Non-Partisan Witch Hunt

Don't Let Domestic Terrorists Win

2010-08-25T19:14:00.001-04:00

Terrorism: the sytematic use of terror as a means of coercion. (Merriam-Webster Dictionary).

This is a wall of shame:

Sarah Palin, the half governor with even less of a brain.
Newt Gingrich, consumate hypocrite, present day hatemonger.
Rush Limbaugh, drug addict and con man, populist worth 1/2 a billion dollars.
Glenn Beck.....too much to say.
Michael "Weiner" Savage, the self hating Jew who also hates gays, Muslims, immigrants, and so forth, ad infinitum.
Pamela Geller, rascist bigot blogger who personally supported genocidal war criminal Slobodan Milosevic.
Laura Ingraham, who, like Glenn Beck, supported Imam Rauf and Park51 before she was against it, [or rather, got the memo].
Rick Lazio, former Congressman, failed Senate candidate, who uses imagery from 9/11 in a cheap campaign ad where he calls Imam Rauf a terrorist sympathizer.
Carl Paladino, an icon of conservative thought who promises to use eminent domain to thwart First Amendment Rights.
Megyn Kelly, pretty face of Fox News, master of injecting commentary into what passes for journalism.
Liz Cheney, Sith Lord, with the special power of being able to lie through her teeth.
Mark Levin, a man of such small character it is astonishing he can hold so much hate.

Make no mistake: these folks, among others, are using their bully pulpit to frighten both Muslims and non-Muslims alike, to use the issue of building houses of prayer and worship as a wedge issue, to coerce Americans into changing their behavior and give up on their most sacred and central beliefs.

They are to be castigated and socially cast out. They are an afront to what American means. Do not let their poison coming from the lips of others go unanswered.

But let us not forget some heroes in this fight against the tyranny of the [m]asses:

Mike Bloomberg, Ron Paul, Elaine Brower: Real Americans.

These are just a few who have shown the courage and conviction to stand up for what is truly right: the feedom of all Americans to worship their religion, and the right of Americans to use their private property in any way they see fit, within the boundaries of the law, a law which applies equally to all.

Park51: The Front Line in the Fight for Real American Values

2010-08-23T10:20:00.011-04:00

If you are reading this blog, you are aware of the made up controversy surrounding the construction of a Muslim cultural and community center, which includes a mosque, about 2 blocks north of the World Trade Center site, called Park51. This past weekend there was an anti-"mosque" protest and a counter rally in support of the cultural center.

Looking at some of the signs by those anti-mosque protesters filled me with a terrible resolve and yet great sadness. Allow me to disgust you:

"A Mosque at Ground Zero Spits on the Graves of 9/11 Victims Stand Up America"

"Sharia Sharia Sharia"

"Building a Mosque at Ground Zero is Like Building a Memorial to Hitler at Auschwitz"

"Stop Islam"

"No Mosque at a War Memorial"

I'll stop there, because I am nauseated this happened in my city.

This is a fake controversy, created by racial and religious bigots, picked up by Fox News, and now pushed to this point. I hate to remind such hatemongers like Pamela Geller, Glenn Beck, and the rest of the knuckle draggers so secure in their own self evident superiority in the eyes of some amorphous creator: this is the United States of America; if you hate the central creed of this great nation, then leave.

As for all those overly sensitive persons who think "it's too close," I have to ask: "Too close to what? Why?" I say to them: "Stop conflating one group of Muslims for another. Muslims are not fungible. There are many sects, just like in Christianity, and it is simpleminded to lump them altogether."

Islam, like Christianity, runs the gamut, from right to left, and high minded to low. A Catholic or Presbyterian would not want to be lumped together with the Westboro Baptist Church or the Christian Identity Movement. Yet that's what everyone against the Park51 project is doing to them, who are members of the peaceful, mystical Sufist sect. If you don't know what Sufism is, or why this is relevant, then look it up and learn something.

Now, to salute a truly great American, Elaine Brower, one of the founders of a group called the New York City Coalition to Stop Islamophobia. She was inspired by her thrice deployed Marine son to action when he said to her:

"Mommy, I thought we lived in America. I thought I fought for freedom. What's going on with these people?"

Ms. Brower is not Muslim. But she answers the clarion call of the central freedom of our nation, and is not cowed by the doomsayers or the inflamed emotions of event he truly righteously angry. But she sees through the fog of emotion and hatred to that which is the prize: the inexorable march forward of this nation toward freedom for all citizens.

It is always easier to go with the herd and pick on the unpopular kid. It is always more difficult to defend the downtrodden against the unthinking masses. These days it is American Muslims that are the class peon, and Elaine Brower is standing up to the bullies.

And make no mistake: those ignorant, dour faced, flag waving, angry sign holding, hate filled crowds are the bullies. Even if they think they are right.

The Park51 project has become, unwittingly, the front line in the fight for religious freedom and cultural acceptance in the United States. There is no compromise with hatred and ignorance. I implore Ms. Brower and the principals of the Park51 project to not back down. Don't let the bigotry of the masses frighten you. You have the power of the Constitution and the righteousness of the promise of this greatest of nations behind you.

Faux News Exposes Itself: Fair and Balanced Is Finally Just a Slogan

2010-08-17T20:01:00.002-04:00

It has been reported today that the parent company of Fox News, News Corp., has donated $1,000,000 to the Republican Governors' Association. Uh, okay.

I suppose the standard Fox set for itself, "Fair and Balanced," a standard it never actually tried to live up to, has finally been exposed to be nothing more than a slogan, mere puffery.

It means that no one - not Bill O'Reilly, nor Sean Hannity, nor Megan Kelly, nor the braintrust that anchors Fox and Friends - can in good faith claim that they are reporting the news without spin, or that any interview conducted is evenhanded.

I never believed Fox News was fair and/or balanced. But now, by the very actions of the parent News Corp., Fox News, they of mighty rating and poor journalism, has been publicly reduced to what they have always been: the mouthpiece of the right wing of the GOP.

It seems that some lyrics of one of my favorite bands applies here:

"Pat yourself on the back and give yourself a handshake, because everything is not yet lost."

Dear Sharron Angle, About Those Second Amendment Remedies.....

2010-08-15T11:28:00.012-04:00

Dear Sharron Angle,

You famously said the following in January:

"You know, our Founding Fathers, they put that Second Amendment in there for a good reason and that was for the people to protect themselves against a tyrannical government. And in fact Thomas Jefferson said it's good for a country to have a revolution every 20 years.

I hope that's not where we're going, but, you know, if this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies and saying my goodness what can we do to turn this country around? I'll tell you the first thing we need to do is take Harry Reid out."

Now I will agree with you, in basic substance, that the Second Amendment is the final check on a real tyranny. I'm not sure that spending too much, bailing out AIG and the automakers and reforming healthcare really qualifies as a tyranny, but I digress.

It is also true, and I am sure you'll agree, that the right to marry whom you want is a fundamental right. Even the Supreme Court has said so, like in Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1968).

At present the case of Perry v. Schwarzennegger, wherein a Federal judge initially appointed by Ronald Reagan and confirmed under George H.W. Bush, Vaughn R. Walker, found that California's Proposition 8, outlawing gay marriage was unconstitutional, is likely heading to the Supreme Court of the United States of America.

Judge Walker found that Proposition 8, among other things, violated the due process clauses and equal protection clauses, and was based on stereotypes and prejudices which are out of date. It was an act of supreme courage in our balkanized times.

Sharron, it is obvious that once this case reaches the Supreme Court which way 8 of the judges will vote. We all know that the liberal block of Sotomayor, Breyer, Kagan, and Ginsburg will most likely vote to uphold Judge Vaughn's ruling, and that the activist conservatives of Alito, Scalia, Roberts the Umpire, and Thomas will do Constitutional gymnastics in order to find some lousy reason to reject it. Then there is the wild card of Justice Kennedy, and upon him ride the hopes and dreams of millions of Americans who only want to get married and be miserable like the rest of us - just kidding!

So let's say that Kennedy goes with his activist conservative pals, like he did on the abominable Citizens United v. FEC, wherein he wrote the opinion, and created out of whole cloth a corporate aristocracy from nothing. Let's say they overturn Judge Walker's decision, and reinstate that blessed example of a tyranny of the slimmest majorities, Proposition 8, and in so doing remove a fundamental right from approximately 10% of American citizens, and throw equal protection under the law under a bus, as well as a long line of cases, including Loving v. Virginia.

I think we can all agree that the gay population of the United States is probably not the most heavily armed demographic. I know very few gays who know what Mossy Oak [tm] is, much less own any. But I was wondering what you would think is the appropriate Second Amendment Remedy - your word, not mine - for a group of people that have most certainly lost a fundamental right by an actual tyranny of a majority, and to have that removal upheld by a bunch of unaccountable activist jurists sitting in their ivory tower, answerable to no one.

Anyway, get back to me when you can, but before Election day. I know a lot of people that would be interested in your answer, myself most of all.

TTFN,

RayRay

Change the Fourteenth Amendment? Step Away from the Stupid!

2010-08-08T16:54:00.004-04:00

I have heard a lot these days about amending the Constitution, namely the Fourteenth Amendment. These calls have come, during the midterm election year, solely from the GOP, and in particular the Republican leadership: House Minority Leader John Boehner, Senators John Kyl and John McCain of Arizona, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, to name just the highest ranking, Senator Lindsey Graham. Let me say it right now: this is not just a bad idea, it is a thinly veiled cynical strategy to invent a wedge issue.

The Fourteenth Amendment is probably, when taken as a whole, the single most important amendment to the Constitution. It is among the first civil rights legislation in American history, and almost certainly the most sweeping. It forced, for the first time, the states to abide by the Bill of Rights, which the states had been free to ignore before 1868. It was written with the express intent of creating American citizens from non-citizens, which in our present day includes the children of illegal immigrants.

For those of you unfamiliar with the Fourteenth Amendment, here's the complete text:

"Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
Section 2. Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.
Section 3. No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may, by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.
Section 4. The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. But neither the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void.
Section 5. The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article."

Conservatives have waved A LOT of signs and made A LOT of in the last two years about the Constitution. Yet there appears to be a lot of consternation on the right about what they actually like about the Constitution. Some have called for a repeal of the Seventeenth Amendment - you know, where WE THE PEOPLE actually vote for our national senators. Why does the hard right hate freedom?

Now we have them clamoring to change the Fourteenth Amendment because of that pesky first sentence of Section 1. Apparently, conservatives belief it is their birthright to deny the right of citizenship as a birthright, so long as they do not approve of the parentage of such people. It's not as if one can control where their parents are living when they are born.

There is an old libel at work here. That old libel is that of the "anchor baby," as slanderous as the once popular conservative mantra against public assistance known as Cadillac-driving welfare queens who have the babies just for the money, 'cause that's where all the money is. No one has ever met one of these welfare queens, just as no one ever met an anchor baby.

No one comes to to the United States of America to have babies. They come to the United States of America for the same reason every person after Columbus came here: to build a better life for themselves and their families. And as our Founding Documents make clear, the rights enjoyed by American citizens are not bestowed by any government, but are a natural result of our Creation. So who we to deny what both the Creator and our wise fathers saw fit to set down: that everyone born here is a citizen, owing fealty to our national creed of hard work and liberty, and owed equal protection under the law.

Now let's be clear about something: Congress cannot pass a law, and the President sign that law, which would in any way alter fundamentally how an Amendment to the Constitution operates. Therefore, any call for "looking into" or "holding hearings" on changing the Fourteenth Amendment is simply balderdash, a distraction from the very real failure of the GOP to have any agenda aside from "We're not the black guy in the White House" to run on in the midterms. That's about as plain as I can say it.

In case you didn't pay attention in your civics class, to amend the Constitution or an Amendment requires whatever changes or additions to be passed by supermajorities [66%] of each house of Congress, as well as then being ratified by three-quarters of the states, or 38. California, New York, Massachusetts, Vermont, Maine, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Washington and Oregon, through either their Congressional representation or their state legislatures, are more than enough to prevent this from happening.

So why propose the impossible?

Furthermore, and not for nothing, but the natural born citizenship of the sitting President is still fodder for tabloids and right wing blogposts. Allegedly 1 in 4 Americans has a question about President Obama's place of birth. This mendacious narrative dovetails nicely with attacking the Democrats for not dealing with illegal immigration through changing of the citizenship clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. This is doubly dishonest because the GOP has a recent history of saying "No" to everything, even to matters which they had either previously backed or proposed, and this includes immigration reform.

Finally, as with all the numbskull calls to either build a wall along the Mexican border, or find and deport all the illegal immigrants, no one takes the long view. Okay, let's amend the Constitution to prevent the children of illegal immigrants from being citizens. Great. Now where are they citizens of? What if mom is from Ecuador and dad from Guatemala? What happens to a now instantaneously created permanent underclass of stateless infants? And how does the government react to any of this without growing larger and more imposing? Will mothers now have to carry documentation of their child's citizenship every time they enroll in school, go to a doctor, or a hospital? Finally, who will pay for this, or more importantly, will this pay off for us?

The short answer is "no." No one thought any of this through beyond screwing over people with brown skins. Personally, I like creating new citizens - it increases the population, and therefore the tax base, so we can all continue to enjoy the the success of our nation.

Between the Bombs, and After

2010-08-07T15:16:00.004-04:00

Yesterday marked the sixty-fifth anniversary of the day the Enola Gay dropped Little Boy onto the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The result was a miniature sun, a pillar of fire, and the immediate extinction of 80,000 people, with many tens of thousands of deaths to follow within the next year.

This Monday, August 9, will mark the sixty-fifth anniversary of the day that Bockscar dropped Fat Man onto Nagasaki, vaporizing anywhere from 40,000-75,000 additional people. As with Hiroshima, many tens of thousands more would die within the next year.

The Japanese Emperor, Hirohito, would give a radio address on August 15, 1945, stating Imperial Japan's intention to unconditionally surrender. What happened in the 9 days between the annihilation of Hiroshima and Hirohito's surrender?

There are some who have questioned the decision to drop the atom bombs on Japan, and some have sought to revise this history to reflect present day regret. I, being a student, albeit amateur, of the art of history, am always hesitant to revise it. Yes, there are times when the popular story told to 7th grade social study classes might give a certain spin or gloss over inconvenient facts. But at the university level I found that my study of history revealed many hard truths.

One of those truths is that the decision to use nuclear weapons against Imperial Japan was probably the right one. This is not to say that, since it was the correct decision, there is not a price to be paid. America still has not, in its national soul of souls, come to grips with that horrific Faustian bargain, and Japan's national character has been indelibly altered, for better and worse, because of it.

While it was, militarily and politically, the correct thing to do, that does not mean it was the moral one. If there is karma, or a price to be paid in final judgment, those chickens have not yet come home to roost. As for Imperial Japan, as terrible a price she paid in her defeat at the hands of the United States, it cannot be said that she did not have it coming. And when I say that I am not labeling Hiroshima and Nagasaki payback for Pearl Harbor. Pearl Harbor was, taking the long view, a justifiable attack on a military target, with a limited [some 3,000] number of casualties, largely confined to military personnel. In other words, Pearl Harbor was no Nanking, no Korea, no Bataan. Pearl Harbor was, relatively speaking, small potatoes.

So about those 9 days - what happened? Well, at first Imperial Japan took Hiroshima on the chin. That's says something about the testicular fortitude of the Japanese people. After Nagasaki - three days later - it became clear to them that they were risking national suicide. Unfortunately, the idea of immolation for the sake of jingoistic pride was okay with several members of the Ministry of War, who then attempted a coup to prevent a surrender.

Known as the Kyujo Incident, the coup was attempted on August 14-15, and thankfully failed, otherwise there might have been up to three or four more cities turned into lakes of fire and the denizens reduced to photographic shadows. Failing that, the United States and her allies would have been forced to invade the Home Islands, and the human costs would have been even more terrible.

So, looking back at this now somber time in the first days of August, let us remember that there are times when the most terrible decision is sometimes the right one, but that may not allay the final judgment on all of our souls when the day of reckoning arrives.

It is also instructive to the point that revising history to tell the narrative that is either more expedient or palatable is the wrong path, and the powers that be in Texas and elsewhere should take heed. For failure to learn the lessons of history shall only doom their repetition.

Anti-Defamation League: Your Stupid is Showing

2010-07-31T13:53:00.006-04:00

Between my seven month old twins and the complete idiocy of what passes for political discourse these days, I haven't written for over 5 months. However, the debate over whether a group of Muslims may open the Cordoba House - an Islamic community center including a mosque - two block north of the World Trade Center site has brought me back out of my cave.

And it wasn't the vacuous statements of Sarah Palin, nor the bald bigotry of others like Newt Gingrich, or the general insanity of Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity [hey, that rhymes!]. No, it was that the Anti-Defamation League has thrown in with the likes of them.

The ADL's self proclaimed mission statement is as follows:

"The immediate object of the League is to stop, by appeals to reason and conscience and, if necessary, by appeals to law, the defamation of the Jewish people. Its ultimate purpose is to secure justice and fair treatment to all citizens alike and to put an end forever to unjust and unfair discrimination against and ridicule of any sect or body of citizens." See it at http://www.adl.org/about.asp?s=topmenu

However, with respect to the proposed Cordoba House, the ADL has decided that "feelings" trump reason, conscience, and law. (For example, see: Amendment 1 to the Constitution). The ADL's statement on the Cordoba House? Here it is:

"Proponents of the Islamic Center may have every right to build at this site, and may even have chosen the site to send a positive message about Islam. The bigotry some have expressed in attacking them is unfair, and wrong. But ultimately this is not a question of rights, but a question of what is right. In our judgment, building an Islamic Center in the shadow of the World Trade Center will cause some victims more pain --unnecessarily -- and that is not right."

Catch that? Reason, conscience and law matter not. Feelings matter most. Especially since we're talking about Muslims. Imagine the self righteous, apoplectic anger that would result if it were an American Muslim community fighting to prevent something like the building of a church, or a synagogue, a memorial to American soldiers, or one to September 11, or perhaps a memorial for the Holocaust. This is a disgusting display of anti-Muslim hate that is but thinly veiled. And I expect it from some, but not the ADL.

Instead of taking the high road - the hard road, the tough row to hoe - the ADL has gone for the cheap thrills of divisiveness and religious hate. The fact remains it is easy to pick on the unpopular kid. Just ask Gov. Jan Brewer, the perpetrator of the single most cowardly political act of 2010, until the ADL went all anti-Islam.

Now, having thrown in with cheap, slimy faith hustlers like Palin, Gingrich, Glenn Beck, Rep. Peter King (R-NY), and Carl Paladino, the ADL has defamed itself and everything it stands for, and done a great deal to undermine its great history of courage in the never ending struggle for civil rights and equal protection. Kudos.

It's the bigotry, stupid. You know, the stuff you said you were there to fight against.

Anti-Defamation League: you are dead to me.

Sarah Palin is Petarded

2010-02-26T12:14:00.007-05:00

Sarah Palin is the political equivalent of bonbons. She is also like the STD herpes: the gift that keeps on giving. She has put her foot in her mouth so many times she probably has a gotten treatment for hoof and mouth disease.

Most recent case of her special brand of leaping before looking was when she decided to courageously take on "Fox Hollywood's" animated "The Family Guy" when they had a character who had Down Syndrome, just like her youngest son, Trig.

While Trig was never brought up, nor was the character a send up of the mentally disabled, nor were there any jokes made at the expense of the mentally disabled, the character did say that her mother was "the former governor of Alaska." Therefore, this was made out to be, in true Palin fashion, an attack against Trig, and therefore she felt "another kick in the gut."

Palin would rant on Fox News, and she had her teenage daughter, Bristol, write a piece on Palin's Facebook page. This was around February 16.

That's when Sarah Palin got, as they say in some quarters, "Pwned."

Apparently, Sarah went off half-cocked, again [see: "paling around with domestic terrorists"], not knowing who she was talking about, as the voice actress, Andrea Fay Friedman, was born with Down Syndrome. That information was released around February 18, just enough time for Sarah to make the rounds to her job on Fox News to whine about Fox Hollywood.

Ms. Friedman told the former governor that she needs to get a sense of humor, and that the bit was not an attack on Trig, but rather a matter of "sarcasm."

While only a sometime purveyor of The Family Guy, at that moment I discovered an entire new respect for the show's creator and key voice actor, Seth McFarlane. He laid a perfectly baited trap and waited till he saw the whites of the molars in the back of Palin's always flapping mouth.

Notice there has been a good bit of silence from Caribou Barbie since then. That's the sound of failure.

Now, for the record, Ms. Friedman did make the following dig against Sarah: "My mother did not carry me around under her arm like a loaf of French bread the way former Governor Palin carries her son Trig around looking for sympathy and votes."

Ouch.

But this brings me to my second point: Sarah Palin has set herself up as the defender of the mentally disabled, but all she seems to do is exploit the mentally disabled, and by extension, her son Trig.

Now, Palin has also set herself up as a hunter and firearm enthusiast, but I never really believed it. I have been dubious about her claims as a hunter - a google search of photos reveal only two photos, and it is not clear whether the ex-gov actually shot the animal in question, or just posed next to it. After all, what politician worth any salt misses a photo-op?

Also, a similar google photo search reveals only 3 photos of Sarah Palin holding any sort of firearm: a posed one with a trap shotgun, opened, and over her shoulder; another of her reloading a trap gun at a range; and another with her using what appears to be an M-4 on some sort of electronic shooting range, the only photo [and there is a video on youtube] where she is holding a firearm in a "ready" position. And she doesn't look particularly comfortable with it. Not an experienced marksman.

Added to this is that her former future son in law, Levi Johnston, said she was not a hunter nor did she know how to handle weapons. While he, as a source for anything Palin related, might be questionable, of all things to blow her spot up about, why this one, unless it is true? He is not the sharpest tool in the shed, but such a dagger goes to the heart of Palin's self made credentials.

So, when I read in the news today Palin would be the keynote speaker at the annual national meeting of the National Rifle Association in Charlotte, North Carolina, I couldn't help but think that she was using the NRA the same way she uses Trig.

While I am sure Palin loves her son, she also has no difficulty exploiting him, using him and his disability as a sword and shield for her own shortcomings. But she has little interest promoting the interests of others like Trig, evidenced by her behavior, most recently in this Family Guy flap.

Similarly, I doubt she is a hunter, much less a true shooting enthusiast. But she can lay some good digs on Obama, like how is is working now to ban all guns, at the NRA meeting.

The NRA, incidentally, treats gun owners the same way Palin publicly treats Trig: as a sword and shield, but never really standing up for their interests. They love to drum up drama and fear, as drama and fear equal dollars into their coffers, and in the pockets of perennial Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre. They, and he, would rather lose fights to make money than stand up for responsible and beneficial gun ownership. More business than civil liberties group.

So perhaps this is a match made in heaven, but I doubt it. Palin is going to a friendly environment, going to bash the president for things he has not done, nor will ever do, and they will love her for it.

And pay her a pretty penny, I am sure. Well, maybe they are all petards, and they deserve each other.

The Road to Hell is Paved With Intellectual Dishonesty

2010-02-14T16:18:00.007-05:00

Hey there, true believers, RayRay is back with his first post of the new decade. I am truly sorry for my failure to post earlier, but I do have two excuses.

My first excuse is that my newborn twins keep my attention away from The Witch Hunt. Those little buggers can take a lot out of a man by the end of the day.

The second excuse is that I have become extremely tired of the political scene, that "politics as usual" are unusually terrible. From feckless Democrats to shameless Republicans, I have been on an unofficial hiatus from politics, because I just can't take the brainless stupidity, from the "retarded" to the sublime.

To highlight this despicable dynamic I shall use the current, and ridiculous, "debate" about global warming and climate change, and I shall endeavor to use unassailable facts to make my point.

To recap, conservatives have used the recent blizzard on the East Coast as demonstrable proof that global warming is a debunked hoax. I assure you that the knuckle-draggers at odds with some 90% of publishing scientists who study climate change are incorrect, and here is why:

1) it is known that the climate of Earth has fluctuated throughout the 5 or so billion years it has existed;

2) in the past the Earth had periods of intense warmth, for instance, during the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous periods, when the dinosaurs walked the earth;

3) carbon dioxide, CO2, among other gases, are known as "greenhouse gases" because they absorb heat and / or infra red wavelengths of light, and do a similar job on sunlight as the glass of a greenhouse does. You can prove this for yourself with two makeshift greenhouses, two lamps with lightbulbs of the same wattage, and by putting a small piece of dry ice in one of the greenhouses;

4) until recently humans released a tremendous amount of chloroflourocarbons, aka CFC's, which reacted with the ozone in the upper atmosphere. CFC's were used a propellants and refrigerants. Ozone (O3) is a molecule which just so happens to absorb the higher intensity wavelengths of sunlight known as "ultraviolet," and our CFC emissions have put a sizable hole in the ozone layer, permitting more energy through the atmosphere and to the surface of the planet;

5) since the Industrial Revolution humans have begun to burn what we now know as "fossil" fuels for energy. Fossil fuels include petroleum, coal, and natural gas. These are called "fossil" fuels because they were once living things, either plant or animals. Incidentally, these animals and plants whose fossils we burn lived at a time when there was a lot more CO2 in the atmosphere, and the Earth was much warmer, and we are busy re-releasing that same CO2 back into our atmosphere;

6) naturally occurring vulcanism accounts for a large amount of what we term "air pollution," but even if this pollution accounts for between 50-75% of known air pollution, that means that human activity accounts for the rest. In a closed system, such additional pollutants become significant over time, much like the expected weight gain of a person who normally ingests a 2500 calorie diet who decides to eat 100 extra calories per day. By the end of a year, that person will have gained a significant amount of weight; the same type of dynamic is at work in our atmosphere. Taken together with the known damage to the ozone layer, which permits more energetic sun rays through the atmosphere, it is inescapable that human acts influence the climate, and that the double effect of more energy into the system is coupled with the dynamic that more energy is absorbed by it;

7) the last decade was the warmest on record;

8) both the Arctic and Antarctic ice sheets have retreated visibly. The nations whose borders extend above the Arctic circle have begun to formulate plans for the sea lanes expected to open up as a result of this. There is a dearth of sea ice for polar bears, and the permafrost of both North America and Far East Asia has begun to melt, causing the steady collapse of villages which were built upon them;

9) in April of 2009 the Wilkins Ice Shelf in Antarctica collapsed. It was the size of Jamaica. The average temperature around Antarctica has risen 3.8 degrees F in the last 50 years;

10) glaciers around the world, from the Rockies to the Alps to most famously on Mount Kilimanjaro have begun to retreat or disappear;

11) Senator James Inhofe, perhaps the most vocal deniers of global warming, is a Young Earth Creationist. He denies the overwhelming scientific evidence as to the age of the Earth, the universe, and various other scientific truths. Being on the same side as Sen. Inhofe in a scientific based argument is akin to arguing you weren't drunk driving because you didn't crash your car. Alongside the likes of Mr. Inhofe we have such intellectual luminaries as ex-Governor Sarah Palin [who could see Russia, but not melting permafrost, in Alaska], Glenn "Hari-kiri" Beck, Sean Hannity, and Rush "I did not straw purchase illegal narcotics through that woman" Limbaugh. Arrayed against this veritable think tank of scientific brilliance we have merely a bunch [read: 90+%] of stupid "scientists," people who foolishly devoted their lives to studying the "why's" of the universe instead of getting into the lucrative industry of punditry. How's that scientific method workin' out for ya?

When all is said and done, global warming is NOT a political issue. But because some people see Al Gore on one side of an issue, or because some people get their grants from the American Petroleum Institute, or just because some people read the Book of Genesis as if it were a science text book, we have this, among the stupidest of political debates. It pains me to have to actually have such idiocy as part of our political discourse, as it is a mere hairsbreadth above debating the veracity of the Theory of Evolution or the Big Bang or if the Earth actually goes around the Sun. It comes down to an argument over, on the one hand, a) vast scientific consensus versus b) inane, uneducated opinion based political posturing for, at best, scoring short term political points, with a bumper sticker slogan.

To then argue, in self imposed ignorance, that the recent storms prove anything, is sheer intellectual dishonesty, and the worst kind of political posturing, as it only inures to the detriment of all of us.

So, if there is an afterlife, I hope that these foolish deniers of what is otherwise rather solid science get to look upon Earth from the Hell they are surely headed to for their sins of bearing false witness and for their greed, and see their children and grandchildren suffering for their sins in the temporal world. But this would be cold comfort for me, as I don't think there is an afterlife, and I must hope that the masses realize the evidence before their eyes before it is too late.

The Hole Islam Has Dug for Itself

2009-12-03T17:35:00.003-05:00

For just about my entire life there has been a perennial reminder of the militant Muslim - throwing rocks at Israeli tanks, hijacking airliners and occasionally blowing them up, attacking crowded public spaces the world over. They often wore some sort of scarf, wrapping, or mask, obscuring their faces and making them appear menacing.

For much of my life these images would pop up periodically in the news when some splinter group of very angry militants - usually angry at Israel or American support for Israel - would do one of the above. Sometimes there was a pretty good reason for the anger, at least from what I could tell: occupation of Palestinian territory, invasion of Beirut in the 1980's, etc. Other times the nexus between the act and the anger did not really exist, like when Pan Am 103 was bombed over Scotland, or when the Achille Lauro was hijacked and Leon Klinghoffer was murdered.

Then September 11, 2001, changed many things. First, it was an attack upon the United States or America, which was something new. Sure, American targets had been hit in the past, and even recently prior to 9/11, but not U.S. soil.

Second, there had never been a terrorist attack of that magnitude. Never had such a terrible act been worked; never had so many people been killed; never had the disregard for innocent civilian life been greater; never had an open society ever been so taken advantage of. Even though Europe had experienced many terrorist attacks from Muslim, radical leftist Red Army Factions, Basque and Irish Republican groups, nothing could compare with the atrocity of September 11, even when piled upon one another.

The world was aghast, even those places where "they hate us," like Tehran, where there were small, brief and spontaneous demonstrations in support of the United States. In fact, even the then President of Iran, Mohammad Khatami came out and said: “My deep sympathy goes out to the American nation, particularly those who have suffered from the attacks and also the families of the victims,” he said. “Terrorism is doomed, and the international community should stem it and take effective measures in a bid to eradicate it.”

Eight years later where are the moderate Muslims?

In that time the United States and her allies, what former President George W. Bush called the "Coalition of the Willing" invaded and toppled the terrorist supporting regime in Afghanistan and the autocratic ruler of Iraq. Yet Muslim terror has not abated. See: the London Metro Attacks, the Madrid railway bombing, and the bombing of the nightclub in Bali, as well as recent military action taken by Saudi Arabia on her border with Yemen. There have also been various plots and/or attacks across the globe, including India, the United States, as well as continued strife in Israel/Palestine which were perpetrated by Muslims, though they may or may not have been part of a larger Muslim terrorist group or effort. The recent tragedy at Fort Hood I would classify under this latter category.

While I have waited, for years now, I have yet to hear the voice of the moderate Muslims who decry these acts in the name of their religion. Rather, their silence has, over this time, cast a pall upon their faith, permitting others - inside and outside Islam - to define them.

Let me be clear: I am wanting to hear these voices. I know that there are hundreds and hundreds of millions of Muslims across the globe that do not hate the United States, or our "freedom," that could not care a wit about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, and only want to live their lives in peace and prosperity. Many of them are in India, Pakistan, Indonesia - the three largest Muslim populations in the world - and tens of millions of them are here in the United States.

But their silence - or perhaps their lack of exposure, to be fair - has resulted in institutionalized hatred against Islam out of fear of Islamic fundamentalism.

On November 30, 2009, The New York Times, among other news sources, reported that the Swiss have passed a popular referendum outlawing future building of minarets, aka prayer towers, on existing mosques. See the full article at: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/30/world/europe/30swiss.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=swiss%20ban%20minarets&st=cse

My live and let live instincts are terribly disturbed by the Swiss and their very discriminatory referendum, which, in the case of Swiss Muslims, is pretty much baseless. On the other hand, Muslim communities, by their acts or omissions, have done a great deal to make their own bed. I cite the truly ridiculous controversy over the Muslim backlash a few years back to cartoons depicting the prophet Mohammed in the Danish paper Jyllands-Posten:

According to the article, France is also considering its own anti-Muslim law, where full veils would be outlawed to stop the influence of more fundamentalist forms of Islam.

And while no such measures are being considered in the United States, I can attest that my I have experienced my fellow Americans expressing overt and unfettered religious and cultural bigotry toward Muslims and Islam. These explosions of vitriol have come from all quarters: friends, family members, politicians, in addition to the self appointed "culture warriors."

The time has long passed for the greater part of Islam to stand up for itself. Yes, there have been some who have stood up and said what needs to be said. But out of the billion Muslims in this world there have been only those few. I need, for my own self, to hear less equivocation about Israel and more words about those who stain the name of one of the great faiths.

There was once a time, up to a half a millenia ago, when the real civilizations on earth were Muslim. European Christendom was barely out of a self imposed stone age during that time [think 700's to 1500's]. Fast forward to today and much of the Muslim world is still stuck in those Medieval times, but without the former glory. Yet great cities rise in the Muslim world, in Dubai and Kuala Lumpur, among others. All is not dark.

Christendom underwent a Renaissance, Reformation and then an Enlightenment. The time has come for Islam to do the same.

Sarah Palin: Leave the Foreign Policy to the Adults

2009-11-25T19:17:00.007-05:00

I learned of this Sarah Palin gem just the other day. While being interviewed by Barbara Walters, (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgizfYZFPC8), who is an interviewer a few grades above Katie Couric, Palin let slip with this missive regarding Mid-East policy:

Palin: "I disagree with the Obama Administration on that. I believe that the Jewish settlements should be allowed to be expanded upon because that population of Israel is going to grow. More and more Jewish people are going to be flocking to Israel in the days and weeks and months ahead. and I don't think the Obama Administration has any right to tell Israel that the Jewish
settlements cannot expand."

Walters: "Even if it's Palestinian areas?"

Palin: "I believe the Jewish settlements should be allowed to expand."

This is so distressing simplistic, not to mention outright cruel toward the misery of the Palestinian people and their [usually self defeating] national aspirations, that I really am at a loss for words. Remember, this is a person who wants to be President of the United States. It is also distressing that she has such little regard for the property of others.

Honestly, aside from a quixotic and myopic world view, what is behind this opinion? Why should the settlements be allowed to expand? Further, I cannot square her opinion that the United States has no right to tell Israel what to do in occupied Palestinian territory, even though we all but guarantee its existence with our aid, yet she is four-square behind our very questionable war in Iraq. Can she possibly rectify this?

Of course it goes without saying that the settlements are a political football in Israel, with large swaths of the population not supporting them, or their growth, and rather, look at the settlers as right wing religious radicals endangering Israel with their insistence on occupying what the Palestinian people see as their land.

Her statements about Afghanistan were equally simplistic. According to Mrs. Palin, our goal should be to listen to [Gen.] McChrystal. Ummmm, with all due respect, that's not a goal. When asked again "What should be our ultimate goal?" Mrs. Palin responded:

"Afghanistan, the people there, the government there should be able to take over and to have a more peaceful existence there for the people that live there without American interference, if you will."

Mrs. Palin: Afghanistan has been a hellhole of warring tribes since at least the Soviet invasion of 1979. There are at least four major ethicities and multiple languages, not to mention tribal and clan rivalries. Though NATO is fighting one group of people there numbered in the hundreds, perhaps the low thousands - that's al Qaeda, there has been an ongoing rise in the Taliban since they were toppled in 2001. See: http://www.military-world.net/Afghanistan/2387.html.

And not for nothing, but after inheriting the political brownout that is Afghanistan, within which the Bush Administration did just enough to not succeed over the course of seven (7!!) years, Obama is not "dithering" if he is taking some time - a few days? - to consider what should be done in a land so exquisitely hostile to foreign invasion that it already had a history of defeating two superpowers. Before spouting off at the mouth the most famous quitter in recent memory should perhaps learn a little bit about those subjects she seeks to be in charge of.

And what happened to the conservative principal of not talking ill of a war President? Won't that upset the troops, shaking their confidence in their Commander in Chief? Just saying.......

Newsflash: Everyone Guaranteed Same Rights Under the Constitution!

2009-11-18T15:49:00.005-05:00

An inconvenient truth, to be sure, but everyone is entitled to the same rights, and in particular, even the nastiest scum-suckingest dirtbags this side of the Khyber Pass.

I know it doesn't sound right, but that's the bottom line. We don't get to choose, on the basis of sympathetic and emotional reasons, who is entitled to avail themselves of their rights under the Constitution. That's because those rights are, in the words of the Founding Fathers, "endowed by their Creator." [see: The Declaration of Independence; Fifth & Sixth Amendment to the Bill of Rights, etc.]

Yeah, I know, it doesn't sound fair. But if the government can, sua sponte, decide who is entitled and not entitled, then they aren't really rights, are they? More like privileges bestowed upon children who do their homework before supper.

So, even when such scum-sucking dirthbags like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed are, after criminal investigations by foreign countries, captured by foreign services in a non-war zone, and turned over to the United States for interrogation and trial in connection with their various crimes, then at that point he is entitled to a fair trial under our Constitution. That's the breaks.

That's our Constitution and those are our laws. If you don't like it, then go live in another country.

New York City: Tough Enough to Try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed

2009-11-17T13:08:00.004-05:00

Notwithstanding the protestations of former United States Attorney Rudolph Giuliani, as well as some others, like Mike Lupica, New York City is the perfect place to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. First: this is the situs of his crime. Second: we deserve first crack at this killer. Third: this is how the justice system is supposed to work.

No, a military tribunal is NOT the place to try him. Zacarias Moussaoui was properly tried and convicted in a 5th Circuit District Court in Virginia, and we, as a nation, were better for it. We showed him and his ilk that even filthbags of his type can receive a fair trial under our (superior) system of justice and government.

And so it should be for Mohammed.

No, he will not be permitted to grandstand by a Federal judge. No, the court will not be turned into a circus. Yes, he shall be given a fair trial, as his Consitutional right, and he will be fairly convicted. And then he will spend a long time in Federal prison, rotting away, until he is executed, if it comes to that.

Rudy's arguments ring hollow. He was strongly in favor of trying Moussaoui - what changed since then except the President? Military tribunals, with their air of being a kangaroo court, will not suffice, especially for a defendant of this magnitude. As for the "extra risk" cited by Giuliani - what risk? That New York City is going to become a target for terror? Been there, done that. Twice. Such should not be a concern when meting out justice.

Also, terrorists, by their definition, seek to terrorize a population into changing their ways. If we change our ways to suit KSM and his alleged acts, and abrogating our Constitution in the process, are we not giving in to the wishes of those same terrorists?

Let us not permit Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and his lousy brethren, to change our ways. Let us demonstrate the superiority of our ways by giving him the fair trial he Constitutionally deserves, and then the punishment he has coming to him.

Palin the Destroyer: The End of the Republican Party as we Know it?

2009-11-15T16:16:00.001-05:00

From the far northern wastes of Alaska came a politician like no other. Wild, beautiful, religiously conservative to the extreme, mavericky, roguey, pit-bully and a full on hockey mom with lipstick. She descended on the Republican Convention from out of nowhere as the newly minted vice-presidential candidate and delivered a tour de force of an acceptance speech. Verily, the halls of the DNC trembled at this woman who would be king by her own hand. But, and some would say luckily, the fates were not impressed, and she appeared to be vanquished.

But the fates sometimes work in mysterious ways.

The idea that Sarah Palin could destroy the Republican Party occurred to me shortly after the 2008 Presidential Election. I saw how many conservatives openly despised John McCain, apparently because he wasn't hot under the collar to check the content of a woman's womb and had some convictions of his own [campaign finance, for example]. But he was reliably conservative in just about every other way, not to mention he fit nicely into the militarism fetish so popular with conservative circles, and said everything right in his stump speeches about nominating strict constructionist conservative judges.

Yet Palin excited a certain sector of the GOP base so much that she eclipsed the top name on the ticket as a draw. People seemed to hang on her every [disingenuous] repetition that she said "Thanks, but no thanks" to the bridge to nowhere. The audiences got so fired up at her claims that Barack Obama was the BFF of a domestic terrorist that some began to believe Obama was a member of The Weather Underground, even though he was in grade school during their brief existence of radicalism.

I never thought my gut instinct would prove correct, and that Sarah would recede back to governing Alaska. She had, after all, cratered in the eyes of about 66% of the American populace after famously whiffing on softball questions tossed under-hand by the cream-puff journalist, Katie Couric. Seriously, if you can't give one newspaper you read, or one Supreme Court case you disagree with, you are not informed enough to be president. Sorry. She also made clear that she was challenged when it came to such other matters like forming cogent sentences or making sense when talking without a teleprompter.

And then Sarah quit her day job of being governor, saying it was done, and that she didn't want to be a lame duck with only the second half of her term to be completed. At this point I thought she was finished for good, that there was some Federal indictment waiting to be disclosed or that her soldier son was being discharged for violating "Don't Ask, Don't Tell."

Boy, was I reading the tea leaves wrong. Somehow Ms. Palin inserted herself into the healthcare debate, notwithstanding the utter vapidity and stupidity of her "death panels" claims. But the Palinistas ate it up, happy to believe anything coming from between her lips.

Even though she was eventually rebuffed, and her strident assertions vitiated, Sarah Palin has not gone quietly into that good night. Most recently she has joined forces with the master astroturfer, Dick Armey, in the search for Republican Party purity.

Her first foray into witch hunting her fellow Republicans was in the 23rd Congressional District in New York, where a special election was held to fill a seat left vacant after Republican John McHugh was nominated to be Secretary of the Army in the Obama Administration. This seat has been reliably Republican since Reconstruction, or the 1870's for all of you who never studied American history. Enter Sarah Palin. Instead of backing the local GOP pick, Dede Scozzafava, she instead backed Doug Hoffman, a man who didn't even live in the district. Why? Because Scozzafava is pro-choice, pro-gay marriage, and was pro-stimulus bill. Aside from those considerations, she is a reliable Republican, pro-gun, pro-hunting, pro-small business. But Palin, as the pretty point-woman for her pals, labeled her a liberal and a RINO, and drove her from the race, giving the election to the Democrat, and thus creating the verb "to Scozzafava." While there is a late breaking recount in the district, which may eventually throw it to Hoffman after the absentee ballots are counted, the damage to party cohesion has been done. You can now count the number of national Republican officeholders in the northeast on one hand.

There is now a concerted effort by a significant quarter of the GOP to get more votes by enforcing party purity and moving the party even further to the right. When you think about this it becomes difficult to see the logic, but that's what's behind Sarah Palin's and Dick Armey's foray into the NY-23. We will surely see primary challenges to Republican incumbents deemed not sufficiently conservative in election cycles to come.

To kick off this silly notion, and to put a truly fine point on it, reliable conservative Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), listed as the 15th most conservative senator by the National Journal, has been Scozzafavaed in his home state. It was reported in the November 12, 2009 New York Times, Graham was censured by the Charleston County Republican Party "for many of the positions he has taken that do not represent the wishes of the people of South Carolina, such as: passing cap and trade energy bill, bailing out banks and granting amnesty for illegal aliens."

When conservatives like Graham, who are truly conservative yet also have integrity and intellect and an admirable ability to compromise, are driven from the party, the GOP will be an even more laughable shell of itself. The Party of Lincoln and the Party of Reagan will have become the know-nothing party of that wild, lawless barbarian politician from the northern wastes, Palin the Destroyer.

At the Eleventh Hour of the Eleventh Day of the Eleventh Month...

2009-11-11T11:52:00.004-05:00

Ninety-one years ago today The Great War, The War to End All Wars, The First World War was brought to a close. The artillery barrages continued until the last minute, and then the armistice went into effect. What would then become known as Armistice Day would eventually, over time, morph into Veteran's Day here in the United States.

I suppose the name change was required as the First World War was more a prelude of horror to come, and in fact, many more wars, with millions more veterans, have come to pass. And are still ongoing.

The First World War was possibly the worst war for the common soldier - never has the field of lethal projectiles ever been as dense, either before or since. But the battlefield and its terror has not abated, and in fact has only grown to encompass all the places a soldier might be deployed. Notwithstanding the inhuman conditions at the front in World War One, there was a safe area "behind the lines." Today our soldiers deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan do not know such a luxury. Nor did the soldiers who fought in Vietnam. And of course, enough cannot be said about our veterans of the Second World War and the Korean War, who slogged through some of the worst conditions, as hot as Hell or as cold as Hades.

Today the Witch Hunt honors our veterans in all of our wars, past and present, declared or not, and humbly thanks them for their service when they were called to duty. You do us credit.

The Night They Brought The Wall Down: Twenty Years Later

2009-11-09T17:15:00.007-05:00

It is amazing to me that it has been twenty years since they brought the Berlin Wall down. I remember watching in absolute shock as the denizens of Berlin took hammer and pick to that great division and brought down the single most telling and literal symbol of the Cold War.

I was 15 at the time, a sophomore in high school. Myself and my peers are probably the last generation to grow up during the Cold War, where NATO and the Warsaw Pact stood ready to defend their economic and social ideologies with all the weapons at their disposal, even the unthinkable ones.

Those were the beginning of some heady times. After Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev decided to dispense with the hardliners in each of their nations and come together as human beings, and talk to each other, the cracks in the Soviet edifice began to show. But the fall of the Berlin Wall was the actual death knell of the Soviet Union and her satellite states.

I visited the Soviet Union with my high school in the winter of 1991, and from what I was told it was like visiting a completely different nation from the former trips. Were we tailed by KGB agents? Sure, but even we could spot them. And the everyday people in the street were openly friendly to us, unlike in former times when they were afraid to be seen consorting with Westerners.

For years peace began to break out all over the globe. The Russians, and their Eastern European brethren, began to cry for freedom, be it artistic, political or economic. And they got it. Except for some hot spots where Communism held down ethnic rivalries and national aspirations, like Yugoslavia and Chechnya, a new day seemed to be dawning.

It even got to a point where Arab, Russian and NATO troops, lead by an American coalition, invaded and freed Kuwait from Saddam Hussein and his summertime invasion. And there even hit a point where, as a senior in college, I thought that there might even be peace in the Middle East, with the handshake on the White House lawn. That dream ended with a bullet in the head of a great man, Yitzhak Rabin, from a gun shot by a fellow Israeli.

My friends and I have often looked back at the days of our youth, where the Super Powers deployed great armies upon the land of Europe, and great fleets above and below the waves of the Seven Seas, with wonder and a bit of fondness. While I can still, with a bit of effort, still feel the fear of the nuclear Sword of Damocles which hung over the head of all mankind, all of us pine, at least a little bit, for the stability of the Cold War.

For since then it has not been all roses. Tens of thousands were massacred in brutal civil wars in the Balkans. Authoritarian governments have retrenched in Russia. Peace never took hold in the Mid-East, and in fact, several more small wars have been fought between Israel and her Arab neighbors. Authoritarian China has come onto the world scene as the new economic super power, and appears to have foregone a switch to a liberal democracy before adopting capitalism.

The religious Islam the United States courted to fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan was, unfortunately, left to its own devices after the USSR pulled out of that country. Left unchecked these men would then attack America, at first abroad, and later on our own soil. They were the watershed of the Post Berlin Wall world, now the Post 9/11 world.

Back in the Cold War you knew where you stood, and where everyone else stood. Alliances were rock solid. Even terrorists were the proxies of one side or the other. In the end all disputes went up the ladder; and if they had to go high enough, and the big guys got involved, people jumped when they were given the word. Nowadays things aren't so clear. Check that: they are not clear at all. Everyone has an agenda. National politics, without the threat of total annihilation, have taken a dreadful turn, with labels used by both sides completely out of proportion with whatever argument they are supporting.

Yet the continuation of the Cold War, as a detente or an arms' race, would have been unconscionable. Thinking in terms of just resources wasted on ICBMs makes me angry, for these are weapons we had no intention of using, but had to have "just in case." Military minds and strategic thought were not thinking straight back in the 1950's and 1960's, when the call for thousands of nuclear devices went out. And each of these devices were tens, if not hundreds or a thousand, times more powerful than the firecrackers the United States [rightly] used on Japan.

By the 1980's there was a palpable undercurrent of fear in all the populations of the world, or at least I felt it to be so. Nuclear weapons and the arms' race was always a huge matter in the news. I can recall several different covers of Time magazine dealing with either nucelar arms talks, or the deployment of one weapons system or another, and in particular the Pershing II, which some say did a great deal to bring the USSR around.

I was a child of people who grew up with air raid drills; hiding under their desks; duck and cover. We children of the mid 70's didn't such have things to cling to or terrify us. By then it was rather common knowledge that nuclear hostilities were the end of it all. What brought people completely around, though, was seeing it in movies. At least that's my opinion.

The Day After (1983) by ABC[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VG2aJyIFrA] and Threads (1984) by the BBC [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RN8-VP810aA]are two terrifying movies, with truly horrifying attack sequences, the links of which I inserted above. These two movies, in my estimation, brought home the complete pointlessness of the nuclear arsenals, except to keep at bay another nuclear arsenal. Their entireties are also available on Youtube, and I highly recommend both of them.

The Berlin Wall fell 20 years ago today. An entire generation has grown up without it, and without the fear of the invasion of the Red Hoardes from the East, or the complete destruction of everything. But this same generation has bore witness to the instability of the Post Wall Era, the Era of the 9/11 World. We are now 8 years after the Fall of the Towers, as painful a memory as I have. But our world is none the better for it. Like it or hate it, our nation is still mired in a conflict in Afghanistan, with an enemy almost too small to defeat; and we are still heavily deployed in Iraq, though mercifully it does appear to be more stable.

These times offer me no comfort, even the cold comfort of mutual assured destruction. While the United States, nor any Western nation, nor even most Asian nations, faces any sort of existential threat, as were the Super Powers and their respective alliances were to each other, there is no stability. At home or abroad. It's as if the removal of the USSR as a threat and counterbalance to the United States has thrown off the kilter of the world, leaving all of us off balance.

Capital Vices: Dick Cheney's Casual Relationship With Truth

2009-11-07T13:14:00.003-05:00

The unindicted co-conspirator cum-former vice president, who is presently worshipped by the right for "keeping us safe," [even though he vice-presided over the biggest failure to "keep us safe" in American history], who is attempting to foist his truth and integrity challenged daughter Liz upon national politics, none other than Dick Cheney, pulled an Alberto Gonzalez when interviewed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation about the Valerie Plame Affair, where a CIA agent under cover was outed for the sake of political payback by the Bush Administration.

If you recall, Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Scooter Libby, was convicted of lying to investigators and obstructing justice in connection with this scandal. When interviewed about Libby's notes, which indicated Libby had learned of Valerie Plame and her identity as an under cover agent for the CIA from Cheney, Cheney would respond to investigators 72 times that he did not recall.

Apparently, lack of memory was epidemic at the Bush White House, which is convenient considering the various acts of incompetence, dishonesty and malfeasance committed there.

Bill Clinton lied under oath in a civil deposition. About an extramarital affair. No one died as a result. Nor was national security compromised in any way. Yet this was the underlying cause of the Republican attempt to unseat him via impeachment and trial by the Senate. To the present day the name Clinton is spat out by conservatives and right wing commentators, largely as a result of this episode.

Dick Cheney lied to Federal investigators about political payback where a CIA agent under cover was outed, and her career ended, because her husband uncovered and made plain the lies of the administration regarding a casus belli which lead us into a war where now 4,276 Americans have been killed, not to mention the untold thousands of innocent Iraqis. Yet the mindlessly hawkish and partisan conservatives will not relent and give up the old criminal, undermining the integrity of the neo-conservative worldview and its criticisms of the Obama Administration, which, incidentally, includes justifying torture and undermining the Constitution because of fear.

And this is the same crowd crowing about "freedom" from medical care, but absolutely swoon over the PATRIOT Act like it's the bees' knees, and love it when the NSA performs warrantless wiretaps in abrogation of the law and all concepts of American justice. Will someone restore some intellectual vigor to conservative thought? Please?

Happy Guy Fawkes Day!

2009-11-05T10:29:00.003-05:00

The title of this post has nothing to do with its contents. Rather, I just wanted to remind the people of the gunpowder, treason and plot.

That said, I have a little rant about these ballot measures, namely the recent Maine popular vote, as well as California's Prop 8 of 2008, which give cover to the haters in our nation when they choose to divide us over what are otherwise fundamental rights - whom to marry, make a family with and associate our lives.

The cover is that these measures, being a popular vote, make the denial of Civil Rights seem the will of the people. But that is simply the tyranny of the majority at work, something which is abhorred by a Constitutional system of government. Respect for minority opinions is a piece of the bedrock upon which our Republic is founded, and, parenthetically, one of the problems with trying to export our system to places which have no such liberal tradition, like Iraq or Afghanistan.

Think of it this way: when the case of Loving v. Virginia came down in the 1960's, which struck down anti-miscegenation laws (laws preventing blacks from marrying whites), do you think a ballot initiative rolling back this case would have passed in Alabama or Mississippi? Or Vermont?

This is the problem with having a simple majority decide fundamental and/or Civil Rights. We The People are, though better than most nations, not much better than a mob. And such fundamental matters, like who is a person's spouse, or next of kin, or who should have a say in end-of-life matters should not be left up to the mob or which side has a better turnout on a given election day.

In the end it demeans the concepts of a constitutional democratic republic, respect for minorities, and Civil Rights. For if the mob can decide who is permitted to marry or not, based on little substance beyond a phobia of a given minority, then the door for more abuses of mob mentality is left ajar.

November Comeuppance

2009-11-04T13:46:00.009-05:00

It looks like both sides of the aisle got some comeuppance yesterday. And we will be hearing the chattering classes parse yesterday's election results as if they were reading tea leaves of absolute truth.

But these are my observations:

- John Corzine, a weak incumbent in a state, New Jersey, which is in a constant state of flux, was destined to lose to any challenger with enough Moxie. Congratulations to Chris Christie on his victory. And condolences for having to now govern New Jersey, the state voted "Most lacking its own identity." As far as national politics goes, this registers as a C- on the Witch Hunt scale of importance. Yes, it is good for the GOP to have won the statehouse. But it is not that big a deal, as Jersey fluctuates the party of its governor regularly. This is not a repudiation of Obama as much a repudiation of Corzine, who did a bad job and never delivered on his promises.
- The Virginia election, where the GOP was also victorious, also registers relatively low. I give this one a C+ in importance, if only because Virginia was one of the new "blue" [geez, I hate the color coding of America] states in 2008, and it would have kept Obama rolling and the GOP on its heels. Again, not so much a repudiation of Obama, but more of one than the New Jersey results. But we'll hear about this like it was the second coming of Ronald Reagan.
- The 23rd District of the Great State of New York went to the Democratic candidate, Bill Owens, who narrowly defeated the Conservative Party candidate, Doug Hoffman. This one is, for me, elucidating, inasmuch as a ton of national media attention was poured onto this race, mostly because the Republican candidate, Dede Scozzafava, dropped out after being pressured by national conservatives, namely Sarah Palin and Dick Armey. Apparently, Scozzafava was not conservative enough, and in the quest for absolute ideological purity, specifically the desire to invade wombs and prevent gays from marrying, Palin and Armey, those scions of Northeast politics, drove her out. Then they selected a guy who isn't even from the district, who had little idea of the "parochial" interests of the area, and who lost. In a district that had been reliably Republican since the Civil War, more or less. I guess this might be a repudiation of Palin and Armey and GOP purity. Or maybe not. As for impact, I give this race a C, and only because Palin got burned.

So, the Democrats, feckless as usual, failing to deliver, have been given a wake up call. Maybe they'll pull their craniums out of their rectums and actually do something with their massive majority. And let the Blue Dogs be put on notice: failure is worse than doing something unpopular.

But the GOP has also been given a wake up call, and I hope they hear it. We need a counter balance to the Dems, and "No" just isn't it. And the alarm ringing this morning was that party purity is not a winning ticket, it's stupidity; and while Palin and her buddy Armey are really ideologically pure, national political strategists they are not.

Finally, I would like to place a pox on the houses of all those ninkompoops who voted yesterday in Maine to repeal the law permitting gay marriage. You guys suck. I mean that. What you did was mean, hurtful, and hateful, and I don't care that you think your opinion matters. Suck eggs. And the backers, be they the Catholic or Mormon or other churches: you suck, too, using Christ as your aegis for hate and divisiveness. Really. I think if churches want to be this involved in politics, fine, but then we get to tax the crap out of you.

Now I also want to start my own stupid petition regarding marriage: I want to ban marriage for all the other proscriptions as set forth in Leviticus. That means if you eat shellfish, an "abomination," you are not allowed to be married. Wear cotton/rayon blends, also an "abomination," then you too shall be denied marriage. Oh, you like bacon cheeseburgers? Abomination, no marriage for you. Any takers?

October Observations

2009-10-27T20:42:00.005-04:00

It has been a while, and I apologize. Times are a little crazy, and time itself has not been a commodity I have had a lot of. That said, here are some Autumnal Observations for all of the Witch Hunters:

Today's New York Times had a byline, on page A19, which reported that in California a gang rape, wherein 6 men, over the course of 2 hours, raped and beat a 15 year old girl outside of her high school during a homecoming dance, was witnessed by a dozen people who did nothing. If this is not a case study in favor of a strong carry and concealed law, I don't know what is.
It appears that Harry Reid has found his manhood and put it out there he is proposing a healthcare bill with a public option. Olympia Snowe is displeased, but so what? Last time I checked, she was in the minority party, with about 18 fewer votes, none of whom want to vote for healthcare reform, with or without a public option. It is refreshing that the lie of bipartisanship can be finally put to bed.
Joe Lieberman, (I - CT), really doesn't like his job anymore. After campaigning for every Republican he could get within arm's reach, he has announced he will join a filibuster against any bill with the public option. Good for him.
Sarah Palin, the most popular quitter of recent memory, should perhaps stay out of New York State politics. She is presently backing the Conservative Party candidate, Doug Hoffman, against the Republican Dede Scozzafava, for the Congressional election in the upstate 23rd District. The Democratic candidate, Bill Owens, is overjoyed. However, Newt Gingrich is not, as he believes the infighting, essentially over the concept of party purity, will weaken the party nationally. Palin is joined by such New York stalwarts as Dick Armey, now of the inaptly named Freedomworks, and Minnesotan Tim Pawlenty. Scozzafava's crimes against the GOP? She is pro-choice and pro-gay marriage. But she has a triple A rating from the NRA - my kind of Republican.
The above story gives me great pause over the issue of government intervention in people's lives. Is it me, or is it a form of cognitive dissonance to say that the government can tell consenting adults how to order their family, or if a woman should have an abortion and make such a crime, but cannot pay for everyone's healthcare out of taxes. Hmmm...

Until next time Witch Hunters: keep the fires burning. And I shall endeavor that the next time shall be sooner than the last.

A True Hero Passes: Rest In Peace, Marek Edelman

2009-10-03T14:35:00.003-04:00

The New York Times reported today in its obituary section the passing of Marek Edelman, M.D. He was 90 years old, and lived in much of his later life in Lodz, Poland.

Few people know who Dr. Edelman was, and until today I was among those ignorant of his mark upon history. But it would be little exaggeration to say there are few among us qualified to shine his shoes.

Dr. Edelman was the last surviving commander of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943. If you never heard of this incredible, three week long event, then please look it up. Suffice it to say that 220 young Polish Jews, with a very few handguns and hand grenades, temporarily halted the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto, stopping the all mighty Wehrmacht in its tracks, and holding off a German force more then ten times their number.

Their story is one of the myriad tales of true heroism, grit, and intestinal fortitude that the Second World War has left with us. But the history of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising has always had a special place, where the few stood against many in a hopeless fight, as if to say that they would not go quietly, and perhaps to save a few of their own.

Theirs is a story of true heroism, where the righteous find themselves in a man made Hades, and yet do not succumb in utter hopelessness at the futility of their stand against evil incarnate. This man fought the Nazis and their henchmen with his bare hands as he watched them kill his loved ones, and he not only survived but left his indelible mark on his foe and lived to tell the tale.

He is an example of a real hero, when regular people rise to the unimaginable challenges placed before them, and even if they may not succeed, they are to be hailed simply for their perseverance in the face of unimaginable adversity.

Confederacy of Dunces

2009-09-26T11:11:00.009-04:00

There is a myth in the circles of those who study history that the American Civil War was not over slavery. Rather, those who take this view narrow the underlying casus belli of the Civil War to States' Rights, to a fight of Americans to preserve some sort of freedom.

In a way they are right, but only when the white elephant of slavery, the freedom to enslave their fellow man, is ignored. And to this end it becomes apparent that in order to have made such a cause for war that rich planters, particularly in the Deep South such as Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia and South Carolina, convinced poor tenant and yeoman farmers from Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee and North Carolina to die. And to say it plainly, the cotton moguls of their day convinced the poor whites of the South to die in the hundreds of thousands for the freedom to own human beings and do what they would with this human chattel.

By the grace of God, or despite it, this war of the South was lost, at the most terrible cost in human lives. And none of the enlisted men of the South who fought and died, or were maimed, or just scarred by the carnage of the first industrial battlefield and total war would have ever, in a million years, owned a slave, or a plantation, or ever have been privy to the Southern Gentility they were fighting to preserve. They were fools fighting to preserve the fortunes of tycoons, paying for human flesh in bondage with their blood.

These are the thoughts which raced through my head as I watched my fellow Americans come together in Washington, D.C., on September 12, 2009, to protest the prospect of healthcare reform and a public option, holding signs lauding the absent Glenn Beck and the rude Congressman Joe Wilson, waiving around the Stars and Bars [that rag of Southern treason] and the idea of secession. I kept thinking how these people in their thousands [not the hundreds of thousands or millions, as some would prevaricate] and how many of them appeared to be stolid working and/or middle class. From the twanging accents I heard from those interviewed a lot seemed to come from former Confederacy.

There they were, their great host gathered from across the nation, to protest reform, and to keep the status quo. They were there in the name of freedom: the freedom of gigantic multinational corporations to make medical decisions for them; their freedom to go bankrupt from skyrocketing medical costs; the freedom of insurance moguls to make more money in a week from premiums and denying coverage than the protesters would make in a year. They were protesting for the freedom to die from lack of medical care.

And the cause of Mr. Wilson's absurd outburst, that illegal immigrants might receive medical care, only undercuts all of the Jesus talk and crucifixes, the overt religiosity of these misguided people. Apparently George W. Bush took the compassionate back out of conservative when he left office. How would Jesus vote?

For these normal, workaday everymen to be fighting for the fortunes of billionaires, patently against their own interests, and against the interests of the tens of millions of their fellow Americans who are without medical coverage, makes them the new fools in our new Civil War.

And make no mistake: we are at war with ourselves. When the man who tried to shout down the President in the House Chamber during a joint address is made a hero by the disloyal opposition over this, we are at war with ourselves. When shouting down using bumper sticker slogans ["You lie!"] replaces reason and discourse, we are at war with ourselves. When the de facto leadership of the GOP calls the half black, half white, raised by his white grandparents President a "racist" with a "deep seated hatred for white people or the whole white culture" we are at war with ourselves. When President Obama is described not only as a socialist, but also a Nazi and a "radical communist" without any sense of irony, we are at war with ourselves. When divisiveness is seen as patriotism, and ludicrous lies unquestionably accepted as truth, we are at war with ourselves.

So the new Confederacy of Dunces marches on, led by Glenn Beck and now Joe Wilson, to preserve the fortunes of the already wealthy and guarantee the middle class becomes poor. So we can only hope that by the grace of God, or despite it, the fools lose this war, too. And before we pay the price in the blood of Americans.

Do You Want That With or Without Profit Motive?

2009-09-14T20:02:00.007-04:00

In their never ending quest to prevent a government takeover of healthcare, except if you are under 18, or over 65, or a veteran or are indigent, the right wing has flogged this old horse repeatedly, and it goes something like this:

"I don't want the government, (or a government bureaucrat, or now a death panel), making decisions and getting in between me and my doctor! And universal [socialized] healthcare will result in rationing! And the USA will become the USSR!"

Well, if one is lucky enough to possess really good health insurance, who do you think makes these decisions? Corporate insurance adjusters who are driven by the bottom line. Bureaucrats. Their job, as in all cases where an insurance company is involved, is to find out ways their company does not have to pay out on their policies, or, to find out how to pay as little as possible. So a patient might not end up with the drug or the procedure that they were expecting to get, and that their doctor had, in his judgment, decided that patient should have.

And it should be patently obvious that by limiting the amount of healthcare doled out in the country to the above groups plus those who can afford their own insurance and those who are fortunate enough to have health insurance through their job, and thusly leaving out 40 or 50 million American citizens, is rationing healthcare.

Looking at certain situations where there is a government mandate to provide health insurance can be instructive. In one case there is the workmens' compensation situation, and on the other hand there is the no-fault automobile insurance. While both are mandatory within their respective spheres, one is administered to via a government bureaucracy and the other not.

Workmens' compensation is an imperfect system, but injured workers get healthcare they need for as long as they need, and a bureaucracy of government adminstrative judges oversee each case to prevent fraud and abuse. On the down side, workmens' compensation can be slow, often taking a long time to approve a given course of treatment. And while the insurance industry uses their own doctors to perform independent medical examinations of claimants, a claimants physician's medical opinion is given a lot of weight.

Then there is no-fault, which applies to those injured in automobile accidents. In the no-fault context there is little to no government administration. After approximately one month of treatment, a claimant is sent to see an insurance company doctor, and once a claimant is examined by that doctor there is a 95% chance any further treatment claims will be denied, no matter the actual condition of the claimant or how much pain they are in or how much therapy they really require. And the opinion of the claimant's doctor does not matter for a hill of beans. That's a private insurer directly affecting patient treatment and rationing care in order to protect their bottom line.

Then there is single payer healthcare, like Medicare. A claimant goes to her doctor, a treatment is prescribed, and the doctor is paid, though perhaps not as much as he would like [but who is?]. And patient satisfaction with Medicare is through the roof. And it is socialized. And patients get all the care they require. The same goes for the Veterans' Administration. And so far the USA hasn't become the USSR. Hmmm....

So, we are at the crossroads of healthcare reform. And the arguments of evil government bureaucracy and rationed care are revealed to be empty arguments, mere chimeras without real substance. And went you get to the bottom line do you want medical decisions made by a corporate bureaucrat worried about the bottom line, or by a bureaucrat who is only seeking to avoid fraud and abuse?

Forever in Our Memory, Forever in Our Hearts

2009-09-11T10:24:00.007-04:00

For today I shall refrain from politics. Today is a day for all of us to be Americans, and remember the things that make us great, and knit us together as a nation.

It is also to remember my fair city as she once was, and as she should be again. Rebuild the Twin Towers, the soaring pillars of the sky, arms of Atlas, bastions of commerce, and the anchors of the skyline of my mind.

Peace to the victims and their families.

"EPIC FAIL" Somehow Falls Short: Joe Wilson's Unmaking

2009-09-10T18:16:00.014-04:00

After yelling out "You lie!" at President Obama during his widely televised address to a joint session of Congress, Congressman Joe Wilson's [R-SC] derisive jeer may have been the shout heard 'round the world. And while some have defended the distinguished gentleman's two word hem and haw, they are few and far between.

In fact, Mr. Wilson himself begged an apology from the White House just after the speech was over. But the damage was done: to himself; to his district for electing a man of such little respect for our institutions; to the Palmetto State, who is still suffering with her insufferable governor; and the United States itself.

Last time I checked no one in my life has, during an address to Congress, heckled a President in the midst of giving his remarks. I suppose when you think you can't get lower, you find that you have yet to hit rock bottom. And the galling thing is that it is Joe Wilson who is lying - the President's bill, like it or hate it, is not written to cover illegal immigrants, which is the underlying claim for Mr. Wilson's bellow of falsehood.

Now, allow me to be frank: I was a vociferous opponent of President George W. Bush. I did not respect the man nor his vision nor his policies. But I did respect the office. I would never have stood for, or stood by, or defended a member of Congress acting in such a disrespectful way towards Mr. Bush while he was giving an address. He was the goddam President.

This is not to say that Mr. Bush, or for that matter Mr. Obama, is above criticism or derision. But like all free speech, there is a time and place. And that time and place is not during an address to the joint session of Congress. Save it for Twitter, which apparently Rep. Eric Cantor could not have waited until the end of the address, but I digress.

But now it is Joe Wilson's time for derision and for his failure to come home to roost like assorted poultry. Already his Democratic opponent has reportedly raked in well into the six figures for his 2010 run, and Mr. Wilson's disrespect for the highest office in the land has continued to marginalize his already squeezed party in a manner he in no way intended on the grandest stage possible.

Flush from a summertime of town hall hijinks and follies, after knocking a good 20+ points off President Obama's approval rating, the GOP and Mr. Wilson were smelling blood in the water. Instead, Mr. Obama appears to have roped the dopes in Muhammed Ali fashion, assisted in great measure by Mr. Wilson's dopey cry during a brief pause in the speech. What was not counted on was that this was no longer a town hall meeting, and that the hot days of summer are now passed us. It was time for the adults to get back to work, and naked insults to the face of the President were no longer going to work. It looks to me, dare I say it, that the deather movement and their associates have hit their high water mark, and the tide of hatred, so chic in hot July days, has begun to recede in the evenings of cool September.

I suppose we owe a debt of gratitude to Mr. Wilson and his Freudian slip. He has, with a mere two syllables, shown us his true face, and perhaps the true face of his party: quick to hate, shameless with insults, but with zero substance to defend their indefensible positions when faced with inexorable truth.

The GOP: Gone to Plaid

2009-09-06T11:35:00.012-04:00

In their never ending search for irrelevance the Republicans have orbited the alien worlds of the Birthers, the large dark clouds of Deathers, and throttled it up passed ludicrous speed. They have reached the unknown reaches of the darkest space only known as Nonsense.

The latest and not greatest partisan attack is lead this time by the supposed "moderate" Republican, Governor Tim Pawlenty, who came out Friday against President Obama addressing the nation's schoolchildren.

These days a "moderate Republican" is even an even more rare creature, apparently, than the allegedly mythical "moderate Muslim." One thing that appears to be a curious link, though, is the acceptance, nay, courting by both Muslims and Republicans at large of persons hewing to a fundamentalist religious faith, faiths which question the very fabric of the modern world in light of religious texts written by desert dwellers hundreds or thousands of years ago. I think unicorns and basilisks are more numerous in these trying times. But I digress.

Governor Pawlenty, sidestepping any concerns of actual content in his criticism, went to say that Mr. Obama's addressing American schoolchildren was: "At a minimum it's disruptive, number two, it's uninvited and number three, if people would like to hear his message they can, on a voluntary basis, go to YouTube or some other source and get it. I don't think he needs to force it upon the nation's school children."

Perhaps the Governor should stop acting like Obama is some alien from another planet who violently took over the White House and start acting like he is the President of this country. In addition to his first amendment right to say what he wants, he is the leader of our nation, and is in his very element when addressing American citizens, including kids. Further, he was overwhelmingly elected, so his views are, more likely than not, shared by his fellow Americans, and is not some sort of intellectual swine flu to be assiduously avoided.

The egregious stupidity is not even remotely over, and Pawlenty continued: "It is time we stand up to President Obama," as if the ridiculous and disingenuous conflict over healthcare reform is some sort of Republican resignation in the face of change.

Then: "It is time we stand up for our principles, and it is time we stand up for the American people."

Pray tell, Governor, what are those principals? Disloyal opposition? Truculence? Lies and prevarication? Where is your integrity? What is the Republican vision aside from mindless recalcitrance?

Not satisfied with letting one Republican governor disgrace himself, Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney jumped into the fray of absurdity with: "If the president wants to encourage students to stay in school and study, that's appropriate," he said. "However, he should be careful not to cross the line to discuss political issues or policy matters."

Seriously? The President is a distraction, but if he must address the nation's schoolchildren he should shy away from policy? Who the heck do you think you are, Mr. Romney? He's not only a politician he's THE PRESIDENT!! Why can't he talk to the nation's children about policy? It's part of the job description, lest anyone forget "Just say no."

And please, spare us any twaddle over "indoctrination" of our kids. Precisely, where do people get off? He is not some Manchurian candidate, he's the President. His interests are inextricably ours; his ideology, like it or not, by virtue of having won an election, is the dominant one. Elections do have consequences.

Republicans and conservatives should stop acting like petulant children, uncover their ears, stop loudly singing to themselves, and grow up. Because, truthfully, the left does not always have all the answers, and a loyal opposition, with actual ideas and something to contribute, is essential to the two party system and the preservation of freedom in the United Sates.

But right now one of the parties is acting like a bunch of kindergartners when we need more grown-ups.

The Democrats and a Cup of Coffee: A Cautionary Fable

2009-09-04T13:23:00.002-04:00

Imagine this: the Democratic Party was overwhelmingly elected on the platform of coffee: coffee for every American. Apparently, the Republican's Sanka of the last 8 or 15 years was no longer palatable, many Americans did not even get the Sanka, and the American people wanted a change.

After the euphoria of the return to significance was over, the Democrats went to work crafting a better cup of coffee. It would need a little cream, some sugar, and it need to be brisk but not too strong. It needed to be a cup of coffee that all of Americans could drink.

The Republicans demanded that this be a bipartisan cup of coffee, so the Democrats invited them to be baristas. Then the Republicans said that only socialists drink coffee, and that what Americans really wanted was more Sanka, with extra bitterness and some saccharin.

The Democrats adopted some changes: they mixed in Sanka with the coffee, and put in an option to include NutraSweet or saccharin for those who can’t use sugar, and made the cream skim milk instead.

Then the Republicans said that their job was to kill coffee reform because Hitler and Stalin and the French drank coffee, and the Democrats were going to use coffee to kill Grandma, puppies, veterans, babies, and put Republicans in concentration camps. The Republicans argued that European and Canadian style coffee were un-American, and that those countries had to ration coffee, and wait in line for coffee, and that American style coffee was the best in the world, even though that every statistic showed this to be false. Tens of millions of Americans did not get coffee at all, and it cost Americans 3 times the amount to provide coffee for those who did get it.

Then some Democrats, forgetting that they were elected on the coffee platform, and fearful of the loud Republicans, started to waffle. Their knees got weak. Their livers turned to lilies, and a yellow stripe came down their backs. They forgot all these arguments about Socialist coffee were used before and proved wrong in the ‘40’s, ‘50’s, ‘60’s and ‘70’s. They said that maybe they should be making hot chocolate, or ice tea, or just not reform coffee, even though the costs were getting astronomically out of hand and every American needed coffee.

They took out the milk and sugar, and replaced it with tar; they burned the coffee; they put it in bowls instead of mugs; they served it cold instead of hot, and during dinner instead of breakfast or dessert. They listened to the Republicans and mixed in more Sanka, even though the People hated that stuff. And the American people turned on the Democratic Party for their weakness.
The moral: The Democratic Party, even when it has everything going for it, can screw up a cup of coffee.

Dick Cheney: You Have the Right to Remain Silent

2009-09-01T20:25:00.005-04:00

Former Vice President and potential future war crimes defendant Dick Cheney was back in the news this week, once again preemptively setting out his defense strategy in the rare instance he is actually brought to justice for the abrogations of national and international laws against torture and inhumane treatment. He stated that Attorney General Eric Holder's naming of a special prosecutor to investigate instances of mistreatment of prisoners in American custody. It should be noted that the inquiry is to be limited to instances where the persons conducting the interrogations went beyond the guidelines approved by the Department of Justice.

Dick Cheney's various defenses were as follows:

1) "The Justice Department reviewed all those allegations several years ago."

Apparently, the irony of a politically compromised Department of Justice investigating its bosses is lost on Mr. Cheney. Or was he referring to the various, and Constitutionally dubious, legal opinions of John "Anything You Want" Yoo? It is also a compromised argument as former AG Alberto Gonzalez has just stated that Mr. Holder was doing the right thing in moving forward with this investigation.

2) That American lives were saved.

As I have said ad nauseum in prior posts, efficacy of torture is no defense. In fact, this is a rather disgusting defense, as it is entirely false. Torturing prisoners in our custody hurts American interests, and Americans individually, in the long run. By acting immorally we lose our moral authority, and become yet another nation of barbarians, just like the barbarians we are trying to bring to justice. Our natural allies are less inclined to assist us as we become alienated from them, while causing our enemies to hate us all the more. But Mr. Cheney's myopia or arrogance does not allow him to see this.

It is also untrue. It is an unassailable fact that no actionable intelligence of credible threats were disclosed by any prisoners who were tortured, and rather conventional techniques proved to work far better. The fact the Khalid Sheik Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times is proof that it did not work. If waterboarding did work, I am sure that the number of times KSM was waterboarded would have been somewhere south of 100. Or ten.

It is also logically fallacious, in addition to factually fallacious, that this was the right course of action because there was no other attacks on the United States. But there was Madrid, London, Bali, and over 4,000 dead servicemen in Iraq. And this argument relies on opponents of having to prove a negative. There was also no second Hurricane Katrina, but Mr. Cheney cannot take credit for that.

It should be noted that Mr. Cheney even went so far as to stand by officers and contractors who went beyond the rules approved by the Justice Department. Why would he stand by clear criminal acts? The only reason I can discern is to throw his considerable weight behind them before they are indicted in case they might consider turning State's evidence.

3) The inquiry is "intensely partisan."

Ummm, President Obama does not want this. Diane Feinstein does not want this. Harry Reid does not want this. Nancy Pelosi does not want this. They want to move beyond this, and concentrate on health care reform. Further, none of them want to assist Dick Cheney in the Cyclopean effort to make him into a sympathetic figure.

And there is a double irony in Mr. Cheney's statement: a) it was on Fox News, ['nuff said], and b) his was the most intensely partisan administration in modern history. See: Tom Ridge and his half hearted confession of raising the terrorist threat levels days before the 2004 election for no discernible reason but for political considerations.

However, let this be known: I am unconcerned about the political considerations of the Democratic White House or Congress. Laws were broken, serious laws, and legal comeuppance is required, no matter the convenience. Politicians and bureaucrats and officials and contractors must be forewarned that they will pay a price for their cavalier attitudes towards our laws, and not even the highest officers in the land are to be spared the sword of Lady Justice should her blind scales tip away from them and towards the felonious.

All Mr. Cheney's ado, if this is about nothing, then begs the question: what is he getting at? If everything that occurred under his watch was all hunky-dory, why continue to speak out in his own defense preemptively? Public opinion has zero bearing on whether American laws were broken, and rather, bad actors can tell a jury their sympathetic defense of "keeping Americans safe" and see if they agree. So what is Dick Cheney afraid of?

And allow me to be clear: I don't want the Lindsay Englands of the CIA or private contractors to pay the price alone. I want the higher ups who gave the order.

As I said - maybe they should consider turning State's evidence.

Injustice in the Name of Compassion

2009-08-24T16:28:00.006-04:00

Scotland has temporarily given compassion a bad name, and in this author's humble opinion, done a disservice to the concepts of trial and justice, and perhaps as some have opined, rewarded terrorism.

In 1988 Pan Am Flight 103 exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 270 people, including 189 Americans. In January 2001, a Scottish court convicted one man, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, for his complicity in this atrocious act. Mr. al-Megrahi was feted to a fair trial, with all opportunities to avail himself of any defense in the evidence. He was justifiably sentenced to 27 years in prison for mass murder.

If anything, his sentence was too short. Yet, due to a diagnosis of terminal prostate cancer, the justice secretary of Scotland, Kenny MacAskill decided and announced last week that, for humanitarian and compassionate reasons, he was releasing al-Megrahi. This was misplaced compassion.

It was enough compassion for a monster the likes of al-Megrahi to have been fairly tried and permitted to live his life behind bars. He was not threatened with torture or execution, notwithstanding he might have deserved such punishment. Nor was he treated with the same dearth of compassion his home country of Libya is well known for.

So it was too much for MacAskill to grant al-Megrahi his freedom; his freedom to die on his own terms, in his own bed, among his own family. All these things al-Megrahi evilly worked to deny hundreds of innocent people of, and thousands of their surviving family members. And the reports that he was greeted in Tripoli with a hero's welcome only turns the stomach that much more, twists the screws into the minds of right thinking people, and stands the concepts of humanitarian and compassion on their heads.

So, Mr. al-Megrahi, may you soon touch the face of Satan, and may he chew your foetid soul with dull teeth for an eternity, liKe a cow chews their cud. And to Mr. MacAskill: may you lose your job and think better the next time you want to reward a convicted terrorist and mass murderer with overwhelming and undeserved compassion.

Phenomenon of Right Wing Patriotism

2009-08-21T18:04:00.006-04:00

As a caveat beforehand, the following diatribe does not apply to all Republicans or conservatives. But the blather and lather of the recent weeks has gotten my dander up. For now in these hot days is the mad blood stirring.............

Can you remember those halcyon days of the Bush Administration, when anyone questioning the President was someone who was a traitor, unAmerican, or was giving "aid and comfort" to our national enemies? When Ari Fleischer said that Americans had to watch what they said and did? When people in powerful positions equated supporting the President and his policies with supporting troops in the field, as if they were one in the same, and that policy decisions could not be seriously discussed because it might damage the military's morale, and therefore lead to our inexorable defeat in a fight against a foe that was out to destroy the very fabric of the nation?

Have we come a long way, baby.

Back then people were using inflammatory language to describe our President. This much is true. Hey, it wasn't like he was actually elected or anything when the decision came to invade a sovereign nation posing no threat to us. But those of us even somewhat left of Barry Goldwater were routinely smeared as traitors, and it was a dark time for those of us who did not think the invasion of Iraq was so dandy. Family events were not a lot of fun, let me tell you.

But now we have a President who was elected by near landslide, carrying states no one thought in their wildest or worst dreams he would, who ran on a ticket of, among other things, health care reform, and he is now being compared to Hitler on a routine basis for trying to change the way health care is handled.

His life is threatened regularly, explicitly and implicitly. People show up to rallies over health care openly carrying weapons, as if there is some dovetail betwixt the divergent issues of gun rights and health care, and they act as if they are making some sort of valid point. There was a man with an AR-15 slung over his shoulder in a crowd, which is not very responsible handling of that weapon. We see a man sloppily carrying a handgun in a haphazard fashion, his holster flopping all over, holding a [seemingly professionally made] sign reading "It is time to water the tree of liberty." I am as big a proponent of the Second Amendment as there is, but these yahoos make the rest of us look really bad.

Water the tree of liberty? With what, sir? The blood of tyrants? Or patriots? It is not as if the President is proposing legislation to permit the FBI to rifle your personal belongings without a warrant, or to detain American citizens indefinitely without charges or trial. The last one did, though.

Right wingers have openly cursed [Old Testament style] their elected leaders over fictitious fears, such as these inane "death panels." A woman actually asked a gay Jew why he supports "Nazi policies," just like the mixed race President "expressly" does. It makes me wish there were actual Nazi policies being proposed so I could get mad at them. Something like raising the terrorist threat level three days before an election for none other than political purposes. But I digress.

So where is all that right wing patriotism, that jingoistic fervor to support the elected President? It is not as if there aren't nearly 200,000 American troops afield in combat zones. It is not as if there is not a wider war not being fought in the original battleground against Islamic terrorists in Afghanistan, as well as a war now being fought openly for the first time in Pakistan against those same fundamentalist Islamic groups.

So what gives?

Some might say it has to do with bailouts, or government control of this or that industry, or Federal spending. Hogwash. Nobody minded when the government was tapping phones without a warrant, [and not catching anybody engaging in international terrorist plots, I might add]. Nobody minded when the government decided to open a prison for the express purpose of circumventing the Constitution. Nobody seemed to mind the trillion dollar layout for the invasion of Iraq, nor that its full financial effect was kept off the balance sheet by funding it through supplemental spending bills outside of the astronomical defense budget [already 1/6-1/4 of the Federal budget]. Nobody minded when billions in cash went missing and unaccounted for. No one minded when cronies enriched cronies on the taxpayer's dime. No one on the right cried foul when the President sought to privatize Social Security, shunting trillions to private investment firms to handle, and none of them have wiped their brow and said we dodged that bullet. And no one screamed bloody murder when the Medicare Part-D plan came out and it was legislated that the Federal government, then wholly run by the GOP, would not use its massive leverage and negotiate lower prices for pharmaceuticals.

And no one thought that the Veterans Administration [Walter Reed aside], or Medicare, or Medicaid was run so bad before this. There are plenty of vets and pensioners who do alright, and will continue to do alright. They see their doctors of choice, get the care they want, and are happy about. But then they show up to town hall meetings and scream that government run health care is unAmerican socialism.

So what gives?

I am loathe to say it. Perhaps this has to do with less of the content of a man's character..........

But I won't finish the sentence. I want to believe that there is a good faith basis behind all this screaming and jumping up and down. I want to give my fellow American the benefit of the doubt, even though he didn't give it to me 6 years ago. I want to think we have become a better nation over the decades, notwithstanding how the electoral map is conveniently colored to reflect not this century, but the century before last.

But to be fair to me I want conservatives to take a minute, or ten, or an hour, and search their hearts. Find out what is at their core; what is driving them to these extremes. Why are they willing to believe the absolute worst. To examine the content of their own character, and their recent past, and what is at the center of their beliefs.

Because I cannot believe all this anger is about universal health care, public options, or potential tax increases.

........As Teats on a Boar

2009-08-18T10:40:00.004-04:00

That's what the Democratic Party often is as useful as. They are, at times like this, completely useless. Like a teenager on drugs in August. Sometimes I wonder why I [sometimes] vote for them. Then the Republicans do something stupid, like compare anything to Nazis. But this isn't about Republicans.

The Democrats took two national elections because people were sick of the Republicans, their illegal war in Iraq, their thumbing their nose at the rest of the world, their trampling on the Constitution. They were elected by a various coalition of minorities, educated young whites, gays, and blue collar folk who had realized they were getting the GOP shaft. So what do the Dems do? Nuttin', I tells ya.

Part of the reason why the Dems do nothing is that they are terrified of the Republicans. A minority party, completely cutting itself off from every constituency except rural gun owning Bible thumpers has more influence than the party with 60 votes in the Senate and a sizable majority in the House. Why? I think this has something to do with flashbacks of Jimmy Carter, the nicest guy who should never have been President.

But seriously, what is the deal? The deal is is that Americans, collectively, are stupid, and both parties know it. Sorry, my fellow Americans, you can be mad, but I will lay out the proofs. Exhibit 1: Death Panels. 'Nuff said. Exhibit 2: reelecting George W. Bush. After the guy literally stole his first election, why would anyone vote for him on the basis of their values? Exhibit 3: Americans believe that you can stop criminals from using guns with gun control. Self explanatory. Exhibit 4: after about 8 decades of locking up Americans, and ratcheting up police authority to search and seize, we are still four-square into the War on Drugs, notwithstanding the human and monetary cost. You would figure we would have learned by now that punitive measures are not any boon. Exhibit 5: the debate of gay rights and gay marriage. As if anyone should care. Exhibit 6: roomfuls of people on Medicare protesting government run health care. Really?

Much of the time, the Democrats have been useless to their constituencies. Take gay rights, for example. Bill Clinton attempted to roll back the odious and self defeating ban on gays in the military, and yet we still have "Don't Ask Don't Tell," which is just as bad. On top of that, he signed the probably unconstitutional Defense of Marriage Act. Go figure.

More recently: few votes against the PATRIOT Act; few votes against the authorization to go to war in Iraq; little defense of the FISA Act; belated rage against the excesses at Guantanamo Bay; wholesale failure to stand up to the revision in the Medicare Bill which prevented the Federal Government from negotiating prices for pharmaceuticals; failure to properly vet Bush's nominees to the Supreme Court.

Barack Obama was elected, in part, by the same gay constituency. To date: lip service.

This is the same dynamic of Democratic Party weak-knees that lead John Kerry to get defeated on the issue of his heroic military service, rather than his opponent's actually avoidance of going to war by going AWOL. At least his loss gave us the phrase "Swift Boating."

And to the singular issue of the moment, health care reform, what does the party with overwhelming votes in both houses do? Start to cave at the first sign that there won't be any bipartisan support. Ooooh, the Public Option is dead on arrival because Chuck Grassley won't support it. Well, let me tell you one thing: Chuck Grassley is dead to me, and the Dems better start thinking that way, too.

And you Blue Dogs: what the hell were you elected for? To be a bunch of weenies at the first sign of a GOP putsch? Tell your constituents, red and blue, to stop being a bunch of stupid sheep, that there are no "Death Panels," and that if Norway and France and all these other countries we think of as weaker than us or beneath us can provide health care for all their citizens, then it is a mark of shame that we don't do it for our people. Then club them over the head with facts: single payer systems are a fraction of the cost of our "free market" system, mostly because of the overhead in administration and executive pay and the need to turn a profit.

And if they are so bent on the free market, well tell them that the Public Option is the free market in operation, with the government competing alongside industry. If the insurance industry can't compete - too bad, so sad, that's the breaks.

So, Democrats, stop being such a bunch of lilly livered, yellow bellied, cowardly, craven little fraidy cats and stand up to John Boehner, aka Tan Man, and Eric Cantor, and Rush Limbaugh and the rest of the hateful right wing set, and set it to a vote. With the goshdarn Public Option in the bill.

And if they aren't going to get it done, well, President Obama, get in there and bust some kneecaps Chicago style. If you aren't going to win, at least go down standing up with your boots on. Sound off like you got a pair.

Some Thoughts on Single Payer Health Care

2009-08-12T18:17:00.004-04:00

Just a few thoughts on the advantages of a single payer system, which seems to be the intellectual version of kryptonite to many left of center thinkers these days. In the interests of full disclosure, I am in favor of a single payer, government run health care system and not afraid to say it.

To come out swinging, I would just like to immediately dismiss any thoughts that "the government" can't do anything. For perpetuating this myth I would like to thank Ronald Reagan, and state he has done his fellow Americans a terrible disservice with his quip that the most terrifying thing is to hear "I'm from the government and I'm here to help." What a champ.

Anyway, if the government can't do anything, I guess landing on the Moon's surface was a fluke. And defeating those nasty fascists in the 40's. And staving off national collapse during the Great Depression. By the way, the Second World War was an enormous socialist undertaking, with everyone pitching in, saving, being paid by and resources rationed through the government. Who paid for all those refrigerator factories to produce propeller heads? Government bonds, that's who. Maybe private enterprise could have done it quicker. Or maybe we'd be speaking a mishmash of Japanese and German.

Can anyone seriously argue with a straight face that capitalism was responsible for the Normandy D-Day landings or the manufacturing of the atom bomb? Please. In fact, some might argue that the Second World War was a fight between national socialism, aka fascism, international socialism, aka soviet style communism, and democratic socialism, aka the U.S.A., U.K. and Canada.

Anyway, consider these advantages to a single payer system that no one is speaking about: first, there would be no need to purchase certain types of mandated insurance, like we have these days. If you want to drive a car, you have to have no-fault insurance in case someone gets hurt in connection with the operation of that automobile. In a single payer system, no-fault insurance is wholly obviated, at least when it comes to providing medical care [I suppose it would not cover lost earnings as a result of an accident]. Inasmuch as there are tens of millions of cars on the road, all of which are supposed to have no-fault insurance, this would save Americans somewhere in the hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars. This is one way to offset any increased taxes needed to pay for a single payer system.

The same could be said for mandatory workmen's compensation insurance. In most locales companies with more than a certain number of non-owner employees are mandated to carry workmen's compensation to cover work related accidents. To the extent that a single payer system would cover the medical costs of workers injured on the job, again mandated workmen's compensation would be obviated. Though I do not know the hard numbers, I am guessing that would be a savings of many billions of dollars a year, and would especially help small businesses whose bottom lines are tighter.

The same would be true for big businesses, like General Motors, especially in the union retirement packages which cover retired employees until they are dead. In fact, it has been this kind of massive overhead which has destroyed much of the financial strength of GM, as well as the other Detroit Big Three.

In fact, all union health plans would be obviated.

And here's one for the right wing: inasmuch as any lawsuit for medical malpractice or personal injury would no longer have to include the costs of passed and future medical expenses, the single payer system is de facto tort reform. Bam! Suddenly, those liability insurance premiums for Ob-Gyns plummet, all because of a single payer system.

So there we have it: the single payer system would give us many advantages that are not being spoken out loud.

A Lesson in History, Vocabulary and Orwellian Irony

2009-08-10T20:16:00.010-04:00

"He who controls the past, controls the future." - Ministry of Truth, aka Minitrue, 1984, George Orwell

The clocks have been striking thirteen around the United States. Amid the unfortunate return of Harry & Louise, the pernicious hyperbole swirling around the hypercritical issue of health care reform has hit a pitch, crossed a line, sunk to a new low, and begun to be dangerous. This danger issues forth in form of arguments which are of a semantic nature, which twist important historical facts for instant gratification, and which reveal something about the so-called 'loyal opposition' that make it seem less and less loyal, if not to their elected president, then at least to American ideals.

First up is vocabulary. Lately there has been a concerted effort by right wing pundits, Jonah Goldberg and Rush Limbaugh in particular, to color the Nazi Party as a creature of liberal thought, and therefore to associate present liberal policies, in particular the Obama Administration's push for a comprehensive reform of the health insurance industry.

I suppose to those unfamiliar with the rise of Nazism in Germany might get a pass, supposing they failed to actually read up on the subject. The National Socialist German Workers' Party, NSDAP or "Nazi" for short, could be confused with socialism, which is a creature of left wing politics, due to the fact that "socialist" is a word contained in both political systems. However, if one but delved a tad deeper than just the names, one would realize that the word "national,"as in "nationalist," modifies the word "socialist."

"Nationalist" is defined by Webster's thusly: loyalty and devotion to a nation; especially a sense of national consciousness exalting one nation above all others and placing primary emphasis on promotion of its culture and interest as opposed to those of other nations or supranational groups. http://mw1.meriam-webster.com/dictionary/nationalism

Therefore, inasmuch as the same crowd attempting to conflate Obama and Hitler also variously called Obama unpatriotic for failing to wear a flag pin or being a natural born American citizen, it would be a touch disingenuous to now say he is a nationalist, at least a hyper nationalist as is required by modern Nazis. Especially since he's half black. Check them out at: http://www.americannaziparty.com/

Actually, it is a little more than revolting, considering the whole "White Power" thing. So, don't jump at the "s" word when trying to compare socialism and national socialism.

Now, let us move on to a lesson in history. In so doing, I shall cite to an actual Nazi, a contemporary of Adolph Hitler, and a higher up in the party before and during the Fascist takeover of Germany, Albert Speer, and his "Inside the Third Reich," Avon Books, 1970.

Nazi idealogy decried urban centers and promoted the uncultured rural peasantry for their simplicity. p. 43. Speer himself felt that his joining of the Nazi party was a frivolous move, and he inculpated his own failure to investigate and question the ideologies of the party, regretting it later in life. p. 48. This was notwithstanding the anti-semitism and anti-intellectualism of Hitler's rhetoric, which he rationalized would need to be moderated. p. 49. Hitler utilized the various Christian Churches to his own ends, maintained his own association with the Catholic Church, and demanded other party higher ups maintained theirs. p. 142. Among others, Jews, Socialists, Communists and Jehovah's Witnesses were persecuted. p. 68. Nearly all high up Nazi leaders were unschooled, without "cosmopolitan experience" and had rarely left the country, and anyone who had gone to Italy for a long weekend was instantly a foreign policy expert. p. 173. These are the descriptions of Nazis by a Nazi member inside Hitler's inner circle.

Not for nothing, but some of this sounds strangely familiar, like when someone without a passport posited that there were more "Pro-American" parts of the country............. but I'm not going out and calling anyone a Nazi. However, people in glass houses...............

Furthermore, there has been some talk these days about "brownshirts," which is an allusion to Hitler's SA [Sturmabteilung] or Stormtroopers. This was an early paramilitary wing of the Nazi party which was used as a parade instrument to impress people, but also as a gang of thugs, and relevantly for today's discussion, to shout support for Hitler and drown out any hecklers and dissent.

I will not compare present day American conservatives and Republicans to Nazis. It is unfair to them, and more importantly, it cheapens the global disaster wrought by the Nazi party. Nazism is a disgusting, evil, and horrible ideology, a gross distortion of ethics, and is rightly detested by everyone. But when Americans are organized by interested and monied parties to not debate at but disrupt in total town hall meetings, to shut them down, to shout down elected representatives and their fellow Americans, this is something that gives me pause.

When those same monied and interested parties stoke what is irrational and otherwise unfocused anger at their elected representatives to the point that it has been said that if they can't get their way via the First Amendment, they'll do it with the Second Amendment, this is getting scary. And when people on Medicare or get their healthcare from the Veteran's Administration, decry government run healthcare, suddenly realization dawns that these people are angry, consciously or not, about something other than healthcare.

Personally, I believe we are witnessing the ideological heirs of that white haired kook who took the microphone at a John McCain rally and said she couldn't trust Obama because he's an Arab. This is the same train of thought underlying that angry lady at the Rep. Mike Castle's town hall meeting screaming "I want my country back" because Obama "is not an American citizen." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9V1nmn2zRMc

The birther movement, headed by the illustrious Orly Taitz, gave birth to the deather movement, which is headed by the illustrious Sarah Palin. Former Gov. Palin recently said that "The American I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Downs Syndrome will have to stand up in front of Obama's death panel so his bureaucrats can decide based on subjective judgment of their level of productivity in society whether they are worthy of healthcare. Such a system is downright evil."

Of course such a thing would be evil, and more importantly, it is outright false, and actually is tantamount to slander. This is dreadful misinformation, and Mrs. Palin has done her supporters a disservice in that 1) she has told them false information, and 2) she has acted like they do not have their own mind and cannot check the facts for themselves.

But Palin and the other "deathers" out there, like Rep. Virginia Fox [NC] and Rep. Paul Broun [GA] have said the same crap. And that's what this whole euthanasia fear mongery amounts to: a pile of crap.

But what this is a symptom of is framing President Obama as "the other," an alien, a person trying to rob good Americans of their entitled largesse. Why? This is because the GOP and their paymasters, the insurance industry and big pharma, are unable to debate the merits of maintaining the present system where tens of millions are uninsured and corporate profits are massive, if not record.

So they form their own "mob" [their words], to shout down the President, the Democratic Congressmen and Senators, and squelch debate. And such matters have become increasingly violent in tenor, purposefully seeking to intimidate supporters and elected officials alike. This cynical twisting of the town hall meetings to fit such a narrow agenda, to pit American against American, is not only a terrible thing, it is dangerous. Because when irrational anger is stoked and stroked and built up and upon, at some point push is going to come to shove. And someone is going to get killed.

So it is ironic that past totalitarian regimes are being redefined to smear the present leadership, and people are buying it. And it is ironic that proposals to pay for end-of-life counseling like living wills and health care proxies is equated with euthanizing the disabled and elderly for the sake of brief political gain. And it is ironic that the ones accusing the President of being a Nazi are the ones acting like the SA. And it is ironic that we see charges of racism against those who actually succeeded despite real racism, namely President Obama and Justice Sotomayor, coming uniformly from privileged white accusers. It is ironic because this is the essence of what George Orwell termed "doublespeak," the verbal accompaniment to "doublethink," the concept that 2+2=5 when Big Brother says it need be so.

Some have argued that universal healthcare is something Orwellian. However, Healthcare is not a subject touched on in Orwell's writings. Rather, government lies, rewriting history, constant war, ignorance as strength, political cognitive dissonance and state sponsored torture are his subjects. To think that a single payer system, or Obama's multi-payer system with a government option, is similar to any of this has not read Orwell, and should do so as soon as possible for their own sake.

What we are seeing is that we are not a post racial nation. We are seeing that people do need to read more books and less bumper stickers. We are seeing that people need to understand what is in their own best interests and to fight for that, not a CEO's big bonus. We are seeing that people are resting on the laurels of the sacrifices of their fathers and grandfathers who fought in the Second World War, and do not understand that we need to continue to make America great over and over. We are seeing that we do not understand shared sacrifice one whit, unlike the so-called "Greatest Generation," who did it all with an American form of socialism.

In parting for this post, I would like to address something that was forwarded to me from a conservative friend. It was a website set up by the White House seeking emails and websites that contain misinformation regarding the healthcare debate. The friend sneered he would like to see me defend it, as it is something that passed totalitarian regimes had done - that is, asked citizens to inform on their fellows. Here it is: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/facts-are-stubborn-things/

And to tell you the truth, I was taken aback. This is scary, whether it is from the left, right, center, or from on high.

Then I thought about it. On the site it requests: "If you see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov."

One thing you are not protected from is having your email or website kept private. You send it, you own it. You put it up on the 'net, you are responsible for its content. And any argument this might chill free speech is vitiated by the fact that there is no protected right to misinform your fellow American.

And while this is still a bit scary, I will not entertain any baloney arguments that this is "Big Brother" from conservatives, friend or otherwise, who think that unfettered government surveillance, lying to Americans to illegally invade non-threatening nations, paying private contractors to torture people, and creating prisons in Cuba for the express purposes of circumventing the Constitution while never intending on going to trial are still okay.

Obviously, they haven't read the book.

Ling and Lee Freed

2009-08-05T17:44:00.008-04:00

Greetings and salutations of the highest order. RayRay has been on a bit of hiatus lately, and for being remiss during such incredibly moving stories like the birthers, the deathers, and Gatesgate, I humbly apologize.

Back to some witch hunting:

Wonderful news from The Hermit Kingdom, the inaptly named Democractic People's Republic of Korea, aka North Korea, aka The Living Orwellian Nightmare: the two American journalists from Current TV who were captured at or near the Chinese/North Korean border, tried in a kangaroo court, and sentenced to twelve years of hard labor, were freed yesterday.

All it took apparently, was a little ego massaging of the little tyrant, the so called Dear Leader, Kim Jong-il, by former President, Bill Clinton.

Now, you can love ol' Willy Jeff or hate him, but as Americans we can all get behind this one situation and applaud when the innocent are freed. Of course, this little situation wasn't all win-win for the United States; the Dear Leader had to "pardon" Ling and Lee, and therefore the aforementioned ego massage. That is, he was permited to act [as in "pretend"] that there is a viable system of justice in his well armed but not well fed little fiefdom, and that Lee and Ling actually broke laws, and that they were actually convicted of anything remotely like the charges read.

Then maybe it wasn't such a bad thing to have former POTUS Clinton mouth an apology for the sake of rescuing these two earnest and erudite journalists from what are literally the bowels of hell on this green earth. Let there be no misunderstanding: the 12 years sentence to hard labor was tantamount to a death sentence. A long, slow, painful death sentence.

So Big Bill patted Little Kim on his fluffy head, had dinner, maybe rubbed his despotic tummy, and got out of Dodge, err, uh, Pyonyang. Proabably before they turned the electricity off for the night.

Ahh, and this is all reminiscent of another recent run in with a former member of that short lived death metal band, The Axis of Evil, Iran, who had arrested, tried, sentenced and then released journalist Roxana Saberi. You can read about that episode in my May 11, 2009 post.

So for now, here is to Ms. Lee and Ms. Ling; glad they are free; and next time - don't get too close to the closest thing to that nation-sized nightmare we call North Korea.

Times Op-Ed: Giveth and Taketh Away

2009-07-19T18:17:00.000-04:00

Last week was very bad and very good in the New York Times Op-Ed pages. One day it descended into knee-jerk idiocy, the very next it rallied.

My take on liberalism is that it is the political philosophy which looks out for the little guy; defends the rights of the poor; seeks equality for all against the weight of class and race. Yet on July 16, 2009, the Op-Page ran a piece entitled "The Right to Arm Public Housing."

The upshot of the opinion piece was that a bipartisan amendment attached to a bill related to expanding Section 8 housing that would allow residents of public housing to keep guns in their homes was doing the bidding of the gun lobby, and that declaring public housing gun free zones has been wise common sense.

This is one of those opinion pieces that someone should have read aloud before publishing, just to make sure it doesn't sound crazy. Because this opinion isn't fit for toilet paper.

Let's see: poor people, who probably don't have other homes, are not permitted to possess a legal firearm in the home they have, as is their Constitutional right under the Second Amendment. And the reason: because it is public housing.

This opinion turns liberal ideas and ideals on their head. Where are these people supposed to keep their legal guns, should they choose to exercise their Constitutional right? What if someone who lives in Section 8 housing wants to defend themselves, or, gasp, take up hunting?

What if someone with legal firearms in their possession falls on hard times, like in a recession, and is forced to move into public housing?

It's not as if anyone with nefarious purposes in their hearts is going to follow a gun ban, so why come down on the law abiding?

Can we, for expediency sake, suspend other Constitutional rights in public housing? Perhaps the Fourth and Fifth Amendments have outlived their usefulness when it comes to the inner city poor? Maybe they don't need a right to an attorney, or to be free from cruel and unusual punishment.

So, there it is, the New York Times making a case to disarm the poor.

I have been a Times reader for over a decade. In that time I have never read an Op-Ed piece extolling the virtues of legal gun ownership. It is truly a losing battle for the left, as evidenced by the type of Democrat elected to Congress and the Senate since 2004. This is something the Times should just drop.

And then, when my faith in the brainpower behind the Time's Op-Ed page was at an big time ebb, the next day restored some of it. "Illegal and Pointless" was the title of a piece which took our late president to task for the illegal wiretapping and domestic spying which took place after September 11, 2001.

As I wrote recently, this spying, in addition to being a criminal act, was also without the merit of actually working, as the inspectors' general report released recently has shown.

The Times opined that the two reasons for the Bush Administration's criminality were that they wholesale panicked after 9/11, and also that Dick Cheney, the paragon of moral and legal virtue, "preyed on that panic to advance their agenda" of an unfettered Executive Branch.

Okay, for all those baloney artists running around these days saying that fascism is a a child of the left [Jonah Goldberg, looking at you], THIS IS WHERE FASCISM COMES FROM! Fascism is the alignment of political, industrial and religious power under a powerful central executive government, usually under a personality cult. It is what Hitler was, Mussolini before him, and Franco, and of course, Saddam Hussein.

And apparently, so is Dick Cheney, at least in his own mind.

And of course, a central player in giving after the fact legal cover is the eminent legal theoretician John Yoo, recently voted "Most Deserving of Being Disbarred." If you don't recall, Mr. Yoo is the guy who wrote those memos saying it was alright to torture people, and the laws saying it's a crime don't matter. And he was also the guy that wrote the memos saying that the Bush Administration could ignore the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act as it was outdated.

Gee, I was unaware of that section in Article II. But since John Yoo said it, it must be Constitutional.

Can you imagine the level of hem and haw if a Democratic president abrogated such a law? This is not something small, like receiving fellatio from an intern. This is the type of law put in place to prevent the already massive powers of the President from being abused domestically in a way which would necessarily transform the very fabric of this nation and the nature which it interacts with its citizens.

And because we cannot trust the powers that be to do the right thing, either at the time the choice to do so is made, or even in the aftermath, when such choices should be investigated and prosecuted after the fact, the Founders of this fine nation, the so called Last Best Hope, saw fit to arm its citizens.

Remember that, New York Times.

In Memorium

2009-07-13T18:12:00.001-04:00

It was one year ago today that my little cousin, Christopher Nowak, was killed by a drunk driver while crossing a street on the Jersey Shore. He would have turned 23 last Sunday.

His family and friends have set up a memorial fund in his name, and any donations would be appreciated. Contact information is: CNMFund@gmail.com.

Bush Administration: Manufacturing Fear to Breach the Constitution

2009-07-12T12:32:00.001-04:00

"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall be issued, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." - 4th Amendment to the Constitution.

The text of the Fourth Amendment is rather plain, unlike some others whose meaning has caused great controversy over the years of our Union. Yet it is the Fourth Amendment, which arguably limits the power of the government vis a vis the governed more than any other, or at least at its most personal level, has been dealt some mighty blows, perhaps beyond repair.

Aside from the bevy of terrible caselaw since Prohibition and the War[s] on Drugs, I present to you the most recent, and outright disturbing news issuing from the intelligence community regarding the and and policies of our late administration.

In addition to manufacturing the threat of Iraq to gain the extra-Constitutional power to wage preemptive war, George W. Bush and friends manufactured threat assessments to gain the extra-Constitutional power to spy on American citizens without seeking a warrant. And further, it appears that the argument of efficacy, so recently used in defending torture, can't be used this time around because apparently these methods, such as warrantless wiretapping and email interception, did not help very much.

As the Saturday edition of the New York Times, upper right, above the fold, tells: a Congressionally mandated report from the inspectors general of the Department of Justice, the National Security Agency [NSA], the Central Intelligence Agency, Department of Defense and the Office of National Security has been partially released, and it informs us that the secret extrajudicial wiretapping program began shortly after September 11, 2001; it was not handed over to the likes of John Yoo at the Office of Legal Counsel for weeks in order to ascertain its legality; and most damning - the high level officials had difficulty citing specific examples of the wiretapping program contributing to successes against terrorists in the form of either thwarted plots or actual arrests.

In fact, the secrecy surrounding the program was cited as a core reason for its ineffectiveness.

Even more damning, and yet no longer shocking, was the revelation that White House officials had provided paragraphs to analysts working on the terrorist threat assessments, which were then inserted into the threat assessments, in turn used by the White House as justification for its extra legal and extra Constitutional acts.

Of course, seeing that "change" has come to Washington, the article, by Eric Lichtblau and James Risen, was based upon materials which were made available on Friday afternoon - the classic time when material the President wants most people to ignore is made public.

What this means is the the high crimes, the lies, of the Bush White House are even greater than heretofore known. And the cost to our freedom has yet to come due.

I have, in the recent weeks, seen a lot of material out there on the "con" side of the argument to universal health care, or even against the so-called government option. A lot of these arguments, hyperbolic or not, seem to center on fear of socialism, and at their worst, that such a thing would be Orwellian in its final form. I have even heard a resurfaced vinyl record of Ronald Reagan from the '60's say as much.

Yet a lot of the same people would fail to see the very Orwellian ramifications of the overall Bush Administration effort. I don't think these people actually have read, Orwell, to tell you the truth, because if they did we would have marched in the streets en masse a long time ago.

What the Bush Administration did was secure the ability to make war where it wanted, when it wanted; to be able to seize and imprison anyone sua sponte indefinitely by naming them an enemy combatant, the definition of which it maintained it was the sole arbiter; it could spy on anyone, anywhere, without the very reasonable constraints of the Fourth Amendment; and it successfully politicized the Department of Justice which likely conducted politically motivated prosecutions.

That's terrifying.

And I am not even bring up the issue of no bid contracts to the firms the Vice President was the former CEO of, or which prominent members of the Executive Branch were shareholders in, or such quaint matters like adherence to The Geneva Conventions, The Convention Against Torture, CIA black sites, and the use of private contractors in the place of either military or intelligence community personnel to perform "enhanced interrogations."

And the real kick in the pants is that these warrantless wiretaps and widespread interception of our emails - that's you and me - added nothing to our national security posture. In fact, in the words of Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon: "I believe this report shows that their obsession with secrecy and their refusal to accept oversight was actually harmful to U.S. national security, not to mention the privacy rights of law abiding Americans."

And just when you thought the lies and prevarications were over, the Sunday edition of the Times, top right corner, above the fold had this headline:

"CHENEY IS LINKED TO CONCEALMENT OF C.I.A. PROJECT."

It looks like the former Veep, who was unable to keep his mouth closed before Michael Jackson died, ordered the CIA to withhold the existence of an anti-terrorism program from Congress, and kept at it for 8 years. What this program did, or was about, is still undisclosed.

Now that's freedom!!

Isn't it refreshing that for once all the bad things we've heard about Speaker Nancy Pelosi are not true?

And keeping Congress in the dark for so long could very well have been a breach of law. But that's nothing new when speaking of the Bushies.

Speaking of illegalities and accountability: the cat might be out of the bag at Justice, which may be to the consternation of President Obama. For now President Obama has been stalling or backpedaling from investigating possible criminal acts of his predecessors, to at best stay out of the messy results, and at worst so he can have all that power the Bushes stole.

But Eric Holder is doing his best to be the top law enforcement agent in the nation. It was leaked Friday that he is considering assigning a special counsel to investigate the allegations the United States tortures terrorism suspects after September 1, 2001.

If they do, I just pray they don't stop at the Lindy Englands, and go all the way to the top. I want to see the real perpetrators frog marched for their crimes. The ones in suits, the ones who fabricated the legalities and the ones who gave the orders.

Why Pay Professionals?

2009-07-11T14:06:00.000-04:00

In the July 7, 2009, New York Times Op-Ed pages, it was opined that when a wild herd, in this case elk in North Dakota's Theodore Roosevelt National Park, needs to be culled, it is better to have professional sharpshooters than citizen hunters. Why?

Democratic Senator Byron Dorgan was right to call for a public elk hunt as a "common sense" solution. This is doubly true as hunters would certainly be effective in culling the herd, as well as contributing to the public coffers. Perhaps in the form of a hunting tag lottery, like Pennsylvania has for its elk herd.

The Times opines, without setting out a foundation, that sharpshooters are a safer and less expensive way to limit the herd, as they will only take cows, and hunters mostly take bulls. But this begs the question of what limits would be placed upon a public hunt. Maybe the bag limits would require cows only.

I also think that paying people to do something that other people will pay for the privilege of completely undermines the argument that using professional sharpshooters would be cheaper. Rather, it lays bare the Times' opinion as meritless.

Additionally, what would be done with the meat of these professionally culled elk was not even raised by the Times. But any self respecting hunter would make sure they harvested at least some of the meat [elk are rather huge, so packing out 400-500 lbs of meat may not be realistic].

So lets give a cheer to Senator Dorgan for his common sense, and a jeer to the Times for its lack thereof.

Fox News and the Myth of Equal Time

2009-07-02T17:37:00.000-04:00

Rupert Murdoch's Fox News, which came into existence in October 1996, has touted itself as the "Fair and Balanced" cable news outlet. Since that time the quality of both news and political discourse have devolved terribly. Is this all Fox News' fault? No. But Fox News is instructive in one way as to an important dynamic these days.

While Fox News denied any bias, it is clear that the unstated purpose behind the channel is to promote the conservative viewpoint. In so doing Fox has promoted several conservative pundits, including but not limited to the wildly popular Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly.

In promoting itself as "Fair and Balanced," to the point of unsuccessfully suing now Senator Al Franken over the use of the phrase, Fox implies that all other news outlets, print, cable, broadcast or otherwise, are not fair and balanced. This has buttressed and reinforced the overall feeling among conservatives that their viewpoint is not being represented in such mainstream news outlets as CNN, NBC and the New York Times.

Of course, there is no such thing as a conservative or liberal view of the news. There is only news. The myth of the "liberal media" is perpetuated by those who are in the position to benefit from it: those who are getting called out by the media, and those who want to profit from selling their own slanted news.

One should, as a practice, gather their news from as many sources as possible, in order to insure you are getting the best news. I for one am a newshound. I love reading newspapers and love cable news, and a guilty pleasure of mine has always been the political punditry shows.

The first of such shows watched, from back in the college days, was Crossfire on CNN. This show had Bill Press for the left and Robert Novak for the right. And while the shows at times became heated, you could tell that Bill and Bob were friends.

Since those halcyon days the phenomena of Fox News has grown, and now Fox is allegedly the biggest cable news operation going. I chalk this up to there being only one Fox and the fact that it caters to a certain viewpoint, whether or not that it is valid. And Fox has done a great disservice to journalism as a whole, as well as the American people, and to the political system.

By creating and perpetuating the myth of a "liberal media" Fox has undermined all other news sources. Sure, there are liberal commentators on the editorial and opinion pages of just about every newspaper in America. But there are also conservative columnists. And in any newspaper worth its salt, whether it be a tabloid or broadsheet, the news editors and the editorial editors are separate offices.

A favorite target of Fox News and the conservative punditry in general is the New York Times. The New York Post, Rupert Murdoch's conservative tabloid, even has an occasional column call "Times Watch." I guess you really are an important journalistic institution when other papers report on your reporting. Anyway, The New York Times is roundly roasted on a regular basis by such journalistic luminaries as Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, and Bill O'Reilly. They say the most amazing things about the Times - that it is treasonous, that it is communist, that it only reports news from a liberal perspective.

Now I will be the first to admit that the Times' editorial page is skewed heavily to the left. But that is simply not true about the news reporting pages, which make up some 95% of the paper. And every time someone tells me that the Times is a skewed and slanted news outlet, my invariable challenge to point to one substantial article on a political topic that was wrongly reported due to a left leaning political bias invariably goes unanswered.

For the sake of argument, where was the liberal media during the Monica Lewinsky scandal? Or during the run up to the Iraq War? In both situations, years apart, the so-called "liberal media" did not do its job and analyze the positions of the newsmakers, and rather, just restated what it was told, variously by Newt Gingrich and his henchmen, or the Bush White House and theirs.

But I didn't come to talk about the myth of the liberal media. Rather, I want to talk about the myth of the concept of equal time. And no, I am not speaking of the "Fairness Doctrine." Rather, I am speaking of the phenomenon, spearheaded largely by Fox News, or the split screen and/or competing experts on a given topic, which during a given news or commentary segment are given equal time.

At first glance you might think that I might be crazy, given all that was said above. However, my point is that by so doing, news outsets, and most famously Fox, create the illusion that there are always two sides to every story [usually one more liberal and the other more conservative], and both deserve equal weight, times and consideration.

However, such is intellectually dishonest.

The best case in point is the [incredibly] still ongoing debate of Creationism v. Science. Anytime this debate comes up on Fox there is always, always, always someone from one of the groups like Answers In Genesis on one side and a confounded paleontologist or geologist on the other. And then the discussion proceeds as if these sides are deserving of equal weight.

Of course, anyone who believes that the world was made in 6 days, or that the concept of an intelligent designer should be taught in a science class, is dead wrong when it comes to discussing science and scientific concepts. They should also not use the tools brought to them via the scientific method, namely television, the internet and radio. Admittedly, I for one am not a scientist. But I do understand basic concepts such as the scientific method of hypothesis, controlled testing, results, and replication.

Another good example is when some topic of gay rights, be it marriage or adoption, is being discussed. On one side you will have an advocate, and on the other you will invariably have someone from Focus On the Family, who invariably cites specious and otherwise unreliable "study" that shows the homosexuals are terrible in some way. No matter that medicine and psychology have come around since the 19th century to recognize that homosexuality is genetic and otherwise a naturally occurring phenomenon throughout mammals, and that homosexuals have contributed mightily to our present civilization at every turn in every epoch.

Perhaps the most grotesque outgrowth of this phenomenon is the conservative version of otherwise everyday things. While not outwardly conservative, the Creation Museum is an excellent example, inasmuch as it blames modern secularization and the Theory of Evolution for most of modern man's ills. If that isn't conservative politics, I don't know what is.

What do the people, Answers In Genesis, know that literally thousands of years of human scientific discovery and experimentation doesn't? The only answer is the King James version of Genesis word for word. And it galls me that they are willing to challenged the decades of industrious work of the scientific community with their truly unsupported beliefs, all the while taking advantage of the profits of science. It is truly a testament to how far we've come as a species that we can afford such backwardness in our society.

Another example is the website called Conservapedia. This is the "conservative" counterpart of Wikipedia, and touts itself as "The Trustworthy Encyclopedia." Check it out: http://www.conservapedia.com/Main_Page. The "Article of the Year: Evolution" is bylined as stating: "Discover what Wikipedia, the public school systems, and the liberal media don't want you to know about the creation v. evolution issue."

You can go to the page entry for homosexuality, and while there are literally hundreds of citations, few of them are of any sort of scientific literature, and when there are they are often taken out of context. Look for yourself: http://www.conservapedia.com/Homosexuality.

Type in a search for "news" and you literally get this: "The news is a list of current events presented by the media. News may be on television (such as Fox News), in a newspapers (such as Wall Street Journal), on the radio (such as Rush Limbaugh Show), or on the Internet." Go see for yourself: http://www.conservapedia.com/News. How many of those are owned by Rupert Murdoch?

Search for "liberal" and the first line is "A liberal (also leftist) is someone who rejects logical and biblical standards, often for self centered reasons." Feel free to check my work: http://www.conservapedia.com/Liberal. All joking aside, how is that a "reliable" definition of liberal? Divisive, certainly. You can look up the definition for "conservative" for yourself.

The fact is is that there is not always two sides to every story. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. But we are not entitled to our own facts. To set up, as the creators of Conservapedia, a divergent series of viewpoints not based on facts but on their own biases, is a terrible thing, and damages our society deeply.

And this is not a liberal v. conservative matter, per se. I believe that the dynamic that has been so successfully used by outlets like Fox News, that there is always a second and equally weighted view, is damaging to our collective thought process. It's as if we could debate whether water were wet, or if burning someone at the stake wasn't inhumane. There are some things which are facts: there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq; Joseph McCarthy was not acting in the best interests of the country in stirring up the Red Scare in the 50's; Jimmy Carter was a terrible President; Bill Clinton did have sex with that woman. These matters are not up for debate.

And the damage comes in these forms: 1) we undermine the so-called Fourth Estate, that is a vigorous and free press as a check upon our government, which leaves us more open to the quiet seizures of power that all of us, right and left, properly fear, as people will reflexively not trust the media when they really need to; and 2) we undermine our own solidarity by moving into separate camps which detest each other as there is no common ground, and in so doing undermine our ability as a people to think clearly and act together as a nation.

And yes, I have exclusively taken the right wing to task in this post. And before my right wing friends come along and complain that I am not evenhanded, there are two things I want considered: 1) it is the right wing derivatives of long standing mainstream institutions of great integrity I am pointing out the weaknesses and dangers of, and 2) I am not news, I am opinion.

George W. Bush: Back In The News & It Ain't Good

2009-06-25T13:45:00.001-04:00

Our illustrious former leader, the first President to be known only be an initial, came out of retirement recently, and probably should think better of it. Early on in the Obama Administration, W. demurred and said the newer Commander In Chief deserved his silence. This, of course, ended as of last week.

However, it has now come to light that there was a second Downing Street memo. If you recall, the first Downing Street Memo, which was written by former UK PM Tony Blair's foreign policy adviser, Sir David Manning, said unequivocally that the intelligence and facts were fixed around the policy of invading Iraq.

Translation: President W. was creating out of whole cloth the casus belli to invade Iraq. In other words, the basis for our invasion of Iraq was a fraud. I hate to bring this up again, but hey, it's a goddam war crime.

So the new Downing Street Memo, written January 31, 2003, before the March invasion, indicates that both PM Blair and President Bush were aware that United Nations inspectors were not going to find any illegal weapons [notwithstanding the hyperventilating fear mongery going on daily; see: mushroom clouds; reconstituted weapons programs, etc.]

So, in order to manufacture a casus belli, President Bush put forth a plan to fly U-2 spy planes over Iraq, in the hopes they would be shot down. The memo also said that the invasion was already scheduled for March 10, when the bombing would begin.

If it needed to be any clearer, our former President was in an illegal conspiracy, with knowledge aforethought, to commit a war crime via the illegal invasion of a sovereign, albeit unsavory, nation.

POSSIBLE IRANIAN CONNECTION TO IRAQ WAR!!!

Now for some lighter fair, during the recent weeks, with the compelling news of the protests over the faulty vote in Iran, it has come to my attention that former President George W. Bush might just be Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad!!

First of all, they both have a penchant for claiming presidential victories in obviously faulty elections, and require old men in dark robes to install them into office. But have you ever looked at them closely?

Do you see what I see? Big ears, dopey mouth, and the same squinty, beady eyes? And considering the animosity that the Iranians had for the Iraqis, there is no question to me that Mahmoud is really just W. in disguise.

Still don't believe me? Well, then why don't you find one single photo of them together. Because you know as well as I do that you cannot!

The Angel of Iran, Neda Soltan

2009-06-22T17:01:00.000-04:00

Thomas Jefferson was once famously quoted as saying: "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." As of Saturday, June 20, 2009, Iran added Neda Soltan as another in that storied list of patriots.

She was 16 years old, born a decade and a half after the Islamic Revolution, lead by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini swept the Shah from power. She had only known life under the Supreme Leadership, yet she ended up becoming a martyr for liberty.

The exact sequence of events leading up to her death are not entirely clear. But as is often the case in these ever more modern times, the graphic video of her death stretched to the ends of the Earth and to the seat of power in Iran, within hours, if not minutes, of her passing.

What matters now is the Iranian protesters in the streets now have a face for their revolution. And while their leader remains the unlikely Mir Hossein Mousavi, they shall have their own saint, The Angel of Iran.

Neda is sure to become another iconic image of the small standing up to the strong; the Davids against the Goliaths; the Iranian Tankman.

Let us all hope that her sacrifice is more successful than the youths that gave their lives and futures at Tiananmen Square twenty years ago.

Neda, may you touch the face of God.

June 23, 2009 Addendum and Correction:

I was incorrect to report Neda's age as 16. According to the most recent news, she was 26. However, this does not change much. She was still a young, vivacious woman who tragically lost her life to the senseless, selfish power mongering by an illegitimate regime of old fart holy rollers.

Thus Unto Tyrants - May Twitter Write Their Epitath

2009-06-19T18:09:00.000-04:00

North Korean Enhanced Interrogation Techniques Successful!

2009-06-17T14:28:00.000-04:00

The news out of the Hermit Kingdom (and there is blessed little of that) is that notorious international terrorists, Laura Ling and Euna Lee, confessed to their crimes.

The state-run (as in actually state run, not like we have in the United States, where we just call it state run when it reports news we don't want to hear) Korea Central News Agency reported that: "During their trial, they admitted what they did was a criminal act inspired by political motives of isolating and stifling our republic by defiling our human rights situation through fabricated video footage."

It is clear that the Democratic People's Republic of Korea uses only the latest in enhanced interrogation techniques, which are a popular export of her patron state, the People's Republic of China. Most recently, these techniques, culled from the experiences of American POW's who were captured by China during the Korean War, were used to famous effect by the United States of America, under the direction of former Vice President Dick Cheney, on such reputed terrorists as Khalid Sheik Mohammed.*

As is obvious, these techniques, which certainly included stress positions, exposure to extreme heat or cold, hard slaps to the face, threats with dogs, being placed in confined box and then filled with insects, and probably included water boarding were successfully implemented against the terrorists Lee and Ling. Clearly, such dangerous terrorists, when broken using the latest in enhanced interrogation techniques will confess to any crime you need them to in order to secure a conviction at a military tribunal.

At this time we are awaiting comment from former vice President Dick Cheney on the success of the interrogations of Ling and Lee, and how he feels these successes should bear on the policies of the Obama Administration.

*(Yes, this is entirely true. The United States, under George W. Bush, used these techniques which it learned from Communist China.)

Cheers and Jeers Over Marriage for Queers

2009-06-16T18:24:00.000-04:00

Sorry about the title of this post in advance, but if you are offended, I'm taking back "queer" from the hatemongers.

Anyway, here's the cheers: former New York State Senate Majority Leader, Republican Joe Bruno, was reported in yesterday's New York Daily News as coming out in favor of gay marriage. Good going!!

While he privately opposes gay marriage, he stated: "However, that view really does conflict with the rights that are afforded all of us. This is America (damn straight), and we have inalienable rights. Life is short, and we should all be afforded the same opportunities to enjoy it."

I do not think I have ever heard a more concise, nor poignant, argument in favor of gay marriage. While stating he has private reservations, he goes the extra mile, recognizing freedom and liberty are not about comfortability, but rather other people. And in so doing, realizing that failing to grant them the same rights as others is anything but "American."

So here's to Joe Bruno.

And now the jeers: to the Commander in Chief, for arguing in Federal Court in a lawsuit brought by a California couple seeking to overturn the odious Defense of MArriage Act. And not just arguing, but arguing a specious train of thought, namely that states may favor heterosexual marriages bcause they are the "traditional and universally recognized form of marriage."

Okaaaay. Where is any of that written except by some homophobic holy rollers in the late 20th century USA (who were taking a page from blackophobic holy rollers from the early 20th century USA)? Last time I checked, most jurisdictions require a marriage license and a ceremony, except those that still recognize common law marriage, which, last time I checked is the "traditional" form of marriage. So can I still shack up and be considered married? Or do I have to shell out for the ring?

And universal? Where in the universe is the form of marriage set in stone? The Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints believes in traditional marriage, where a man can have as many wives as he wants, as young as he wants. Like in Biblical times and such. And those guys are in Texas, among other places. Not to mention how marriage works under Shariah Law in the Mid-East and Afghanistan.

And to use caselaw comparing gay marriage to incestuous relationships? Why not just go and dig up some of those anti-miscegenation cases while you are at it? Disgusting.

And of course, this is all without mentioning President Obama's pledge to the homosexual community during his campaign, which now seems to have been a sham. Say it ain't so, Barry.

So I am urging President Obama to reverse his course, end "don't ask, don't tell" in military service, and work to repeal the facially un-Constitutional Defense of Marriage Act rather than submit briefs in its defense.

Hoist Them Upon Their Own Petards

2009-06-14T14:19:00.000-04:00

After wrestling with the happening of the cold blooded murder of George Tiller, M.D., as well as the dearth of an acceptable response from the likes of those who had labelled Dr. Tiller in the past as a "killer," and in light of the the purely vitriolic yet vapid rhetoric from the right aimed at, among other things, President Obama [for example, by continuing to maintain he is not an American born citizen, inferring he is not the lawful President], I have settled on a solution of sorts.

While reasonable minds may disagree, political discourse has become poisoned. Now we have to hear, with the party's imprimatur, actor Jon Voight term the President a "false prophet." Really, Mr. Voight? Really? Like you would know?

Anyway, I am getting off track.

My very targeted solution, and I admit it is a flawed solution, is for Mrs. Jeane Tiller, grieving widow of the murdered doctor, to sue Operation Rescue, Fox News and Bill O'Reilly. Sue their nattering pants off.

On what grounds, RayRay, you, my gentle readership might ask? I say take a page from the playbook of the Southern Poverty Law Center and sue them for incitement to commit violence.

Recent lawsuits by the SPLC has gone to great lengths to bankrupt, and thereby defang, such hate groups as the Aryan Nations and sects of the Ku Klux Klan. These successful suits use as one of their causes of action the incitement of certain individuals to commit violence.

Operation Rescue uses Biblical Apocalyptic language in their exhortations, taking its political cause outside the realm of political rhetoric. When invoking the name of God to come and smite a baby murderer, where is the possibility of political discourse? When past violence is but prologue to even more bloodshed, where can reasonable minds come together? And more importantly, what can the reasonable mind infer will be the rational result of such admonitions?

Is not the "lone wolf" the intended consequence?

Bill O'Reilly is another phenomenon altogether. Loudly self proclaimed to be the most popular man in his genre of cable "news," Mr. O'Reilly occupies another stratosphere than Operation Rescue. He is well monied as a result of his often vitriolic and bombastic opinions.

But maybe with respect to the murder of Dr. Tiller, and perhaps the issue of abortion in general, Mr. O'Reilly has crossed the line.

Here is a Youtube link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYulgba5BPE to but one discussion between Mr. O'Reilly and a pro-choice advocate, Amy Richards, speaking in depth about Dr. Tiller, his work, and abortion. You will notice the choice of words Mr. O'Reilly uses, namely "execute babies." He also uses the classic fallacious argument about "irrefutable evidence" which he does not deign to disclose, and therefore it is unchallengeable, yet somehow always inures to the benefit of his side of the story. He also conflates the argument of having an abortion with permitting a rapist to "get away with" rape, without seeking to discuss the complex issues of criminal procedure and privacy. Finally, when confounded by his opponent's intransigence, he becomes an ogre and screams at her. Truthfully, this segment is illuminating as to O'Reilly's personality.

But his closing remarks that his opponent, Amy Richards, was working to "allow babies to be killed for any reason at all" only highlights my point. If that were the real issue involved, then how can any right thinking person not hunt Ms. Richards down and kill her, if only to save those innocent babies.

And it is not as if Bill O'Reilly doesn't know who his audience is. It is no secret that he is popular among the more conservative segment of the population, tending more toward the anti-choice, pro-gun crowd.

So, what is Bill O'Reilly's intended consequence when he uses such words and phrases? I can with confidence say it is not the well being of Ms. Richards.

I for one have had enough of this baloney. Bill O'Reilly, with his extra high soap box and his ultra self righteousness has finally crossed a line. He, and his patron, Fox News, must pay. This is not a matter of free speech. This is a matter of incitement to commit violence, which is most certainly not protected free speech.

So, Mrs. Tiller, with the highest of respect for the graveness of your situation, when the terrors in your mind have quieted but a little and you can muster the strength, I ask you to bring suit against Operation Rescue, Bill O'Reilly, and Fox News. Bring suit for their part in the incitement of that animal Roeder to kill your husband in cold blood. Bring suit to bankrupt their bank accounts like they have already bankrupted religion and their own souls. And even if you cannot win in Court, you will make them have to defend, on the national stage, their disgusting words about your husband. And if you make them do that, it will be as good as if you won a verdict. Because they will have to take off their masks of self righteousness and defend the indefensible.

And then, with a little luck, no one will listen to them anymore. And you will have won but a small piece of solace, for yourself and us all.

Palin-Letterman Row: Is Caribou Barbie Craving Attention?

2009-06-12T15:47:00.000-04:00

The recent brouhaha betwixt our northernmost governor and late night talk show host, David Letterman, is heating up to a gentle simmer. Is this really that important? No, but it's Friday, and the news cycle is going to slow down any minute.

In your humble author's humble opinion, Mrs. Palin is feeling the lack of the heat from the lack of the national spotlight, and is doing anything she can to make a Federal case out of Letterman's lowbrow humor. Mrs. Palin has gone so far as to try to make a cause out of a stupid joke.

To recap, Palin was visiting New York, and at the invitation of former mayor Rudy Giuliani, she attended a Yankee's game with her 14 year old daughter, Willow. Afterward, Letterman made a crude joke about how Palin's "daughter got knocked up Alex Rodriguez." He did not specify which daughter it was.

Well, Mama Grizzly got all up in Letterman's grill, saying he shouldn't make perverted jokes about 14 year olds getting knocked up and statutory rape. Even Iron Dog racing champ Todd Palin got in on the act. Letterman apologized for his joke in bad taste, and that he was not referring to the 14 year old Willow, but her 18 year old daughter Bristol who, in fact, had been knocked up, which was notoriously revealed on the stage of the Republican National Convention. Bristol Palin gave birth to a son in December. To date there are no new reports of her being knocked up again.

Unable to just let it go, and apparently compelled make her family the center of media attention, Mrs. Palin has termed Letterman's apology a "weak, convenient excuse." She has also termed his joke as contributing to the "atrociously high rate of exploitation of minors by older men.."

She said "atrociously high rate." Wow, I didn't know it was an epidemic. Must have missed the report on Studio B.

So now she has made a cause out of a stupid joke. Next up The Willow Palin Center for the Prevention of Underage Exploitation? Come on, Governor. You put your kids front and center, which put your parenting skills front and center. So if someone, like Letterman, wants to make a joke in bad taste about your family and one of your daughters getting knocked up out of wedlock, that's your own fault for putting them out there.

Right Wing Domestic Terror: The Department of Homeland Security Got It Right

2009-06-11T10:18:00.001-04:00

After a brief hiatus, I am back true believers. I apologize for the dearth of content over the last 5 days, but real life intrudes into the blogosphere, too.

Anywho.....remember that flap in early April when the Department of Homeland Security via Secretary Janet Napolitano issued a report warning that fringe right wing groups were potentially dangerous? Wow, was that prescient!

Since then there have been the recent murder of the controversial gynecologist, George Tiller, M.D., by anti-abortion zealot Scott Roeder, and yesterday there was a murder of a security guard, Steven Tyrone Johns, by Neo-Nazi James van Brunn at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.

Back when the DHS released their report the right wing punditry, in particular Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Nancy Goldfarb, and Michelle Malkin, inter alia, were absolutely besides themselves at Secretary Napolitano's warning. Yet, the conundrum is that they have painted themselves into a corner, equating their positions with these obviously terrible actors, just on the basis of being to the right of Centrist. This is pretty stupid, if you ask me. It's like if Rachel Maddow or Democratic Party was trying to defend the Baader-Meinhof Gang because they are left of Newt Gingrich.

Michelle Malkin has even gone the extra mile today on her website and posted this link "Inconvenient truths: Holocaust Museum shooter hated Fox News, Murdoch; Weekly Standard possible target" (http://michellemalkin.com/2009/06/11/the-dhs-right-wing-extremism-report-and-the-holocaust-shooter/), as if this somehow mollifies van Brunn's fringe right wing associations. Uuuhhh, Michelle, he shot a black security guard at the Holocaust Museum. Have you no shame?

Why would the Right try to defend the actions of, or politics of, the maniac fringe? Once you get there you find yourself among some truly terrible people with their deplorable politics: Christian Identity, White Power, Ultra-Nationalists, Ku Klux Klan, and anti-abortion maniacs like Roeder who think cold blooded murder is the answer. You get the lynchers of America's dark past, and the Timothy McVeighs of our dark present.

And I will not be the first to say this, nor the last, I suspect, but the divisive rhetoric from the chattering classes, the language used on the campaign trail last year, the accusations of treason, malfeasance, and criminal behavior as a matter of political discourse, which mostly issues from the right wing, is not acceptable. Do not think for a second that I am considering any impingement upon the First Amendment rights of anyone. Rather, I believe that it is imperative that we stop the slinging of unfounded mud for the sake of garnering a meager 1/2 of a percentage point of temporary advantage which inures to the benefit of no one in the long view.

Please permit me to reminisce: President Obama was accused by Sarah Palin of "paling around with terrorists" due to a prior innocent association with William Ayers. Mind you, Mr. Ayers was never convicted of anything, and his "domestic terrorist group," The Weather Underground, whose actions, planned or executed, while deplorable, never killed anyone but themselves. I also doubt that Mrs. Palin knew who Bill Ayers was prior to being chosen as John McCain's running mate, but that is another matter.

Candidate Obama was called a terrorist and traitor and a Muslim [as if being a Muslim is a bad thing] by supporters at McCain campaign rallies, and Sen. McCain, to his credit, actually defended Obama's decency to the crowd at one of his rallies after a supporter said she could not trust Obama because he is "an Arab."

To this day people of such reputation as Rush Limbaugh are continuing to harangue the President for not having a birth certificate. Really? We still haven't gotten passed this?

It is one thing to say one disagrees with the ruling party, or a given policy, or the course the country is one. Lord knows I vociferously did during the last administration. But, if, as Messr's Limbaugh and Hannity, among others, have stated ad nauseum, that President Obama is trying his best to destroy the nation, and they intend to have these statements believed as true by a given portion of the population, what do they think is supposed to be the natural result?

It is time for the marketplace of ideas to make a course correction, and for us, as a nation, to choose our politicians and our pundits more on the basis of the content of their ideas rather than the bombast of their rhetoric. I prefer my political discourse like it is on such programs like The News Hour With Jim Lehrer: sober, reasoned, respectful, working out the issues, not rooting for one side or the other like it's a sports contest.

Ideas are not good or bad because they are espoused by the right or left. They are good or bad on their own merits. That they are espoused by the right or left is incidental. The American people should begin to think about it this way.

Right Wing Lie Machine

2009-06-05T17:05:00.000-04:00

It looks like Dick Cheney, not used to this whole "video" thing, cannot keep his pack of lies shuffled properly. So much so he tried to get his daughter, Liz [not the gay one], to help out, to no avail.

As this video from Daily Kos demonstrates, the Cheney Family pasttime is looseness with the truth.

http://www.dailykostv.com/w/001821/

Moving on, it appears that Sean Hannity's soul must have some severe scar tissue on it, as this series of video excerpts lays bare Sean Hannity's utter moral bankruptcy.

http://www.dailykostv.com/w/001818/

That there is anyone I know or related to actually still listens to this man as a source of news or germane opinion shames me.

Part of the reason I get upset over Left/Right politics is that there is so much mendacity on the Right. Sure, there are plenty of liars on the Left. In fact, Speaker Nancy Pelosi may or may not be a liar regarding this CIA flap.

But Sean Hannity is not one representative from one of 435 disctricts. He is a major voice in a party and movement. And he holds himself out to be an arbiter of good and bad, truth and lies.

And he is squarely on the "pants on fire" side of the equation.

I think it has gotten to the point that Hannity is closing in on defamation, as he is knowingly stating false allegations for the sake of purposefully hurting the credibility of a fellow citizen, who just happens to be President. Just a thought.

Mark and Remember

2009-06-04T14:43:00.000-04:00

The Mendacious Manuel Miranda

2009-06-02T17:43:00.000-04:00

Remember back in the Bush days, when then Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, M.D., was talking about a rule change to end the time honored tradition of filibustering judicial nominees? Well, the man leading the charge back then was Manuel Miranda, and his group, the Coalition to End Judicial Filibusters, aka CEJF. Fortunately for the country, the CEJF was unsuccessful, largely due to the behind the scenes work of the "Gang of Fourteen," 7 Republican and 7 Democratic Senators with the requisite respect for the rules and traditions of the Senate, who brokered a deal and preserved this limited power of the minority party.

According to Talking Points Memo, http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/06/head-of-coalition-to-end-judicial-filibusters-now-promotes-filibustering-sotomayor.php?ref=fpa, Mr. Miranda's campaign was so successful that he is back in the news today with his newly minted group, the Third Branch Conference.

Pray tell what does the Third Branch Conference want to do? Well, they want Republican Senators TO FILIBUSTER THE CONFIRMATION OF SONIA SOTOMAYOR!!!

This is an absurd turn of events, and I call on the GOP members of the Gang of Fourteen, including Senators Lindsey Graham, Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, and John McCain to roundly reject the hypocrisy of Mr. Manuel.

Look, if they rightly believe that Justice Sotomayor is unfit, filibuster away. But to do so relfexively, solely because she is to the left of them is unconscionable. Elections do have consequences, and this is one of them. Instead, let's have a real debate, based on the facts and her decisions, before resorting to the filibuster.

And, seriously, the way things are looking up there in Minnesota, Mr. Manuel's suggestion might be a tad behind the curve.

Right to Life Movement Exposed as Farce Once Again.......

2009-06-01T12:27:00.000-04:00

Scott Roeder, avowed believer in an unborn fetus' right to life brutally and premeditatedly gunned down one of the three doctors in the United States who provides late term abortions to women. According to the conservative newspaper, The Washington Times, Dr. George Tiller's clinic has been the site of two decades worth of protests, and was bombed in 1985. The doctor was also shot in both arms in 1993.

Also reported in the same paper was the founder of Operation Rescue, Randall Terry, called the murdered doctor a mass murderer and stated: "He was an evil man - his hands were covered in blood." No, sir, your hands are covered in blood. Dr. Tiller was an upstanding member of his community and church, devoted husband and father of four.

The Right to Life Movement, if I can stomach to call it such a thing, has revealed itself again to be a terrible sham. I shall know them by the company they keep, and Roeder is their company.

This is not to say that the issue of abortion is not terribly divisive, and reasonable persons can disagree a great deal. It is also not to say that good people cannot oppose abortion. It is a very tough issue, as no matter how compelling the needs of an unborn child might be, the needs of the mother, to whom that unborn child owes not just its life, but very existence, are greater. It is a tough call in a zero sum game, but when I am forced to make the decision on whose call it is on what to do, I go with the right of the mother to choose.

No, what I am saying is the Right to Interfere With a Woman's Womb Movement is an industry based upon hatred and dividing Americans. Mr. Terry, I thought you read the word of God. Am I not now quoting Jesus, Matthew 7: Judge not lest ye be judged" ? Or do you construe that very clear dictate as meaning something else?

A funny thing about the multitude of those who oppose a woman's right to choose whether or not to carry a child to full term is that they are most often pro-death penalty and pro-gun. Now, I have made no secret of my pro-gun attitudes here on the Witch Hunt, but I am diametrically opposed to the death penalty.

I always found it funny - funny peculiar, not funny haha - that the so called right to life movement was filled with so many pro-death penalty hypocrites. And not for nothing, but being pro-gun means at some level that you are pro-ability to kill. Just pointing that out.

Therefore, I don't accept the moral high ground the anti-abortion crowd attempts to talk down to me from. Rather, I tend to ignore them. Apparently, I was wrong to do so. Let's get something clear: since the 1960's there has been both left and right wing violence that we now call domestic terrorism because it gets local sheriffs more Homeland Security dollars.

The left wing variety has largely been aimed at either laboratories to free animals or environmental, attacking the logging industry and such. People have been hurt and some killed by these acts, but they are few. Not that numbers excuse such things.

On the other hand, the right wing violence has been anti-abortion and anti-government, and has consisted of many OB-GYN clinics being bombed, as well as the Centennial Park bombing during the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, and of course the Oklahoma City bombing. And lest I forget, the cowardly murder of Dr. Barnett Slepian, the fourth abortion provider to be murdered, shot in his home by anti-abortion activist James Charles Kopp. Kopp of course did the brave thing and tried to flee to Canada.

Another quixotic aspect of the anti-abortion crowd is their general disdain for universal health care, which stems from the right wing belief in small government. So, the government can't pay doctors based upon set fee schedules, like it does for the Veterans' Administration and Medicaid, but it can regulate the contents of a woman's womb? Huh?

Therefore, it is clear that the anti-abortion crowd doesn't care much for life, just the unborn. And to really hit this home, I checked out the major pundits today, going to some of the biggest right wing bloviator's websites to see what, if anything, they had to say.

Hannity: nothing.

Rush: Nada.

Levin: Zip.

Malkin: focused on how "every mainstream pro-life organization has condemned the killing." She even said it twice. What about you, Michelle?

Coulter: Niente.

Savage: yes, an article by a David Kupelian, decrying violence in the name of Right Wing goals because it may hurt said goals, and the real danger was being labeled as extremists, which could lead the establishment [read: Obama] to exploit such a label the way Hitler [!!!] exploited the Reichstag Fire against the Communists in 1933. Nothing, nothing about the tragic murder of a father of four!

O'Reilly: yes, a line saying "Infamous abortion doctor Dr. George Tiller is gunned down in church. Bill and our guests react." Infamy is usually reserved for things like the attack on Pearl Harbor. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defined infamy as "evil reputation brought about by something grossly criminal, shocking or brutal." Gee, a husband and father of four is gunned down at the door of his church and HE is the infamous one? Could this be defamation?

So, it appears that the punditry had nothing to say about this except 'Don't let it ruin our movement.' Therefore, the only soul searching I am seeing from the punditry is self preservation. Real Christian of all of you.

Then I checked Operation Rescue's website, and clicked on the "Tiller Watch" link [I am not kidding, go see: http://www.operationrescue.org/archives/operation-rescue-denounces-the-killing-of-abortionist-tiller/] and got this:

Operation Rescue Denounces The Killing of Abortionist Tiller
Wichita, KS – It has been learned today that GeorgeTiller was shot and killed while entering his church on Sunday morning, May31.
Operation Rescue releases the following statement: We are shocked at this morning’s disturbing news that Mr. Tiller was gunned down. Operation Rescue has worked for years through peaceful, legal means, and through the proper channels to see him brought to justice. We denounce vigilantism and the cowardly act that took place this morning. We pray for Mr. Tiller’s family that they will find comfort and healing that can only be found in Jesus Christ.

Was this the denunciation Ms. Malkin was so adamant about she said it twice on her website? That Operation Rescue who was legally trying to bring Dr. Tiller TO JUSTICE ? Who the heck are they?

I know who they are. They are accessories before the fact. They fed millions of people, 99% of them good and decent people, this divisive crapola for decades now, hoping, no, praying that someone of a fragile mind like Roeder's will act on their command to bring such physicians to justice. Allow me to quote another member of Operation Rescue, Flip Benham, in response to calls for peace after Dr. Slepian's murder:

"we are in store for more bloodshed in the streets—the likes of which willsicken even the sturdiest among us."

Kopp was one of these "pro-lifers," just like Roeder. And Randall Terry knows it, and he is the one that needs to be brought to justice. The legal way. Not the way involves murdering a father of four children and running away.

Dr. Derangelove, Or How I Continue Worrying Because These Guys Still Love the Bomb

2009-05-30T15:11:00.000-04:00

Boys love toys, and among the toys boys love are weapons. Swords, bows, spears, guns, missiles. We love to imagine possessing these powerful tools, imagine using them, playing war. We love games that let us play out the possibilities of war, of set piece battles, outsmarting our opponent. We fantasize about different ways to win, what are acceptable losses, and how we can make these possibilities come to pass without "losing." In that vein, many boys love nuclear weapons, if, for any reasons, because they are the biggest weapons there are, and the stakes are higher than ever, and the play is always for keeps.

Last week the inestimable nation of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, also known as The Hermit Kingdom and The Crazy Northern Half of Korea, detonated its second nuclear device. Happily, for the moment, it appears that the device in question was the nuclear weapon equivalent of a Fourth of July sparkler, but this is a disquieting development for the Korean Peninsula, and North East Asia, not to mention the world at large.

North Korea is one of the poorest nations in the world, and it is likely that up to 2 million of her citizens starved to death during the late 90's. Yet her leadership, namely the Dear Leader Kim Jong-il, has his ship of state set at full speed ahead towards a nuclear arsenal.

Kim is a special individual, highly intelligent, yet bizarre to the extreme. He is the poster boy for the phrase 'cult of personality' and it is not out of bounds to suggest that when he shuffles off this mortal coil, the nation itself will simply collapse due to lack of recognizable leadership.

He is also, in my opinion, a rather depraved person who, if he has read the book, has used Orwell's 1984 as a guidebook and instruction manual. The inhumanity described in the stories of those who have escaped this veritable piece of Hell on Earth, even if only a tenth true, are truly stomach churning.

Therefore, we here at the Witch Hunt are more discomfited than usual when it has come to pass that a person with little to lose, a lot to prove, and who places little value on human life has come ever closer to perfecting the perfect machine for exterminating his fellow man, at least since small pox. And it doesn't help that Kim has ratcheted up his normal penchant for brinkmanship and not only detonated his small nuclear weapon, but has also fired off a half dozen short range missiles as well.

A critical question is 'What is Kim Jong-il's endgame?' But the obvious answers, such as to sell either a nuclear weapon or technology, doesn't satisfy my sensibilities. As poor as North Korea is, which is so poor they do not keep the lights on in the capital Pyongyang overnight, the few millions they would fetch from a fellow rogue nation or non-governmental organization I don't see as being worthwhile. Consider the time and expense, which includes building nuclear reactors for the purpose of creating the plutonium for a fission bomb, and then add to the equation that selling one bomb means an arsenal depletion of 20% or more.

This is probably more about Kim burnishing his personality cult within and without his insular nation. Kim has begun to age, and age rapidly. He has not named a successor. He also has very distinct personality defects, including being insecure with a fragile self esteem most likely buttressed by a not so healthy paranoia. You can see it in his comical bouffant hairdo and elevator shoes. What I am getting at, and not to put too fine a point on it, is that it has finally occurred to me that maybe this guy wants to go out Waco style.

It is possible that we have arrived at a tipping point. Nothing, nothing, nothing has worked. Sunshine policy with her estranged sister state, South Korea. Six Party Talks. Sanctions on top of sanctions.

Now, South Korea has decided to officially join the Proliferation Security Initiative, to which North Korea has responded would be seen as "a declaration of undisguised confrontation and a declaration of war." Japan has publicly wondered whether she will have to amended her constitution to take a more hawkish footing, pointing out that they are the only nation to withstand a nuclear attack. And the United States has stated we are considering halting and inspecting North Korean shipping for nuclear weapons and missile parts, to which North Korea said she was "fully ready for battle."

Kim and his regime has always been given to heavy rhetoric, but this seems much more than usual. Defense Secretary Gates stated that the USA will not accept a nuclear armed North Korea, and has publicly stated we are prepared to defend our regional allies. Whoa.

It looks like right now even China and Russia are less than thrilled, and might actually try something constructive. I am not holding my breath.

Now what?

Whatever it is, the United States, nay, the world, cannot permit this self destructive regime to possess a nuclear arsenal. Do we go to war? Do we put the odious "Bush Doctrine" in motion? I don't know.

To tell you the truth, I have to confess that I have indulged in the fantasy using 5 or 6 of our largest bombs, I'm talking about 10+ megatons in yield, and put them in a ring around Kim's test site. Let him see the pillar of fire he wants so badly.

But we all know that is not the answer. And unfortunately, no one knows what the answer might be. We can only hope we don't get it wrong.

One thing we should not do is to conflate this massive crisis with our other "rogue" nation problem, Iran. Whatever we do, we should not chase Iran into North Korea's arms, literally and figuratively. It was a tremendous error for W. to have conflated Iran, Iraq and North Korea into his overly simple yet catchy "Axis of Evil." And Iran is a nation lightyears ahead of North Korea in every way, and in my opinion is poised to become a real and possibly constructive player on the world stage. We should engage with it, as isolation from United States influence, as with Cuba, has simply not worked.

That being said, enter into the fray John R. Bolton, late U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. In his Op-Ed piece recently published in the New York Times on May 26, 2009, Mr. Bolton myopically decried the Obama Administration's arms control overtures to Russia, opining that such deals inure solely to the advantage of Russia, and thusly we were losing the arms race. He also complained that the Obama Administration was giving up on the strategically destabilizing, still pie in the sky missile defense program, notwithstanding it has been a gigantic failure of a boondoggle that couldn't hit its target even when we told it where it was going. He then continued with criticism for the Administration's efforts to reenact the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which was rejected in 1999, which he pointed out was the first treaty to fail on the Senate floor since the Treaty of Versailles after the First World War in 1918. It is interesting to note that it was Republican Party controlled Senate in both 1918 and 1999, and that the failure of the USA to enter the Treaty of Versailles was a contributing cause of the Second World War. Just saying.

The querulous Mr. Bolton apparently doesn't see the need for the United States to lead the world in arms reduction, so he doesn't recognize the utility of being party to treaties aimed at reducing nuclear arms and stopping their proliferation. Such efforts in the past, done earnestly, might have saved us from the knife's edge we must now walk with the Dear Leader of North Korea.

What Mr. Bolton doesn't get, much like Mr. Kim, is that nuclear weapons are never good, nor are arms races. That he is still concerned with an arms race is telling, as he is apparently still trapped in his Cold War ways, when concerns about missile gaps and bomber gaps were all the rage.

Mr. Bolton came of age when there was an unrealistic attitude about nuclear weapons. In the 1950's and 1960's we made all sorts of atomic weapons, from anti-nuclear weapons nuclear weapons, to depth charges, air to air missiles, artillery shells, mortars, and even contemplated hand grenades and bazooka rockets. The science fiction of the time blithely spoke in the past tense about atomic wars as if such things were expected to happen and were survivable.

Frankly, it was best said by J. Robert Oppenheimer when he quoted the Bhagavad Gita: "If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one. Now I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds." Bear in mind that this is when he witnessed the first nuclear explosion ever, the test of the plutonium bomb that would be known as Fatman, and eventually dropped on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945.

Fatman had a yield of about 20 kT, or 20,000 tons of TNT, and instantly killed about 40,000 people. Today, the average W78 warhead atop the average Minuteman III ICBM is 375 kT, and it has two roommates, and they can reach almost anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere. We have about 1,500 of these missiles. That's in addition to the 10,000 other nuclear warheads we deploy, including the 3,000 475 kT warheads arming the Navy's Trident missiles in our Ohio Class ballistic missile submarines.

This is not to say we should volunteer to disarm ourselves in this dangerous world. In a way, our arsenal and its counterpart in Russia have kept a peace, of sorts. They have probably prevented another nuclear weapon from being detonated in anger. But the dynamic of unreasonable nuclear buildup has much more downside. Firstly, setting the bar so high probably allowed more internecine and proxy wars, as neither side would dare raise the stakes to the nuclear level. It has also been a complete waste of time, resources, and scientific and engineering know-how. And it has saddled the future generations, no longer constrained by a battle between competing economic philosophies, with the problem of what to do with and how to dispose of, these awful weapons in a world with upwards of ten nuclear powers.

But that nuclear weapons are awful; that they do not strengthen but shackle those who possess them; that they are a waste of time and energy; that there is not any use for them or any strategic arms race, is as lost on Mr. Bolton and his ilk, just as it is lost on Kim Jong-il, [though I will grant Mr. Kim arrived at his conclusions for more selfish reasons]. They are still boys playing at their imaginary games of strategy and chance, heedless of the consequences. Neither has, to my knowledge, tasted warfare firsthand. But they, like many of us, myself included, indulge themselves in fantasies of gaming out the unthinkable. There is nothing wrong with it, so long as when you know that it is really just a game and a fantasy.

California Steaming

2009-05-29T17:14:00.000-04:00

The California Supreme Court dropped and ball, and dropped it big time. In the never ending search for fairness for all Americans under the law, the lilly livered justices of the Golden State's High Court decided to reverse themselves in a fashion I have never witnessed in my adult life.

If you recall, the Californis Supreme Court decided not too long ago that the Constitution of the state mandated that gay and lesbian couples be afforded the right to marry the person of their choice. They had based this prior decision on the failure of any other scheme, like civil unions, to provide EQUAL PROTECTION under the law, namely the fundamental right to marry.

Not to be outdone by such mundane concepts like basic fairness, common decency and equal protection under the law, certain member of the Californian electorate, most of whom are members of what is euphemistically called the religious right, put forth Proposition 8, which banned future gay and lesbian marriages.

Bizarrely, the decision, which ran to 130+ pages, permitted the 18,000 gay and lesbian unions that took place prior to the decision to stand, stating that Prop 8 did not entirely repeal or abrogate the prior marriages. Rather, the 6 cowards agreed that the word marriage now only applies to heterosexual unions, but that all the same rights are preserved in civil unions. This begs the question of why all the bother............

This was a terrible decision, and permit me to say why: the California Supreme Court found, in a prior decision, that the right to marry the person of your choice was a FUNDAMENTAL RIGHT. Those are magic words. Fundamental means basic; means the entry level; means without this, there are no following rights.

This prior decision was therefore precedent, and should have been respected as such.

Under the United States Constitution the fundamental rights are the ones like freedom of and from religion; freedom to move about the nation unfettered and live where you want; to have or not have children; the freedom from cruel and unusual punishment; the right to counsel. These are the rights we don't need government imprimatur. We possess them because we are Americans. Period.

And these fundamental rights cannot be taken away by a whim. Majority rule does not, and need not apply. It would require an amendment to the Constitution. You can look up on your own what an arduous process that is.

Yet, the California Supreme Court has now permitted the destruction of what it already found to be a fundamental right based upon a popular vote, notwithstanding prior precedence. Ladies and gentlemen, this a textbook case of what we call the TYRANNY OF THE MAJORITY, and what Constitutions are meant to prevent. It is very un-American for this turn of events to have occurred.

And the one courageous dissenting justice, Justice Carlos R. Moreno, said it best when he wrote that Proposition 8 means "requiring discrimination" which "strikes at the core of the promise of equality that underlies our California Constitution" and "places at risk the state constitutional rights of all disfavored minorities."

The Witch Hunt salutes you, Justice Moreno.

For those celebrating this travesty, enjoy your schadenfreude for now. But also know you have contributed to the pain for millions of your fellow Americans for the sake of your petty vanities. And there shall be a comeuppance, and conservatism shall be further marginalized for its mendacious ways. You are people not "preserving marriage" but rather trying to destroy your fellow American out of some sort of baseless jealousy or other hatred.

You all should be ashamed for your schadenfreude. Such joy at the pain of others is sinful, at least according to the Bible I have read. Your lack of compassion for your fellow man evinces your unworthiness of the epithet "Christian." Verily, you are the modern day Pharisees.

And I also know that those of you celebrating this as a victory only feel this way because you are homophobes. Plain and simple. Well, please do us a favor, check your calendar, and figure out this is the 21st Century. Please take you Medieval attitudes about the very natural phenomenon of homosexuality, stuff them somewhere, and actually read the Book of Leviticus. You will find a lot of things in there that are called abominations, and some of them are mundane and some you have already done twice today, like eat shellfish or bacon. If you are wearing a polyester/cotton blend, you are an abomination. Just like the gays and lesbians you hate so much.

And if you are lucky, maybe you will realize that the Old Testament is simply a collection of loosely related stories, and not to be taken literally.

Last I checked, Jesus Christ was mum on this issue, among others. And he probably doesn't appreciate his name being taken in vain and the like.

I have said it before, and I will say it again: beware those who tell you they know the mind of God; they are either mad, or lying to you.

All Things Being Equal........

2009-05-27T16:18:00.000-04:00

Newt Gingrich says that Judge Sonia Sotomayor is a rascist, and should withdraw her name from consideration for the Supreme Court.

Apprently, the former Speaker, that paragon of marital virtue, reached this conclusion after reading that Judge Sotomayor expressed an opinion that a Latina, having lived that life, would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male "who hasn't lived that life."

The implication of Judge Sotomayor's statement , which is very much based upon the reality we live in, is that a person who had to work harder against prejudices to get to where she is would be better informed than someone who had an easier life. If there is any doubt as to the validity of this, I want to hear it, and it better be good.

Seeing as this is but one sentence of a greater quote in a speech, this is clearly a classic "gotcha" style political attack.

What is also lost on the former Speaker is that all things are not equal. Old racsism is not the same as supposed new racism. This is the same baloney line of attack that the McCain-Palin campaign tried to foist upon the electorate with the entire Jeremiah Wright fiasco. Sorry to say, my fellow white people, but it is really racist for any of us to deny those who had to live through prejudice and racism their commensurate rage, as well as pride, after having experienced being denied the same opportunity and respect.

In fact, former Speaker Gingrich's conlcusion that the same such statements from a white man would cause that man to have to withdraw from consideration only exemplifies this dynamic. In equating the experience of a white male, who, let's be completely honest, dominated the political, social, legal, economic and financial landscape up until only very recent history, with the experience of a Latina wholly discounts the experience of the Latina, which is the core inference of Judge Sotomayor's statement.

So, Toad, er, uh, Newt, and the other fat man, Rush, can take their racist rhetoric and stuff it up their white bums.

Far Out; Far East

2009-05-26T15:34:00.000-04:00

First, allow us to remember that this year is the 20th anniversary of the student protests and resultant massacre of June 3, 1989, in Tiananmen Square, Beijing, China. If you recall, this event took place during the wholesale collapse of Soviet Communism in Eastern Europe. It was thought, with great hope, that the trend would extend to the People's Republic of China. Instead, we were eventually treated to the Oligarch's Totalitarian China.

Allow us to take a moment to recall those brave persons yearning to have their leadership listen for once to the governed. Allow ourselves to appreciate what we take for granted here. And to recall the iconic images we saw before our televisions went dark that fateful day the 27th and 28th Armies slaughtered thousands of their fellow countrymen.

This will bring me to the second part of this Far East post. Kudos to the Hermit Kingdom of the Democratic Republic of North Korea, as big a misnomer there has been since the German Democratic Republic went out of business in 1989, for detonating its second atomic device.

Also, let's thank George W. Bush and Dick Cheney for that results oriented foreign policy of engagement. Without them, North Korea might not have nuclear weapons!!

Kim Jong-il - at once the world's biggest loser and winner of "Most Likely to be Parodied As a James Bond Villain" contest, has spent what little capital his nearly useless country has to build a second atom bomb, so he can now attack two cities before it is vaporized in certain retaliation.

It seems Mr. il, er, uh, I mean Kim, hasn't realized that nuclear weapons are really more trouble than they are worth. See, if you don't use them, they don't do anything for you. And if you use them, they don't do anything for you.

As the inestimable John Keegan postulated in his book A History of Warfare, while war is an extension of politics by other means [see: von Clausewitz], nuclear war breaks this trend as it necessarilly destroys the political systems which created them. Nuclear weapons are in themselves a terrible conundrum. They provide a false sense of security, while permitting the boiling point of tensions to artificially rise under their umbrella.

As an example, think of the ubiquity of proxy wars between the Superpowers and their respective blocs which ran through the length of the Cold War. Where it might be thought that war would be impossible after the development and depolyment of large arsenals of ever more destructive nuclear arms, rather the reverse was true.

So now North Korea has tossed down its nuclear gauntlet, but has done so in a pitch black room. I say that because there are several key unkowns: the size of their weapon in yield as well as physical mass; this will directly affect their ability to weaponize this device, and limit how far they can throw it on their available rockets. In any event, their meager arsenal is but a drop in the bucket when compared to the arsenals of the USA and Russia in every way.

On the upside, though, is that it appears this test was slightly less of a fizzle than the last test, in 2006. So, it looks like Mr. Kim has an over rated roman candle at his disposal. Yay.

I wonder how many of his fellow Koreans the Dear Leader starved to afford his little vanity project.

Some opine that Mr. Kim may seek to put such technology on the black market, and that this is the true danger. Perhaps, but in order to make such a sale worthwhile it would have to be a relatively large amount of money. And to sell what he has worked so hard to create seems to me to be a little shallow minded, and Mr. Kim is not a dunce.

Finally, at the outset, President Obama has responded well. I do think that, short of a shooting war, which would be a calamity, the only thing left is for the nations most concerned - China, Russia, Japan, South Korea and the USA - as well as the rest of the civilized world, to tighten sanctions around North Korea like a slow noose. Every ship coming in or out of the Hermit Kingdom must be stopped and searched, and if Mr. Kim doesn't like it, well, he should just come out of his cave.

Liberty University - Putting the Moron in Oxymoron

2009-05-26T14:31:00.000-04:00

It was reported over the weekend that the bastion of a solid liberal arts education, Liberty University, founded by the corpulent Jerry Falwell, has ordered its nascent College Democrats Club to disband.

While the club may still meet on campus, Liberty U., as poorly named a school as there ever was, will not lend its name or school funds to the club.

As the Associated Press reported, Vice president of student affairs, Mark Hine, sent an email to the club's president that the decision was made due the the national Democratic Party's support of abortion, socialism, and the "LGBT Agenda."

The school's Chancellor and President [hmmm, what other famous person held both of those titles...?] Jerry Falwell, Jr., in defending the decision, quixotically stated, among other things:

"To blindly support any candidate solely because of party affiliation irrespective of moral values is wrong. Liberty would never endorse a Republican student group that supported abortion rights."

However, Mr. Falwell, Jr., is apparently not proof reading his online statements, as a mere five paragraphs above this statement Mr. Falwell, Jr., stated:

"The students who formed the Democrat club last October are good students. They are pro-life and believe in traditional marriage."

So, which is it, Mr. Falwell, Jr. Please don't tell me you haven't brushed
up on your Exodus in a while. It appears you re bearing false witness against thy students, and you should be ashamed for a) talking out of both sides of your mouth, and b) making an issue of this magnitude over a Democrat Club. Not all Democrats support abortion rights, nor gay marriage rights, and you admit this. Yet you have stuffed YOUR OWN VIEWS of the Democratic party down the throats of your own young Democrats.

If I were their parents I would be demanding a refund.

Now, let's take a real look at the reasoning given for the ban. Seeing as abortion is one of the most divisive issues in the nation, and sound minded persons can disagree, I will give this issue a pass, for now.

That brings socialism up to bat. Pray tell, Mr. Falwell, Jr., where does Jesus come out against socialism? Where is it bad to share? Was it when he tossed the money changers out of the temple? Are there money changers in your temple, sir?

How about when he commanded to render unto Caesar? Or when he said that bit about a rich man, a camel, and an eye of a needle? Answers, please?

And I haven't even brought up any of the commands to charity Jesus issued.

Moving on, please tell me what's the lesbian, gay, and the transgendered agenda? That they want equal rights? What would Jesus say about that? As far as I know, Jesus said nothing about homosexuality, or really anything about the prohibitions contained in Leviticus.

Speaking of Leviticus, where homosexuality is referred to as an abomination, isn't it also true that shrimp scampi and cotton-rayon blends are also abominations? I just want to make sure you are following ALL the words of the Bible, not just the ones you WANT to. I'm sure you aren't prideful enough to wear more than one type of thread, like a monogrammed shirt or something.

I think Jesus, who is oft equated with love, would not deny equality to any of his brothers and sisters, nor conflate religious institutions with secular ones for the sake of a remunerative wedge issue. You might want to fight me on this, but I will remind you to render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, and render unto the Lord what is the Lord's. I believe you have transposed one for the other, and your soul has become unclean.

And if all this isn't enough, wait until the first Young Republicans' Club is thrown off a campus for being a hate group.

Powell Strikes Back

2009-05-26T03:01:00.000-04:00

In the less and less amusing installments of the GOP intra-party family feud, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, former Secretary of State, and former Bush Administration patsy Colin Powell decided to re-enter the fray, responding to former Vice Boss Dick Cheney.

When we last left these former colleagues, Dick Cheney stated on Face the Nation he preferred Rush Limbaugh's political philosophy to Powell's, stating less than graciously that he had believed that Powell "had left the party. I didn't know he was still a Republican."

But on Sunday Powell fired back, probably with greater marksmanship than draft dodger Cheney ever possessed, "And Mr. Cheney is misinformed. I am still a Republican."

This tiff had its genesis in Powell's endorsement of Barack Obama for president. It should be noted that Secretary Powell was one among a plethora of intellectual conservatives who decided to either back Obama, or who wavered in their endorsement of the McCain-Palin ticket.

It is further complicated by the ideological warfare - social conservatives v. moderates - with the more conservative wing seeking more "purity" at the expense of moving toward the center to garner more supporters. This "purity" tends to center around the social issues of the right to reproductive choice and equal rights for gays and lesbians. In very recent history, the party plank on both issues has proved to be an albatross, and moderates wish to focus more on fiscal conservatism and small government.

However, even people I consider to be plain dealers, like Gov. Tim Pawlenty, are disingenuous about the Cheney-Powell row. As reported in yesterday's New York Times by Adam Nagourney, Mr. Pawlenty was quoted s saying about Powell, "If your indictment of the Republican Party is that it is not mainstream enough, and then the party puts forth somebody who is clearly a mainstream Republican - John McCain for President - and then you leap-frog over him to endorse Barack Obama, that seems about more than being frustrated with the Republican Party not being mainstream enough."

I don't know exactly where Mr. Pawlenty was going with this, but he may have been alluding to race being a factor, as Rush Limbaugh had. However, the 10,000 lb elephant [pun intended] in the room he is ignoring is the nomination of Sarah Palin as running mate for Sen. McCain. It was her vast and obvious shortcomings, not Mr. McCain, that drove Mr. Powell, as well as many of the more intellectual, less religious member of the party to defect.

The fact is that Sarah Palin was the polarizing agent in the Presidential election. She is of the social conservative wing of the party where religiosity and fanatical adherence to failed social policies [like abstinence] are more highly prized than deep thoughts on geopolitics or Constitutional law. That Mrs. Palin failed famously when she was interviewed by Katie Couric, namely by being unprepared to answer relatively simple questions for a Vice Presidential candidate and revealing herself to be little more than a pretty face versed at the art of petty insults, was what drove the likes of Peggy Noonan, as well as Colin Powell, among many others Republicans, to endorse the Democratic ticket.

So, it appears that the GOP has a lot more soul searching to do, as the very thing that caused a veritable brain drain on the right side of the aisle, Governor Sarah Palin, has not been reduced in stature, but rather is the present GOP front runner for 2012.

Think about it in these terms: the Sarah Palins of the GOP are seeking to supplant the Colin Powells.

If they had any brains left, the Powells should run for it.

Memorial Day 2009

2009-05-25T13:00:00.001-04:00

Today is a day free of politics and opinion. Today is reserved for those who served our country, to thank those who are still with us, and remember those who has moved off this mortal coil.

It doesn't matter the war, or even less how you felt about the war. World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Lebanon, Grenada, Panama, Haiti, Kuwait, Afghanistan, Iraq; Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force, Coast Guard.

Republican, Democrat, Whig.......

We are all Americans.

So, thank you to all the veterans for your service and your sacrifices. Today is for you.

UK Not Importing Garbage - Michael Savage Banned

2009-05-24T12:00:00.000-04:00

I know the Witch Hunt is behind the curve on this one, but that why it is a blog page and not news site. And all I have to say in response is: Hahahahahahahahahahaha!

Michael Savage is a classic case of the self hating Semite, who changed his surname from Weiner, probably so he could avenge himself from all those jocks who kicked his butt in high school. So he picked up a thesaurus and chose the toughest sounding name he could find. What a chump.

He hates his family name, and yet this is a guy who constantly talks about family values and tradition. Go figure.

The savage Weiner is among a rare classification here on the Witch Hunt. He has achieved the rarified honor of being among those few persons whom, if found in the middle of a desert, dying of thirst and on fire, I would not relieve my bladder upon.

Weiner is a special kind of hate monger. He spews bilious opinion from his very popular radio show, but manages to do it in the faux tough guy style, talking tough and throwing around disgusting insults, wishing AIDS on gays, and calling lesbians disgusting. His hatred of gays and lesbians, for Muslims, and of anything different than his narrow and myopic worldview, knows few bounds and abides by no concept of common decency. Frankly, his views share more with the likes of the Taliban than the common American, notwithstanding his claims of fighting for "traditional" American values and culture.

Well, Weiner's savage hate mongery has caught up with him. He, along with 15 fellow troglodyte closet cases have been banned by Great Britain's Home Office. The Home Office issued the following statement:

"This is someone who has fallen into the category of fomenting hatred, of such extreme views and expressing them in such a way that it is actually likely to cause inter-community tension or even violence if that person were allowed into the country."

In so doing, the Home Office has grouped Weiner with the likes of Fred Phelps and family, those paragons of American virtue, as well as Hamas MP Yunis Al-Astal, Jewish extremist Mike Guzovsky, former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard Stephen Donald Black, neo-Nazi Erich Gliebe, Artur Ryno and Pavel Skachevsky, the imprisoned former leaders of a violent Russian skinhead gang which committed 20 racially motivated murders, preachers Wadgy Abd El Hamied Mohamed Ghoneim, Abdullah Qadri Al Ahdal, Safwat Hijazi and Amir Siddique, Muslim activist Abdul Ali Musa (previously Clarence Reams), murderer and Hezbollah terrorist Samir Al Quntar and Kashmiri terror group leader Nasr Javed.

We will now know Mr. Weiner from the company he keeps, ideologically if not personally. And if he actually reads the Bible he will be familiar with the concept that since he has sown the wind, he must now reap the whirlwind.

Well, I wish we could deport Weiner, but in truth, even his disgusting rhetoric is protected speech under the cherished First Amendment. That's the breaks. But the UK has done its part to send him a much needed message.

His Debt is Paid, Let Him Get Back To Work

2009-05-24T10:24:00.000-04:00

Michael Vick, the former electrifying quarterback for the Atlanta Falcons, has recently been released from prison after serving his sentence in connection with his involvement in a dog fighting ring. Now it is time to get off his back and let the man get back to work, to wit, being an NFL quarterback.

But some people out there are giving him, and the NFL heat. They should just stop.

Allow me to say that the allegations Vick eventually pled guilty to turned my stomach. I have two dogs, and they are like people to me. I would kill anyone who hurt either of them.

That being said, Michael Vick has paid for his crime with everything he once had. He lost his good name, his freedom and his fortune. All he has left is his arm and his legs. Let him use them both, without delay.

I never witnessed the piling on that happened to Michael Vick, and continues to happen. Apparently, PETA, the People for Ethical Treatment of Animals, a bunch of hypocrites is there ever was one, want Vick to undergo a psychiatric evaluation to prove his remorse.

Uh, PETA, go to Hell. Who are you people that you would be entitled to ask for such a thing?

And Roger Goodell, don't listen to these people. First, NFL fans don't overlap much with PETA members, so you won't be hurting your bottom line. Second, PETA has killed more puppies than Vick killed fighting dogs, so they can go to Hell. Third, Vick is entitled to redeem himself after already paying an enormous price.

Let's be serious: Michael Vick never killed a human being. He never laid a hand on a human being. He abused dogs, which, no matter how much you or I love them, or how much the hypocritical PETA says they love them, it is not murder. Lay off the man.

People should be entitled to resume their lives as good citizens after they have paid their debt to society. Ray Lewis of the Baltimore Ravens was permitted back in the NFL, and he was involved in a murder.

Also, this is an elucidating example of what our society does to those who have paid their debt after a release from prison. Vick was a world class athlete, with over $100 million in contracts and endorsements. As of now he has almost nothing. What if he were already poor and from an impoverished area, and society is piling on like this, which is does? What chance would a person have to resume being productive once again? The answer we all know is very small, and we also know that this is a big reason why ex-cons return to crime.

So let's take a lesson from this. Let's ignore PETA, let's allow Vick to play, and let's all get on with our lives as we permit Vick to do so.

New York City State of Mind

2009-05-23T11:49:00.000-04:00

Lately there has been a great deal of handwringing on both sides of the aisle because if President Obama closes Guantanamo Bay we will, gasp, have to bring the prisoners therein to the shores of the United states.

Among these yellow bellies are Democratic Senators from Montana, Max Baucus and John Tester, who really don't want Guantanamo Bay prisoners in Big Sky Country, even if the small town of Hardin, Montana does.

Hardin built a 400+ bed prison a few years ago, but since then they haven't housed prisoners, and the town is hurting financially. So the town fathers have volunteered to house prisoners from Gitmo. Kudos to you, Hardin, Montana. America, and the Witch Hunt, salute you.

Meanwhile, New York City, the only American city to be hit twice by so called Islamo-fascist terror attacks, one of those the biggest terrorist act in history, where a half dozen terrorists were tried back in 90's, and is going to be first to try Al Qaeda suspect from Guantanamo, is still going strong. Apparently, New Yorkers didn't get the memo that suddenly being afraid of terrorist attacks was back in fashion. Rather, New Yorkers get on the biggest mass transit system in the country on a daily basis and go to work, and then come back home the same way. New York City's jails have and will hold terrorists, and New Yorkers will nary give it a second thought. Oh, and a jihadist "plot" was just disrupted in the Bronx. Most people didn't notice, and more don't care.

Long the whipping boy of the far right punditry for being too cosmopolitan and not part of 'real America,' the inference being New York was not manly like the South and West, it appears the Big Apple has once again raised its mantle of being the home of the toughest and strongest Americans. Apparently, the Counties of New York, Kings, Queens, Richmond, and the Bronx are where real Americans live now.

While faux tough guys, like Floridian Joe Scarborough [sorry, Joe] fret about becoming a target for Al Qaeda, New Yorkers go about their everyday business without telegraphing fear all over cable tv, even though New York is the biggest, and really only, target for Al Qaeda. Big deal. Get over yourselves.

Rather, act like New Yorkers, and defeat Al Qaeda by not being afraid. It's the only real way to combat "terror."

So to Rush, and Sean, and Ann, and Laura, and Bill, and each and every pinhead on cable tv and in Congress that has called New York City anything but the best of America, I say this: New York City to Pinheads: DROP DEAD!

In related news, I just wan to state that the garbage surrounding rebuilding the World Trade Center site is terrible. On September 12, 2001, I wanted the Twin Towers built again. I still want those towers rebuilt, so badly that I can feel it in my bones. Well, if the fools running the show, beginning with Giuliani and moving forward had only said the obvious from the word go, those soaring pillars of the sky would have been returned to the greatest skyline in the world. Instead there is a hole in the ground that tourists take photos of.

In the obtuse language of the internet: Epic Fail.

Right and Wrong, Not Left or Right

2009-05-22T11:08:00.000-04:00

Thursday was the duel of ideals, the new sherrif and the old gunfighter, white hat v. black hat. But the one thing it wasn't, no matter how the press has portrayed it, was a battle of the left v. right. It was undeniably, a battle of the right v. wrong. It was the President against the former Vice and his myriad vices.

In his speech at the National Archives, before an original copy of the sacred document of our national formation, Mr. Obama took the hard look at the sins of our collective past under the administration of George W. Bush that most have been unable or unwilling to take. He called them out on their fears and fear mongery, on their shortcuts made out of panic, and the shortsightedness of those shortcuts, and how those shortcuts actually continue to hurt us now. And one of those shortcuts was the creation of an extra-legal sysem of detention and trial of suspected terrorists we now know as Guantanamo Bay.

Mr. Obama called for a return to the core values that make our nation great, our civil liberties the envy of the world, and to those aspects of our genesis that make our nation the greatest and most prosperous now and in history. He made the case that it was our collectively turning our back on those values, such as Constitutional rights for all, our fair trials, our Justice System, and the Rule of Law, all for the sake of expediency out of fear, that created many of the problems he is dealing with today.

Mr. Obama was right to say that our core values, our rights, are not luxuries, but the very strength of our nation. To those who gainsay, I respond: America, pal - love it or leave it; this is what it means when you say 'freedom isn't free.' It means not being afraid. It means standing up for the little guy, or more importantly, the guy whose guts you hate. When you protect their rights, only then can you feel a little secure in your own.

He was also brave, in these times where the efficacy of a war crime is being seriously discussed as a possible defense, to categorically reject waterboarding as a method of interrogation. Huzzah!

In short, Mr. Obama told Americans to get back to being Americans, like we were before W. turned us against each other and against the Constitution.

Mr. Cheney's speech, by contrast, sought to justify his extra and illegal actions at every turn, evincing what I gather to be his increasing dread that he might not as above the law as he once thought. He sunk to a new low when he stated that criticism of his "enhanced interrogation" was defaming the men who tortured prisoners at his order, which is an Orwellian distortion of the facts, seeing as these "heroes" were likely private contractors, or, to not put too fine a point on it, mercenaries. I didn't know mercenaries, much less people who can stomach simulating drowning another person, are entitled to be called heroes.

Moving further with Orwellian doublespeak, Mr. Cheney compared his almost certain criminal liability, and any investigation of same by the Obama Administration, as such:

"It's hard to imagine a worse precedent, filled with more possibilities for trouble and abuse, than to have an incoming administration criminalize the policy decisions of its predecessors."

So, Mr. Cheney, you should get a pass for the authorizing and the actual ordering of war crimes because it is a bad precedent? Because torture was merely a policy consideration? Have you no decency?

This is a classic non sequitur argument, literally, that the argued result does not follow from the premise. Last time I check "It was only a policy" was no defense at the Nuremburg Trials. Just saying.

Rather, waterboarding has been called torture, and been held to be torture, under American Law [!!] for more decades than Cheny has lived. Yet, as we Americans are poor students of history, many will simply take the ex-Vice at his word, no matter what abominations the forked tongue of his flicks out of his mouth. He who controls the past might control the future, but not today, and not on my watch.

Significantly, while he spoke of documents to support his fallacious defense that torture prevented terrorist attacks, he failed to set forth what these documents were, or, in fact, what they contained. Yet, while he still had the chance, he never leaked such documents, unlike his leaking of the name of a certain CIA agent under cover when that was politically expedient. Getting erratic in retirement?

Actually, Mr. Cheney is a skilled political fighter. He has nothing to lose, so he is purposefully going after Obama to weaken him, which is vanity taken to new heights. He is using two very effective, though logically fallacious, methods.

One is to state that Mr. Obama is weakening America and making us vulnerable to another attack. Therefore, when another attack does happen, which, in all likelihood it will at some point, he will be seen as prophetic. But this is really a case of a broken clock being correct twice a day. I can state that it will rain tomorrow every day does not me a weatherman when by coincidence it does precipitate.

Second, he is using the contents of certain documents, whose existence is at best dubious, to defend himself on the question of the authorization of illegal torture. Since these documents probably do not exist, when they are not produced he can then state that Mr. Obama is refusing to release them. However, the essential point he is avoiding is that expediency or efficacy are no defense to a war crime.

It is also noteworthy that Mr. Cheney has gone to the family well in recent days, having his daughter Liz go on the Faux News circuit to defend Daddy. That means he must be really scared of being prosecuted for war crimes. Seriously, who gives a rat's posterior what his daughter thinks? Who the Hell is she? At best a charcter witness during Cheney's sentencing phase. If only..........

AND YET, PRESIDENT OBAMA GOT IT WRONG, TOO

Mr. Obama, saddled with the extra-legal baggage of his predecessors, is apparently at a loss at what to do with the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay that are really likely terrible people who only want to do their best to destroy our nation, or at the very least kill Americans en masse. I surmise that he believes that the cases against likes of Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheik Mohammed, who were likely tortured, as well as much "evidence" against them and others was obtained through illegal means, are indelibly tainted, and a criminal conviction might be impossible, no matter the setting - civilian or military proceedings alike.

Therefore, Mr. Obama has endorsed a terrible, and illegal, plan to keep these prisoners confined, without trial, forever and anon. Such a result is not acceptable. There is zero provision in any law or anywhere in the Constitution, for such a result, and I am calling out President Obama to figure out a legal way to deal with this.

It is unacceptable for him to go for the type of expedient solution the prior occupants of the White House used. Lime it or not, these poor excuses for human beings are still entitled to a trial.

Say It Ain't So, Joe

2009-05-21T16:44:00.001-04:00

Joe Scarborough, one of my favorite conservative pundits, has disappointed me. I like Joe because, even when we disagree, he is a plain dealer, and he is not a shouter. He gets his point across, and does it with respect.

But today on his morning show on MSNBC he was spouting the same fear mongering, and, to be truthful, cowardly baloney that has been bouncing all over both aisles of Congress, and around the punditry.

In a debate with Ed Schultz, he took the position that if one of the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, like Khalid Sheik Mohammed, was moved to a prison in, for example, Pensacola, it would make Pensacola a target for Muslim extremists.

Are you @#$%ing kidding me, Joe?

That is one of the lamest, yellow bellied, as well as unreasoned, hokey, and fallacious claims I have ever heard in my life. What, are these extremists going to somehow pull another 9/11 just so they can bust him out of jail, now that KSM is wide open in the Continental USA?

Have any of the people thinking this way actually said the words out loud to themselves before saying it on national TV? The reasoning is childish, sorry to say.

Not to mention that we have already jailed many "Muslim Extremists," most importantly, but not limited to the perpetrators of the original bombing of the World Trade Center!!!!

As of this writing, about a decade and a half after the guilty verdicts, a half dozen men are still incarcerated in the Federal Prison system, convicted in the very competent Federal Courts after prosecution from a very professional Justice Department. So far, no extremist attacks.

Also, until 9/11, there was a very peculiar fact about terrorism in the USA: the vast bulk of terrorist acts, as well as terrorist related deaths, were the result of good old, made in the USA domestic terrorists. Like Tim McVeigh. And there are tons of these guys, most of them from the KKK, White Power or such related fringe right wing movements.

Still, no extremists.

How about this: we use the very competent, very fair, very tried and true legal system we have, that is also very Constitutional. That way there is no second guessing the results, and we look like the good guys we think we are by actually living up to our ideals.

Good enough for ya?

Pro Gun Majority In Congress

2009-05-20T19:10:00.000-04:00

Today's New York Times states the obvious: the GOP is no longer the sole proprietor of Second Amendment rights. Rather, the most recent Democratic members of the House and Senate are as pro-gun rights as anyone.

And further, the amendment added to the new credit card law, which permits the carrying of loaded weapons in national parks, passed the Senate by the overwhelming majority of 90-5. When the Democratic Party has 59 [really 60] of those seats, that means a lot of Dems voted for it.

Further, President Obama is expected to sign the bill into law. Hooray for gun rights, and hooray for President Obama for defusing a social issue that didn't need a divisive one.

Now that the Democrats have come around, do you think we'll hear a little less hysteria from the NRA? Perhaps even backing a Democrat or two, maybe when, all things being equal, they are the better candidate?

Let's see.

...Or Banish Them.

2009-05-19T18:06:00.000-04:00

Notwithstanding that the profession of attorney at law is greatly maligned, oftimes with good reason, among the vast bulk of attorneys there is a recognition of the basic duties of those privileged to practice law. Among those duties is an ethical requirement to uphold the law, as well as defend the Constitution.

To that end, an attorney may not give any advice to his or her client. They are bound to give well reasoned advice, based upon the laws, as well as their ethical duties as an officer of the Court. To that end an attorney representing a husband in a divorice proceeding may not advise his or her client to hire a hitman for $5,000 to kill their spouse, even though it would save the client $35,000 in legal fees, as well as the half of the marital estate, soon to be divided.

That, class, would be unethical.

So it was reported today in the New York Times, in an article by Scott Shane, that a legal ethics complaint was filed today against a dirty dozen of Bush Administration attorneys, including 3 former Attorney's General, in connection with the roles they played in assisting the former occupants of the White House to justify and implement torture as a policy of the United States of America.

Bravo. At last, somebody standing up for the more besmirched than ever name of the profession. Thank you, Velvet Revolution, the group that is bringing the complaint.

Among these twelve attorneys are John C. Yoo, author of the most damning memos, his former boss and present Federal Judge with a lifetime appointment, Jay S. Bybee, as well as former AG's Alberto Gonzalez, John Ashcroft, Michael Mukasey, and in addition a few superstars from the Pentagon and White House: Douglas J. Feith and David S. Addington.

You know, it was with the help of many lawyers that the fascist regimes of Europe took power and committed atrocities, giving the actors legal cover for their heinous acts. And it is the responsibility of the profession to stand up to such requests from the powerful, especially when what is sought is how to circumvent laws in place for our protection from the powerful.

It was the duty under the law for the Office of Legal Counsel, where Mr. Yoo served when he wrote his repugnent memorandums at the supervision of Mr. Bybee, to advise the President as to what was and was not legal; what was and was not permissible under the law.

In this case, the laws in question were the Geneva Conventions, the Conventions Against Torture, as well as domestic American laws prohibitting torture. This does not mention, of course, the Eighth Amendment's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishments.

At the behest of their terrified, yet sadistic masters, Mr. Yoo and Mr. Bybee, among others, issued legal opinions justifying and permitting torture. This was in direct contravention of their duties as attorneys and officers of the Court, as such acts were patently against the law.

This is not opinion. This is fact, just as true as saying 2 + 2 = 4. It is never sometimes 5, even if terrorism is involved.

To that end, each and every licensed attorney admitted to the Bar who played a role in formulating these unlawful and disgusting opinons, who did not resign when asked to render them, and played a role in either implementing torture or giving legal cover to do so, should thusly be disbarred as they are clearly lacking in the most basic ethical necessities to be bestowed the privilege of being called an attorney.

The legal profession has more than enough black eyes, most of them self inflicted. This one time, when it really counts, the profession must stand up for itself and proclaim that these enablers of terrible criminal acts are not fit to be counted among its members.

Sean Hannity: Black Hole of Integrity

2009-05-18T16:49:00.000-04:00

I was in a tad of a masochistic mood this afternoon, so I put on the Sean Hannity radio show as he was interviewing J.C. Watts. The subject of the bulk of the conversation that I heard, which was about 10 minutes, was about Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and her struggle right now with the CIA.

Now, I am on record that if Pelosi has to pay a political price for either not acting on information then, or falsifying information now, so be it. I do not root for a party like I root for a football team.

But I heard Hannity go on and on about how she lied, and therefore she is unfit to be Speaker [as if he knows any of the actual requirements to be Speaker of the House], and also how her accusations that the CIA lied to her undermined the CIA and national security.

My observations are thus:

1) Sean Hannity ignored the 10,000 lb elephant [pun intended] in the room, as the real debate is about torture, not Pelosi's knowledge of torture. This is about a million times more damaging and dangerous for the GOP than for Pelosi. Once again, she is a straw man. Just so it is now crystal clear: if the prior administration told Nancy Pelosi, when she was not Speaker of the House, that they were torturing people, that is NOT A DEFENSE TO TORTURING PEOPLE.

2) Sean Hannity is under the delusion that the CIA is incapable of lying to a member of Congress, or he is simply not being honest [gasp!]. Well, the CIA lied, or aided and abetted lying, to Congress, the American people, and the world with the whole "yellowcake" debacle. Have IQ's on the fringe right dropped suddenly? Sean, are you dipping into your pal Rush's stash? Can I quote George Tenet, the guy who received a Preidential Medal of Freedom for his lies and coverups, about Iraq's possession of WMD: "Slamdunk." Slam this, Seany.

3) That Sean Hannity lacks the integrity to actually talk about the very serious issue of torture, and this is probably his worst trait. To attempt to raise another person's credibility as an issue, when in reality the issue is not their credibility but the criminal acts in violation of both domestic and internaitonal laws by a third party is disingenuous, as well as a logical fallacy. Further, it is clear that Hannity's intent is, by extension, to DEFEND TORTURE!! As such, Hannity is a singularity of truth and integrity, where both go to die in the black hole that is his twisted morality.

4) Sean Hannity is an abject coward. I did not hear him mention once on the show today that he will proudly be waterboarded for charity, as he was challenged weeks ago by Charles Grodin and Keith Olbermann. To paraphrase Shakespeare: how many times have you tasted death so far, you yellow bellied slime?

5) J.C. Watts, to his credit, did not charge on the offense and readily agree with Hannity. He didn't defend Pelosi, per se, but he certainly equivocated, as I do believe that he understands that there is more at stake than just the Madame Speaker.

6) That Hannity, by pushing this angle, has no idea what he is doing. If Pelosi, a very powerful woman, is pushed to fight for her political life, she can do a great deal of lasting damage not only to the members of adminstrations passed, but to the Republican Party as whole. What is lost on him apparently, while stuck in his ivory tower of self righteousness, is that if the CIA told Pelosi, then the CIA must have also briefed a number of GOP lawmakers, like the then Speaker, Dennis Hastert. And if this goes far enough, this isn't going to be about Truth Commissions. This is going to be about Special Prosecutors.

So, Sean, by all means, keep stiring the pot. Keep going at the Speaker. I will trade you one lousy, overly ambitious, undertalented Congressman from California for the entirety of the Bush legacy. I will happily watch your Faux News show the day they frogmarch that "Great American" Dick Cheney into a supermax.

That would be a great day. A great day, indeed.

The Company They Keep

2009-05-17T15:44:00.000-04:00

In furtherance of my incessant attacks against the Bush Administration and their continued supporters over the issue of torture and authoritarianism, allow me to point to Seth Mydan's poignant article on page 14 of today's New York Times.

Entitled "Survivors Shed Light on Dark Days of Khmer Rouge," it tells the story of two survivors, Bou Meng and Chum Mey, now confronting Kaing Guek Eav, aka Duch [pronounced Doik], the former commander of Tuol Sleng prison, where some 14,000 Cambodians were imprisoned, worked, starved to death or brutally executed, at his trial for crimes against humanity.

Towards the end of this article, Mr. Mydan writes:

"Mr. Bou Meng dies not wander like his friend [Chum Mey] among the Tuol Sleng pictures, but he does keep one in his wallet: a snapshot-size reproduction of the prison portrait of his wife, Ma Yueun, who was arrested with him but did not survive.

'Sometimes when I sit at home I look at the picture and everything seems fresh,' he said. 'I think of the suffering she endured, and I wonder how long she stayed alive.'

Mr. Bou Meng has since remarried twice, but he remains shackled to his memories. 'I know I should forget her,' he said, 'but I can't.'

She visits him, he said, in visions that are something more than dreams, looking just as she did when he last saw her - still 28 years old, leaving Mr. Bou Meng to live on and grow old without her.

Sometimes she appears with the spirits of others who were killed, he said. They stand together, a crowd of ghosts in black, and she tells him, 'Only you, Bou Meng, can find justice for us.'"

Here is to Mr. Mydans, for his wonderful article, and to Mr. Bou Meng and Mr. Chum Mey, for their courage in confronting the monsters of their history.

For us, the lessons are that torture cannot ever be whitewashed; that it permeates the victim and torturer alike, and never, ever goes away; all the victims of torture and brutality cry out through the ages for us to bring them justice.

A small part of bringing them that justice is to never permit torture in our name. But in that, we have failed.

As it stands right now George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, as well as their underlings and their apologists, are standing alongside criminals the like of Kaing Guek Eav, who assuredly used the excuses of expediency, efficacy, and security during the commission of his legion crimes.

So let us judge them by the company they keep.

The Trap of Fallacy

2009-05-17T14:05:00.000-04:00

Let it be said here, and said loud: it is no defense to the illegal and immoral actions of the Bush White House in its pursuit of torture, that they briefed Nancy Pelosi.

That Nancy Pelosi, one of 535 legislators, might have been told of secret torture programs is a non sequitur when the issue is whether or not our President, Vice President and their underlings are war criminals for breaching both domestic and international law.

This is the classic logical fallacy of the straw man, or straw madame speaker. But the ISSUE is the acts of the administration, which actually committed the alleged war crimes of torture. Perhaps even used torture to create, out of whole cloth, the "intelligence" requisite to frighten the rest of Congress, and some of the world, into invading Iraq.

That Nancy Pelosi might have to pay a price for her knowledge is a different, and wholly separate, issue.

But for now, let's stay out of the fallacy trap, and not get distracted from the peopel who actually did the evil deeds.

Grand Old Party? No Longer

2009-05-17T11:36:00.000-04:00

There was a time when the Republican Party, before it took on the moniker GOP, was the liberal party. That was when it really was the party of Lincoln. Sigh. How times change.

And there was a time when conservative meant fiscal responsibility, and hewing closely to the words of the Constitution, limiting the power of government and respect for judicial precedence, economic growth, quiet yet confident foreign policy, but also the preservation of our natural and national treasures. Such was the party of Theodore Roosevelt. Hmmm....

In an nearly unholy quest for power, even openly speaking of a permanent majority, nay, actually naming political action committees after such desires [Trimpac, Armpac - thank you Tom Delay for your unintentional honesty], the GOP sold out every single one of its core principles: reigning in spending, limited government, respect for the Constitution. The cause forthis was the presidency of George W. Bush, and more than likely, the use of the curmudgeon Dick Cheney as a bludgeon in Congress. But also, there was a glee to finally hold all the levers of power, and a feeling that there was no time to waste.

And so the GOP traded all of its principle for the following: tax cuts for the rich, rolling back 40 years of Supreme Court precedence not through the legislative process but by appointing judges with predetermined goals, opposition to marriage for gays, and virtually unlimited preemptive war powers given not to the Congress but the President, including unlimited power for the President to spy on, imprison, and torture any person he felt like, including American citizens. See, among others: the Authorization for use of force, the PATRIOT Acts, Military Commissions Act, etc.

And in so doing, the GOP engaged in mendacity heretofore unknown in my life. They stole an election through judicial fiat [no, I will not forget]; they engaged in Executive secrecy of unprecedented proportions [secrecy is the room where freedom goes to die]; they lied repeated to Congress, the American people and our allies; engaged is money and power grabs the extent of which are still unknown, in the form of, among other things, no-bid contracts to corporations which the VP was a former CEO, and extraordinary rendition - unlawfully seizing persons and sending them off to other nations to be tortured; and they attempted to thwart the ability of the Senate minority to filibuster via Sen. Bill Frist's 'Nuclear Option'.

Six years of this criminal enterprise masked as a presidency, which hit its high water mark in November 2004, and its low the following August, when it was demonstrated by the hand of God [if you believe in such things] to be in over its head [Helluva job, Brownie], was enough for the American people. In 2006 the Dems stormed back in Congress, and we all know what happened last November.

Since then there has been some very public soul searching by the Republican Party. In fact, it doesn't look like much of a party, and is more like a luncheon of a dysfunctional family. The leadership has been, variously, the Chairman Michael Steele, the former Veep Cheney, who is all but an unindicted war criminal, and Rush Limbaugh. Wow. While each is popular with a particular constituency, none of these clowns, especially Cheney, could get elected to anything if they were running against a can of Campbell's Soup.

And today, with the shoe firmly on he other foot, on Meet the Press, Mr. Steele dropped some more pearls of wisdom. Or maybe it was swine droppings.

When pressed on torture, Chairman Steele stated his concern was "I want to get the information."

Wow. If this equivocation is not disturbing just coming from a fellow American, think about it in the context of the rest of the world watching the elected leader of one of the two American political parties JUSTIFY TORTURE FOR THE SAKE OF EXPEDIENCY.

New GOP Principle: the ends justify the means, no matter what.

Later, they switched gears, and the discussion moved to appointment of Supreme Court Justices. Now of the nine on the High Court, six were appointed by Republican presidents [not including two conservatives who have left, Rehnquist who passed away and O'Connor, who retired], and four [Scalia, Thomas, Roberts and Alito] are among the most conservative justices to have ever served. Therefore, even if President Obama appointed a clone of Karl Marx to the Court and the clone was approved, the essential makeup of the Court would not be substantially altered. Rather, it would be a status quo, with the moderate Kennedy holding the middle.

After DECADES of campaigns centered around appointing justices with the type of temperment to toss out Roe v. Wade and Casey v. Planned Parenthood, Mr. Steele now states he is concerned about President Obama appointing a justice with empathy. Now they want judicial restraint!? He then went on to make an argument he wanted a judge who was going to just look at the facts and apply the law, and not have think about how being black affected a given litigant's life.

Oh, no. Not empathy.

New GOP principle: empathy is for wussies, and is not a good quality for such a high and permanent position, and compassion has no place in their party. Somewhere, Thurgood Marshall is weeping.

I also found it interesting, and a little sad, that Mr. Steele went out and played the reverse race card, as if he is burnishing his own credentials by stating it is unimportant for race to be considered. The significance is that race was not part of the conversation at that time, and he inserted it all on his own, unprompted. Therefore, clearly this was a dog whistle for the party faithful, which is pretty much limited to West Virginia, Alabama, Georgia, Arkansas, and Mississippi. You do the math.

Finally, Mr. Steele spoke about the possibility of a filibuster-proof Democratic majority in the Senate. He went on a ramble to the effect of " When the Senate gets to 60 there will be very little can be done to prevent" the government from intruding into the everyday lives of families.

Wait a gosh darn second!!! NOW the GOP is all about the power of the minority? AFTER the Frist 'Nuclear Option'? And to go on and talk about the power of the government to intrude in the lives of people four years after ramming the Terry Schiavo bill though Congress is the height of doublespeak and doublethink.

New GOP principle: hypocrisy is no sin, and just because we said it was bad for the other guy to do it, it's okay for us to do so.

There are many reasons why I rail against the Republican Party. You have read many of them on this post. But right now one of the most important reasons is that a healthy democratic republic, as is our system, requires more than one party to function properly. We need to have an honorable opposition.

But now all we have is opposition, and a feckless one at that. The GOP is a chicken without a head, and is flailing all over the place. But the chicken won't do that dance forever, and eventually dies.

The GOP needs more than just conservative social issues and tax cuts, and the Dems appear to have found some religion on gun control. That's 25% of GOP issues!! And holding onto to torture as an issue, arguing it efficacy, is absurd and more than a little nauseating.

And more and more, I am saddened that there appear to be less and less thoughtful Powells in the GOP, and more and more Palins, that is, so-called "movement conservatives" sharing a brain.

GOP, we hardly knew ye.

...To Defend The Constitution...

2009-05-16T15:24:00.000-04:00

...against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

This is the oath of office that the President of the United States of America takes. Not to protect the citizens, or defend the "homeland" [as unwittingly insidious a word that ever existed], or keep us safe.

You wanna feel safer? Buy a 12 gauge, or subscribe to Slomin's.

And the Constitution, the overarching uniting force of the country [as opposed to such emotive items, like the flag or apple pie], extends its protections to everyone on American soil, citizen or no, whether that soil is in the lower forty-eight, a consulate in a far flung land, and even to "enemy combatants" in custody at Guantanamo Bay. Sorry, but that's the breaks. Hey, being an Enlightenment Document means you have to live up to the ideals of the Enlightenment.

Lousy Founding Fathers and their lousy ideals.

Oh, and THIS is what the phrase "Freedom isn't free" really means. It means you have to abide by the law, and respect the rights of the lowest of the low, even when it makes you wretch.

So, suffice it to say that I am distressed to have learned that President Obama has decided for the second time this week to reverse himself and go W. If you recall, earlier this week he decided to NOT release photos of abuse of "detainees" [as odious a euphemism as there is in our doublethink world], and now he has decided to go forward with military tribunals in trying certain suspects of terrorist acts, including the plotting of the attacks of September 11, 2001. Happily, he has decided to permit some basic, Constitutionally mandated protections, like choice of counsel, limiting hearsay evidence, and prohibiting the use of evidence obtained through that tried and failed method of torture.

Sorry, Mr. Obama, that's not good enough. I believe that our Federal Judiciary and the Justice Department are more than up to the task of trying these suspected criminals, even if they are terrible people.

And if the Bush Administration fornicated with the proverbial canine by torturing confessions, or by just torturing, and thereby violating the Eighth Amendment's mandate that "Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines be imposed, NOR CRUEL AND UNUSUAL PUNISHMENT INFLICTED," making prosecution difficult or impossible, then so be it.

There must be some comeuppance for our failure to abide by our own law, nay, our organizing principles. This is not a matter of hating America first, as I am sure the Faux News crowd would clamor, but a matter of loving the ideals of my country more than my last President.

This is what "We are a country of laws and not men" means. We are not subject to the whims of our leadership, and rather, are commonly bounded by the law, and the ultimate law is enshrined in the Constitution. And by extension of that logic the Constitution IS the country, not the dirt under your feet. Without it we may as well be barbarians.

And the Constitution demands of us something better than political convenience, or reacting out of fear. It demands we live up to it, so that we might be that City on a Hill, that last best hope for the world.

Otherwise, we are just another country out of hundreds now, and thousands in history. And our self aggrandizing rhetoric is nothing. Nothing but words. And if so, then so is that sacred piece of paper.

Know Them By The Words That Come Out of Their Mouths

2009-05-14T16:30:00.000-04:00

Due to my recent schedule, I had to drive for an extended time again this morning. Which meant my senses were assaulted for the third morning in a row by the political ad of Mayor Steve Lonergan, attacking his fellow Republican candidate for New Jersey governor, who I believe is Chris Christie.

This ad makes much hay out of Mr. Christie's statement to "Know people by their words" and then goes on to attack him for not being sufficiently aggressive in cutting taxes, for recognizing that Roe v. Wade is the law of the land, and concluding he is not a conservative.

So, I will judge Mr. Lonergan's campaign by his words, which inexorably leads me to the conclusion that conservatism has been reduced to tax cuts and opposition to womens' reproductive rights, no matter what.

That's it? Because those are your words.

Sure, who doesn't want to pay less taxes? But what about other considerations, like balancing budgets and fiscal strength and responsibility? What about schools, roads, and the common good, in general? Not conservative enough?

And then there is the tired old saw of abortion. Really, can conservatives just get out of the bedroom, and out of the womb. What? Two Supreme Court decisions on abortion aren't enough? What, you want some more do-overs?

Abortion is the the right what gun control is the left: an albatross.

How about working to make abortion less necessary? Assisting in making adoptions easier? In counseling more young single mother's to be, and supporting health care for them and their children in utero? Because you are not winning the argument now.

Seriously, in brief, this continued cynical attempt to thwart the lawful process by appointing judges of certain predispositions on the Supreme Court, only so they can toss nearly 40 years of precedence out the window is truly myopic. And they complain about judicial activism!

Anyway, moving on, my next target is once again, the man who would love to be Darth Vader, Dick Cheney [sorry, Darth]. This guy just cannot shut his trap. He spent eight years hiding from the press in a secure, undisclosed location, refusing to tell his bosses, [us], who he spends his time with, and coming up with nefarious plans to poke holes in the Constitution. The man blocked his house on Google Earth!! Now he cannot find a microphone he doesn't vomit his stupidity into.

Apparently, according to Politico's Ben Smith, Mr. I Had Other Priorities So I Got Five Deferments While Nearly Sixty-Thousand Fellow American Boys Died For The War I Supported has poured forth this gem from the gullet of Hell that is his mouth:

""Everybody's in a giant conspiracy to achieve a different objective than the one we want to achieve," Cheney said. The negotiations are "bound to fail unless we are perceived as very credible" in threatening military action against Iran, he said."

So, Dick has finally been revealed to be the paranoid-in-need-of-serious-meds that he truly is, and further, his war mongery knows no bounds. Back in 1971 Black Sabbath wrote a poignant song, and Dick Cheney fits the bill. As sung in War Pigs:

"Politicians hide themselves away. They only started the war. Why should they go out to fight? They lead their own to the boar."

Mr. Cheney failed to see the wrongheadedness in the misadventure in Southeast Asia; he failed to anticipate anything but a smooth invasion and occupation in Iraq [as if history would teach anything but]; and he now calls for intimidating Iran into giving up their nuclear ambitions. This guy should quit while he is still in double digits in poll ratings.

Let's see: the Bush administration's hard line on Iran and North Korea bore so much fruit that we could almost have enough to paint a still life. In that time the Hermit Kingdom, which lacks enough oil to keep the lights on in Pyongyang over night, went from zero nuclear weapons to about six, and actually exploded one small one [though it might have been a dud]. They also were so terrified of Dick Cheney they launched several long range missiles, happily all of which were dreadful failures. And Iran went from being the pariah nation in its region to veritable non-nuclear regional superpower.

Who would have thunk taking out the biggest counterweight to Iran in a vain war of choice would have upset the regional balance of power? That's almost more difficult to divine than a hurricane over-topping the levies. Except you can't control hurricanes, which is unlike whether or not you choose to invade a country that never attacked you.

With geopolitical skills like this Dick Cheney's talents were wasted as Vice President. He should have gone out for something more challenging, like firearms safety instructor. Err, whoops. Maybe dog catcher.

Somebody please indict this war criminal just so he will have an attorney tell him to shut up and not incriminate himself any further!!

Finally, I would like to point out that if Mr. Cheney would actually have liked to intimidate the Iranians militarilly, it would have been nice for him to have not handed the incoming administration two land wars in Asia. You know what they say about land wars in Asia.

As today is thursday, I am going for the trifecta, and the third victim of the Witchhunt is the newspaper I love and hate equally, the New York Times.

Today, in the Op-Ed section there was an editorial about an amendment to a credit card bill which permits visitors to national parks to opening carry firearms.

Initially, my response to this is "So what?" Firstly, it's not as if the bill permits the open carrying of firearms in Times Square [not that I would mind so much]. It's in a National Park. And not that it is a prime concern, but at times there are animals that might need a little more than the usual incentive to stay away. And of course, there is the most dangerous animal one might encounter in a national park: Man.

And then the writer begins to get truly shrill, failing to make a cogent argument, and rather, descended into the logical fallacy of the red herring:

"And why should the national parks, which are supposed to be peaceful preserves, be filled with loaded AK-47's and other war weapons?"

Apparently, the writer of this incredibly stupid Op-Ed piece has no idea what they are talking about, and decided to mask this by going straight for the hyperbole. What if a law abding citizen just wanted to carry his trusty old shotgun? Would that be okay with you, Mr. or Ms. Shrill?

And when you thought it couldn't get worse, it does. Continuing:

"The gun lobby already has poisoned the proposal to let the District of Columbia have a voting representative in the House. The Senate's gun lackeys tacked on a vindictive amendment to strip the district of basic gun control powers, inviting assault and sniper rifles designed for military battlefields into homes and businesses."

Hmm, let's break this one down a little bit. The first clause of the second sentence uses "vindictive", as if the gun lobby, or anyone else, had a score to settle with D.C. What, I don't know. Maybe someone just needed a cool sounding word to sex up the sentence.

Then the writer goes into "inviting assault and sniper rifles designed for militarybattlefields into homes and businesses." First off, why lump assault and sniper weapons together? These are totally different types of weapons, for different uses. Further, most sniper rifles are modified bolt action sporting rifles. This truly evinces the total ignorance of the author, who is more interested in fancy words than reality. And the use of such sporting weapons in crimes is so minimal as to approach nil.

Next, I continue to take umbrage at the term "assault rifle." I dare anyone, especially those in favor of their banishment, to come up with a workable definition of an assault rifle. Truly, an assault rifle is more of a chimera than anything. And the fact tht the ignorant bandy around the phrase is what chills the lawful gun owners in America.

Moving on, the phrase "designed for military battlefields" is clumsy, as well as extraneous. Are there any other types of battlefields? And what does their design have to do with the issue at hand, which is lawful ownership? Doesn't every single police and sherrif's department in the country have such weapons? And for what reason? Because those are what modern firearms are comprised of. I fail to find any actual argument underneath these explosive words.

However, such weapons like the aforementioned AK-47, as well as other similar semi-automatic rifles, are ideal for home and business defense. Which brings me to the third clause: "into homes and businesses."

It would seem that the writer at the Times has abandoned any pretext, such as 'put these weapons on the street' or 'in the hands of criminals' and instead have gone after lawful ownership of weapons for home and business protection. As if such ownership is not an individual right guaranteed under the Second Amendment to the Consitutition, and pursuant to the recent Heller decision. As if such ownership is a bad thing.

And this piece castigates the 27 Democratic Senators that voted for it. Ummmm, helloooo New York Times!! If you would take a second and come down from your ivory tower it would be obvious that the Democrats control Congress largely because of the election of centrists who favor gun rights, not bans.

Honestly, this is why people hate the New York Times.

Know them by their words, indeed.

Poor Widdle Wimbaugh

2009-05-13T19:42:00.000-04:00

Awwwwwwwwww.................................the poor little rich kid, who got, er, uh, stayed fat while saying just about anything that came to his hate filled little mind got a taste of comeuppance this weekend, and needed his entire gang, er, uh, GOP, to run to his rescue.

Yeah, Rush, maybe saying you want the country to fail is just like saying you hate America first. Maybe you funded the 9/11 attack? I dunno, you never denied it.

Maybe you need to take a break and have a week of reruns. It's not like anyone would notice. You've been playing hate on a loop for what, 15 years now? Amazing how well spastic vitriol sells both here and in Muslim countries.

So when you were calling everyone not in thrall to the former chump in charge a traitor in the run-up the the Iraq Debacle [now 6+ years post Mission Accomplished] it was okay, but you being called out by a black woman at the White House Correspondents Dinner is not?

Is this like the Colin Powell endorsement "all about race" ? Because I would have a hard time thinking about you like that. Actually, the reverse in true.

So here's to your kidneys failing, Rush, you old Junkie. Hey, by the way, that's a good book by someone who shares your greatest love: narcotics. Hey, didn't you once say something to the effect that all drug addicts should be deported? Why are you still here?

Your hypocrisy knows few, if any bounds. You're like a fat kid on little blues with Tourettes, except that is offensive to people with Tourettes. More like the fat kid on little blues that needs someone to say: stop eating, fatso, and stop taking illegal drugs you had your maid smuggle for you, you lying sack of feces, and stop acting like you know anything about anything, aside from where to get more little blues.

Haha, just kidding, Rush. Wait, no I'm not.

By the way, Rush, are you willing to be waterboarded for charity? Your buddy, Hannity flaked, and I suspect it's because he is a wussy. Ya know, talks tough, but really isn't. I'll set it up: $1,000 per second, and all the money will go the the families of dead U.S. servicemen. I'll be sitting by the phone, you buffoon.

But not holding my breath.

Mr. President, Sunshine is the Best Disinfectant

2009-05-13T18:40:00.000-04:00

With all due respect, Mr. President, you are wrong to order government lawyers to object to the Court Ordered release of photos depicting the abuse of "detainees" while in American custody.

It is the responsibility of a democracy such as ours to see what has been wrought in our name, for in the end, we are the end of the line for the proverbial buck.

If horrible things were done in our name, than we have to face the music. Keeping it secret will do nothing to make our nation and our soldiers abroad more or less safe. Those people that hate us already hate us, and not for the acts portrayed in these photos. Last time I checked, we were attacked on September 11, 2001, for reasons far more esoteric than what is contained in these photos.

Rather, it is in our best interests, in the spirit of turning over a new leaf as represented by your presidency, to show that the attitudes of secrecy and exceptionalism surrounding our actions are no more, and the crimes of the Bush White House are not going to be whitewashed, but brought to light. We must show the world the depth of the crimes to which we were all party before we can begin to heal our national soul.

Sweeping our crimes under the rug will not suffice. We must face the music, as bitter as it might be.

So draw back the curtain of secrecy, and let the sun shine in. To do any less only perpetuates the crimes already committed and depicted in the photos, like a murderer coming to the grave of his victim to defile the body.

And if these photos necessarilly lead to a reckoning to those in charge at the time of the depicted acts, so be it. We permitted George W. Bush to sow the wind. It is our national duty to reap his whirlwind. Let that be George the Lesser's legacy.