail of position papers put out by neocon thinkers (I know, it’s sorta like Iranian moderates, but bear with me) on how we could turn the whole Muslim world into a wellspring of democracy if only they would stand still and let us administer the beat-down they so richly deserved.

But who knows if this is the whole plan or just the part of it they feel like telling us right now? If Bush really had campaigned in 1999 on invading the Middle East until they bent to our wishes, do you think he would’ve won? He would’ve been relegated to the wing of the Republican party reserved for mutants and evolutionary dead-ends – the short bus of the small tent party – and fifty years from now his likeness would adorn Madame Tussaud’s between Ross Perot and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Instead he hooked up with some ex-Nixonites, who apparently came away from their impeachment experience with the lesson that Nixon was too forthcoming and open with the press. The Nixonites dragged in a raft of neocons who liked to describe themselves as starry-eyed idealists – in much the same way that John Lennon would’ve been an idealist if, instead of making music about peace and love, he had instead written songs about conquering the Holy Land and converting the heathens at the point of a spear.

And taking their oil. Because you know they’re not just doing this in order to make the world a better place – or, in the case of the End-Timers, a worse place, then a perfectly horrid place, and then a much, much nicer place. No, the starry-eyed Johnny Appleseeds of freedom know you can’t just export democracy at the point of a gun – at least not without drafting all of Mexico. If it’s not possible to threaten the entire world with violence, then you can at least threaten them with economic misery. It’s called the stick-and-stick approach, and while it doesn’t win over any hearts or minds, they’re not worried about that – they can blame the media for that failure later.

For all I can tell, this is only to maintain an approach to the world that sees every other country as innately hostile and in need of subjugation. This, I suppose, stems from the idealistic notion that the world is always just one massive military beat-down – one Operation [Your Nation Here] Freedom – one preemptive war – away from complete perfection. For instance – in the Palestinian Authority, Bush first wanted to get rid of Yasser Arafat, saying he wasn’t a legitimate representative of the people. After Arafat’s death, his political party was exposed for being massively corrupt. In the following elections, Hamas won control of the Palestinian parliament and was promptly ostracized by the US and Israel – notwithstanding their status as the only legitimate contender to Fatah’s political supremacy. Now our governments make the lives of everyday Palestinians even more miserable than usual in the hopes that this will somehow cause a legitimate and highly popular appeasement candidate to spring from the populace. It’s like the dad who yells “Come here” to his son, and when the kid complies, smacks him upside the head. The dad’s taught his son a lesson, but he may be surprised to know it’s not the lesson he intended.

About two years ago, in the last throes of the election cycle, John Kerry and the Democrats were widely ridiculed for allegedly building a foreign policy around being liked by other countries. This, we heard, was not the way to fight the war on terror. Only lily-livered Neville Chamberlains sought out middle positions ever since Everything Changed. And now that it has, we don’t need to make any excuses about telling the world to obey – when you have the moral clarity to insist that you’re always right, facts just get in the way. But in a number of places – Gaza and Lebanon and maybe Iraq and Iran as well – when you’ve scraped the layers of opposition down one by one, at some point it should occur to you that it’s opposition all the way to the core. There’s no secret moderate majority among your enemies waiting to embrace your arrival. The only surprise in the neocons’ strategy is that they’ve arrived at this point so quickly.

Get Your Kicks in 2006

2005-12-30T19:02:00.000-05:00

Another year has blown by like a garbage truck full of road kill, and all we can do is pick ourselves up and try to figure out what happened so it doesn’t happen again. Oh wait – that would be un-American. No, if there’s anything at all we’ve learned from this year, it’s that even if your strategy is horribly misguided to start with, swear up and down that it’s a) going fine and b) just a few tweaks away from purring like a kitten.

Take – oh, Iraq for instance. Didn’t we liberate the whole nation once a couple of years ago? So why is the Green Zone the only part of the country you can walk around in without a reasonable expectation of getting kidnapped or assassinated? Don’t ask such questions – everything’s great there. In fact just last week Dick Cheney flew his Winnebago into Iraq, watched some Iraqi national guardsmen train with imaginary guns, never left the security of a military base, and declared that victory was around the corner. Now that’s the spirit that made America what is today – an angry, frightened giant running rampant over the countryside and terrifying the peasants.

But that’s just one example of how the faith-based approach to reality has worked for us in 2005. Let us not forget to include the Katrina response, the Terri Schiavo horror, the tax cuts for the rich, the Intelligent Design nonsense, and Ashlee Simpson – all these show what happens when, using only the sheer power of belief, someone tries to create a reality that just isn’t there. And so what if it didn’t work the first few times? Remember the proverb: if at first you don’t succeed – fake success.

So in the spirit of banging your head against a brick wall – because turning around would look like failure – here are some super-duper accurate predictions for the coming year:

The Middle East
2006 will be a year of liberation for Iraqis. First the freely elected government will liberate the Iraqi populace from ever having to vote again. Next, the women of Iraq will be liberated from the onerous burden of pants, makeup, and speaking in public. After that the Kurds will liberate themselves – again – and liberate any Arabs who happen to be living on their land. Finally, all hell will be liberated.

But that won’t be the only happenin’ place in the region. All about, the shimmering glow of Iraq’s success will serve as a beacon to its neighbors. The bounties of freedom and democracy will inspire repressed Muslims everywhere to ask, “Why doesn’t my country have car bombs and fundamentalist militias?”

The Third World
Large swathes of the world will continue to be plagued by lack of clean food and water, inadequate shelter, and lack of opportunity. But Mayor Nagin will ask them to come back anyway.

Government Secrecy
The scandal-plagued Bush administration will suffer from leaks again when the New York Times reveals that Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld have been secretly building a Death Star on the far side of the moon. After first issuing a slew of denials, the pair finally call a press conference and admit to their project. “But,” they explain, “Having a planet-destroying space station is in the interest of national security.” They then activate their jet packs, crash through a skylight and enter a hatch in a flying saucer hovering above. It flies off at high speed and is last seen rendevouzing with some sort of mother ship 200 miles over the mid-Atlantic.

Church and State
Spurred on by their successes saving Christmas and teaching Intelligent Design, a number of religious groups begin a campaign to have God included as part of state math requirements. As usual the Kansas state school board leads the way, mandating that differential calculus be taught in a revival tent with at least a four-piece band. Describing the program as “Higher Math with a Higher Power,” Kansas educator Rev. Carpal Sternbottom said, “Consider the number pi. It’s a number that goes on endlessly without stopping or repeating. You can’t tell me this is due to pure chance.” A stunned press corps duly takes notes.

Popular Culture
Katie Holmes gives birth to her and Tom Cruise’s love child. Despite rampant internet gambling about the sex, size and weight of the baby, there is only one winner among the thousands of entrants. Peter Schwimmer of Lakeland, FL walks away with millions for his guess that the child would be a six-pound, nine ounce, thirteen-inch long fly larva. Said a tearful Holmes after the birth, “We’ll love it whatever it turns out to be. But Tom and I were so hoping for a locust.”