Hello from Plundered Democracy

Anima

Pentagon admits to surveillance of gay groups, releases documents

This is so incredible and awful, I gotta quote it in its entirety. Thanks for the pointer, Aspidistra Flying!

Anima

Link: PageOneQ | Pentagon admits to surveillance of gay groups, releases documents.

Pentagon admits to surveillance of gay groups, releases documents

by PageOneQ
 

The Servicemembers Legal Defense Network has released documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act from the Department of Defense, which confirm the military's surveillance of organizations working to repeal the Military's Don't Ask, Don't Tell Policy, PageOneQ has learned.

The government's monitoring of anti-war protestors, including protests against the Military's Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy, was first reported by Ron Brynaert of Raw Story.com in December.

"The very idea that the federal government believes freedom of speech is a threat to national security is unconscionable," Steve Ralls, Servicemembers Legal Defense Network’s Director of Communications told PageOneQ today. “The Pentagon has acknowledged that collection of the information was perhaps inappropriate,” Mr. Ralls said as he cited an earlier report by United Press International on the Pentagon’s admission.

Mr. Ralls also explained that Servicemembers Legal Defense Network fully expects the federal government to “discontinue surveillance because there was no legitimate reason to begin it in the first place."

The Department of Defense, according to the 16 pages of documents it released, monitored protests against the DADT policy at college campuses in New York City, Berkeley, and Santa Cruz. A counterintelligence agent reported on the protests against Military recruitment on campuses had "a strong potential for confrontation at this protest..." Discounting a theory that the protest was taking place in a separate location from Military recruiting, the agent wrote "tactics have included using mass text paging to inform others of the location of the recruiters."

The Department of Defense has indicated that it's search for documents relating to surveillance of groups opposed to Don't Ask, Don't tell continues.

The documents are available here.

The SLDN Press release is below.

WASHINGTON, DC – The Department of Defense (DoD) has released documentation confirming government surveillance of groups opposed to the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” law banning openly lesbian, gay and bisexual service members. The government’s TALON reports were released in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by Servicemembers Legal Defense

Network (SLDN) in January. The release of the documents follows media reports indicating government surveillance of civilian groups at several universities across the country. The Department of Defense acknowledged that it had ‘inappropriately’ collected information on protestors in a letter to the Senate Armed Services Committee, according to a February report by United Press International.

“The Department of Defense has now confirmed the existence of a surveillance program monitoring LGBT groups,” said C. Dixon Osburn, executive director of SLDN. “Pentagon leaders have also acknowledged inappropriately collecting some of the information in the TALON database. That information should be destroyed and no similar surveillance should be authorized in the future. Free expression is not a threat to our national security.”

Although the recently released TALON reports may not be a complete list of groups monitored, it does confirm domestic surveillance of protests at New York University, the University of California at Berkeley, and the University of California at Santa Cruz. DoD has indicated that it continues to search for other documents related to SLDN’s FOIA request.

In February, SLDN filed a lawsuit as part of its efforts to obtain information related to the government’s domestic spy program. The TALON documents, complete information on the lawsuit and the domestic surveillance program are available online at www.Servicemembers Legal Defense Network.org.

 

Reflecting on Fukuyama's neocon defection

This book review by Paul Berman, raises some issues that I'm wanting to stew over some more. I'm still not sure what I think yet, but this feels like the most rational and pointed look at the ironies and contradictions that make the neoconservative philosophy so peculiar, and notable in its very peculiarities.

I just wanted to pull out the bits here that help me remember certain ideas, so I can think about them some more.

Link: 'America at the Crossroads,' by Francis Fukuyama - The New York Times Book Review - New York Times.

March 26, 2006

'America at the Crossroads,' by Francis Fukuyama

Neo No More

Review by PAUL BERMAN

In February 2004, Francis Fukuyama attended a neoconservative think-tank dinner in Washington and listened aghast as the featured speaker, the columnist Charles Krauthammer, attributed "a virtually unqualified success" to America's efforts in Iraq, and the audience enthusiastically applauded. Fukuyama was aghast partly for the obvious reason, but partly for another reason, too, which, as he explains in the opening pages of his new book, "America at the Crossroads," was entirely personal. In years gone by, Fukuyama would have felt cozily at home among those applauding neoconservatives. He and Krauthammer used to share many a political instinct. It was Krauthammer who wrote the ecstatic topmost blurb ("bold, lucid, scandalously brilliant") for the back jacket of Fukuyama's masterpiece from 1992, "The End of History and the Last Man."

But that was then.

Today Fukuyama has decided to resign from the neoconservative movement — though for reasons that, as he expounds them, may seem a tad ambiguous. In his estimation, neoconservative principles in their pristine version remain valid even now. But his ex-fellow-thinkers have lately given those old ideas a regrettable twist, and dreadful errors have followed. Under these circumstances, Fukuyama figures he has no alternative but to go away and publish his complaint.

[...]

His resignation seems to me, in any case, a fairly notable event, as these things go, and that is because, among the neoconservative intellectuals, Fukuyama has surely been the most imaginative, the most playful in his thinking and the most ambitious. Then again, something about his departure may express a larger mood among the political intellectuals just now, not only on the right.

[...]

Fukuyama offers a thumbnail sketch of neoconservatism and its origins, back to the anti-Communist left at City College in the 1930's and 40's and to the conservative philosophers (Leo Strauss, Allan Bloom, Albert Wohlstetter) at the University of Chicago in later years. From these disparate origins, the neoconservatives eventually generated "a set of coherent principles," which, taken together, ended up defining their impulse in foreign affairs during the last quarter-century. They upheld a belief that democratic states are by nature friendly and unthreatening, and therefore America ought to go around the world promoting democracy and human rights wherever possible. They believed that American power can serve moral purposes. They doubted the usefulness of international law and institutions. And they were skeptical about what is called "social engineering" — about big government and its ability to generate positive social changes.

Such is Fukuyama's summary. It seems to me too kind. For how did the neoconservatives propose to reconcile their ambitious desire to combat despotism around the world with their cautious aversion to social engineering? Fukuyama notes that during the 1990's the neoconservatives veered in militarist directions, which strikes him as a mistake. A less sympathetic observer might recall that neoconservative foreign policy thinking has all along indulged a romance of the ruthless — an expectation that small numbers of people might be able to play a decisive role in world events, if only their ferocity could be unleashed. It was a romance of the ruthless that led some of the early generation of neoconservatives in the 1970's to champion the grisliest of anti-Communist guerrillas in Angola; and, during the next decade, led the neoconservatives to champion some not very attractive anti-Communist guerrillas in Central America, too; and led the Reagan administration's neoconservatives into the swamps of the Iran-contra scandal in order to go on championing their guerrillas. Doesn't this same impulse shed a light on the baffling question of how the Bush administration of our own time could have managed to yoke together a stirring democratic oratory with a series of grotesque scandals involving American torture — this very weird and self-defeating combination of idealism and brass knuckles? But Fukuyama must not agree.

The criticisms he does propose are pretty scathing. In 2002, Fukuyama came to the conclusion that invading Iraq was going to be a gamble with unacceptably long odds. Then he watched with dismay as the administration adopted one strange policy after another that was bound to make the odds still longer. The White House decided to ignore any useful lessons the Clinton administration might have learned in Bosnia and Kosovo, on the grounds that whatever Bill Clinton did — for example, conduct a successful intervention — George W. Bush wanted to do the opposite. There was the diplomatic folly of announcing an intention to dominate the globe, and so forth — all of which leads Fukuyama, scratching his head, to propose a psychological explanation.

The neoconservatives, he suggests, are people who, having witnessed the collapse of Communism long ago, ought to look back on those gigantic events as a one-in-a-zillion lucky break, like winning the lottery. Instead, the neoconservatives, victims of their own success, came to believe that Communism's implosion reflected the deepest laws of history, which were operating in their own and America's favor — a formula for hubris. This is a shrewd observation, and might seem peculiar only because Fukuyama's own "End of History" articulated the world's most eloquent argument for detecting within the collapse of Communism the deepest laws of history. He insists in his new book that "The End of History" ought never to have led anyone to adopt such a view, but this makes me think only that Fukuyama is an utterly unreliable interpreter of his own writings.

[...]

He proposes a post-Bush foreign policy, which he styles "realistic Wilsonianism" — his new motto in place of neoconservatism. He worries that because of Bush's blunders, Americans on the right and the left are going to retreat into a Kissinger-style reluctance to promote democratic values in other parts of the world. Fukuyama does want to promote democratic values — "what is in the end a revolutionary American foreign policy agenda" — though he would like to be cautious about it, and even multilateral about it. The United Nations seems to him largely unsalvageable, given the role of nondemocratic countries there. But he thinks that a variety of other institutions, consisting strictly of democracies, might be able to establish and sometimes even enforce a new and superior version of international legitimacy. He wants to encourage economic development in poor countries, too — if only a method can be found that avoids the dreadful phrase "social engineering."

[this is perhaps the most frightening observation I've seen, but I'm happy to see SOMEONE from the neocon camp at least acknowledging that the majority of the "non-nation-building" nation-building rhetoric out of the Bush administration appears to be lifted directly from the Woodrow Wilson playbook, with any notion of a "League of Nations" surgically removed and replaced with U.S. despotic dominance, the U.S. as the single superpower to assume sovereignty over all as a self-appointed United Nations of One.

What I find so frightening in Fukayama's view here, and in the views of others who hold these ideas as well, distinctly neocon ideas since they bear little resemblance to the ideas usually attributed to traditional conservatism, is that the "promotion of democracy" as some kind of saving grace is purely rhetorical and bears no resemblance to what is actually happening.

I believe the word "democracy" is being corrupted, used as a code word for "governments that are easy to manipulate using massive influxes of capital to interfere, influence, and buy elections for our hand-picked and corruptible puppets." In other words, the opposite of true democracy (although one could argue it has become the way "democracy" is currently being practiced in the U.S.)

Sure, the U.S. could put a chosen dictator or despot in place, as colonial powers have traditionally done, or perhaps use the methods of control previously employed by the Soviet empire, OR it could simply use capital and corruption to turn the word "democracy" into a pale shadow of it's true meaning, and simply use it as rhetorical cover for things we might call "democracy" that are really unregulated monopolies by non-local corporations seeking to find the best way to siphon as much wealth out of a nation as possible, as quickly as possible.]

[...]

I worry that Fukuyama's preferred language may shrink our predicament into something smaller than it ever was. He pictures the present struggle as a "counterinsurgency" campaign — a struggle in which, before the Iraq war, "no more than a few thousand people around the world" threatened the United States. I suppose he has in mind an elite among the 10,000 to 20,000 people who are said to have trained at bin Laden's Afghan camps, plus other people who may never have gotten out of the immigrant districts of Western Europe. But the slaughters contemplated by this elite have always outrivaled anything contemplated by more conventional insurgencies — as Fukuyama does recognize in some passages. And there is the pesky problem that, as we have learned, the elite few thousand appear to have the ability endlessly to renew themselves. HERE is where a rhetoric pointing to something larger than a typical counterinsurgency campaign may have a virtue, after all. A more grandiose rhetoric draws our attention, at least, to the danger of gigantic massacres. And a more grandiose rhetoric might lead us to think about ideological questions. Why are so many people eager to join the jihadi elite? They are eager for ideological reasons, exactly as in the case of fascists and other totalitarians of the past. These people will be defeated only when their ideologies begin to seem exhausted, which means that any struggle against them has to be, above all, a battle of ideas — a campaign to persuade entire mass movements around the world to abandon their present doctrines in favor of more liberal ones.

[that would entail actually being true advocates for liberal democratic ideas, rather than using them as a smokescreen for more fascist strong-arm tactics and overt manipulation.]

[...]

In "America at the Crossroads," Fukuyama describes the Hegelianism of "The End of History" as a version of "modernization" theory, bringing his optimistic vision of progress into the world of modern social science. But the problem with modernization theory was always a tendency to concentrate most of its attention on the steadily progressing phases of history, as determined by the predictable workings of sociology or economics or psychology — and to relegate the free play of unpredictable ideas and ideologies to the margins of world events.

And yet, what dominated the 20th century, what drowned the century in oceans of blood, was precisely the free play of ideas and ideologies, which could never be relegated entirely to the workings of sociology, economics, psychology or any of the other categories of social science.  [...]  Fukuyama is always worth reading, and his new book contains ideas that I hope the non-neoconservatives of America will adopt. But neither his old arguments nor his new ones offer much insight into this, the most important problem of all — the problem of murderous ideologies and how to combat them.

Here's my deal: somewhere along the way I stopped worrying so much about the problem of murderous ideologies and how to combat them and instead started worrying more about those who pretend to ideologies, some potentially murderous, as crass cover for intentions that are far more devious.

Say what you like about Osama bin Laden, but the guy is apparently incorruptible and a true believer in his cause, however odious many of its basic principles may be to me.

So bin Laden has a murderous ideology, a cultural construct based in an interpretation of a venerable ancient religion. This is the lens through which he sees the world, and however I may not like it, it is reliable and consistent.

Many venerable ancient religions can be turned into murderous ideologies, perhaps ANY venerable and ancient religion, what with Pluto in Sagittarius. (I just had to throw that in... hey, you know Pluto will be moving out of Sag soon. Something to look forward to. When Pluto was in Scorpio, sex=death, and when Pluto moved into Sag, ideological purity=death. What do you suppose will happen when Pluto hits Capricorn, coming on the heels of these wars for ideology? Ambition=death. The will to power=death. So many people try to psych Pluto out, but Pluto has its own way of doing things, you know?)

But back to more rational thinking... It seems to me that it is easier to fight an ideologue than to fight a Machiavellian sophist. I dunno, maybe it's just me. One enemy seems a lot easier to understand and pin down than the other.

And once Pluto moves into Capricorn, we will just be aswim in Machiavellian sophists, as if we aren't gearing up for their ascendancy already.

So Berman may be more worried about how to characterize and combat an enemy that has an ideological beef with us, a clash of world views, and a desire to make one world view dominant over the other. So long as this fight is characterized by "my god is better than your god" thinking, a distinctly patriarchal view of religion that requires dominance just as surely as a dog pack requires an alpha, wars can only result. These are the wars of the "true believers," patriarchal true believers who make the fight an extension of rival high school football games with considerably more dick-waving, er, waving of big sticks. Even if the warfare is ultimately asymmetrical, broadswords vs. daggers or what have you.

Many cultures have allowed multiple religions, often matriarchal religions, to peacefully co-exist without a need for one to dominate or wipe out the others, without the culture of literalism, the book and the law, that demands the ascendancy one metaphysical interpretation of spirituality and one interpretation only.

In other words, this isn't high noon. The two patriarchal religions that are squaring off seem to think so, however, and they're saying, "This here globe isn't big enough for the two of us."

Both of them are of a piece, claiming allegiance to the same war-like Jehovah alpha god, nearly identical ascendant male deities, only with somewhat different commands and opposing claims of who exactly are the "chosen people."

I know one side is supposed to have white hats and the other side is supposed to have black hats, but they just look alike to me, with differences of degree in their oppression of women, the shrillness in which they impose their belief systems, and the manner in which they execute their will to power, to have power over others, and which commodities of power they prefer to use. Power and dominance are the coins in both of their realms. Ideology is merely the fuel that feeds it.

And me, I'm anticipating Pluto in Capricorn. I figure, ultimately, once Pluto moves, true believers will be corrupted by that power, by ambition. I'm not picking on Capricorn. Some of my best friends have their SUNS in Capricorn. But this is PLUTO in Capricorn, and power corrupts.

I think a day will come when we will wistfully long for true believers, as we face unending death, suffering, and wars over far less, over this person or that group's mere ambition and crass willingness to reach and grasp with Machiavellian slipperiness.

Anima

Alito Watch: this doesn't look good

Question is, will these views about the legality of the constitution lead to a credible challenge to Samuel Alito's candidacy for the Supreme Court?

Anima

Link: CNN.com - Document: Alito denied that Constitution protected abortion rights - Nov 14, 2005.

Document: Alito denied that Constitution protected abortion rights

Supreme Court nominee expressed views in 1985 job application

Monday, November 14, 2005; Posted: 2:07 p.m. EST (19:07 GMT)

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito wrote back in 1985 that he was proud of his Reagan-era work helping the government argue that "the Constitution does not protect a right to an abortion," documents showed Monday.

Alito, who was applying in 1985 to become deputy assistant attorney general in the Reagan administration, said in a document that he was proud of his work in the solicitor general's office from 1982-1985, where he helped "to advance legal positions in which I personally believe very strongly."

"I am particularly proud of my contributions in recent cases in which the government argued that racial and ethnic quotas should not be allowed and that the Constitution does not protect a right to an abortion," he said.

[...]

Here's what the opposition is planning:

Link: CNN.com - Liberal groups to step up pressure on Alito nomination - Nov 10, 2005.

So are any of the folks at the protest getting symptoms?

I don't know what to think of this story at all. It is just too puzzling all around. There was an anti-war rally, but I believe First Lady Laura Bush was involved with that Book Festival, wasn't she?

Anima

Link: Biohazard Sensors Triggered.

Biohazard Sensors Triggered

Mall Germ Levels  Likely Not a Threat

By Martin Weil  and Susan Levine
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, October 1, 2005; B01

Biohazard sensors showed the presence of small amounts of potentially dangerous tularemia bacteria in the Mall area last weekend as huge crowds assembled there, but health officials said they believed the levels were too low to be a threat.

Health authorities in the Washington area were notified yesterday that the bacteria were found in and near the area between the U.S. Capitol and the Lincoln Memorial, where crowds gathered Saturday for an antiwar rally and a book festival.

The notification, which came from federal health officials, said that after the initial detection, subsequent tests "supported the presence of low levels" of the bacteria. However, officials also said they did not believe the findings posed a health problem.

[...]

Health officials said the usual incubation period for tularemia is less than a week.

Roebuck said people who were on the Mall but who do not have symptoms need not be concerned.

Symptoms include fever, chills, headache, muscle ache, joint pain, dry cough and conjunctivitis.

Officials said the quantities detected were too small to have been an attack.

In nature, the bacteria are found in rodents and small animals, and "the working hypothesis" is that something in the environment got stirred up, D.C. Public Health Director Gregg A. Pane said.

But he said it was puzzling that the finding was from a day when the Mall was packed with people.

"Why that day? That's what is not explained," Pane said. "It was just this 24-hour period and none since."

At least one official suggested that so many people on the Mall might have triggered the alert, since dry conditions would have made it easier to raise dust.

Tularemia is not spread from person to person. It can be contracted by direct contact with the bacteria that cause it -- by swallowing them or, if they have been suspended in air, through inhalation.

The germ that causes tularemia is considered a biohazard because it is highly infectious and was tested in the 1960s by the United States as a biological weapon. The disease is treatable with antibiotics but, if left untreated, can be fatal.

[...]

He said the CDC expected to notify hospitals nationwide as a precaution because so many people came from out of town to the Mall last weekend.

Similarly, he said, he expected area health officials to watch for symptoms into next week.

Authorities recommend that people who visited the Mall between 10 a.m. Sept. 24 and 10 a.m. Sept. 25 should see a physician if they experience symptoms.

President's nephew arrested on Sixth Street: no comment necessary

Link: President's nephew arrested on Sixth Street.

AUSTIN

President's nephew arrested on Sixth Street

John Ellis Bush charged with public intoxication, resisting arrest.

(enlarge photo)

John Ellis Bush

By Tony Plohetski, Steven Kreytak

AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF

Saturday, September 17, 2005
The youngest son of Florida Gov. Jeb Bush — and the nephew of President Bush — was arrested in downtown Austin early Friday on charges of public intoxication and resisting arrest, officials said.                  
John Ellis Bush, 21, was taken into custody around 2:30 a.m. near the intersection of Trinity and Sixth streets in the downtown entertainment district. Bail was set at $2,500, but he was released around 10:30 a.m. Friday on his own recognizance — meaning he must pay $2,500 if he doesn't appear for court.

An affidavit on the public intoxication charge was not immediately available; according to an affidavit for the resisting arrest charge, Bush continually pushed against an officer for the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission as the officer attempted to handcuff him.

"Subject further resisted by pushing back with his body as he was restrained at the (Austin Police Department) transport van," the document said.

Bush could not be reached for comment.

[...]

Public intoxication is a Class C misdemeanor punishable by a fine of up to $500. Resisting arrest is a Class A misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in jail.

Scouted by Anima

 

This site showed up on one of our Google ads under the heading "Private Prisons"

Link: Omni View: Innovative Incarceration.

When I clicked on the link, it mostly was talking about Native American reservation corrections sites... but I found the entire thing REALLY disturbing.

First of all, what kind of outfit tries to sell itself as a "Private Prison"?! What is a Private Prison?

If there are "private prisons" in the U.S. (or elsewhere) it would seem to me that they would have to be EXTRA-LEGAL facilities for incarceration of human beings, because as far as I know, only governments are given the power to confine and enslave people against their will, based on their legal systems.

SO, if an entire system of "private prisons" exists (and I'm thinking of the "prison franchises" in Neal Stephenson's wonderful sci-fi cyberpunk book Snow Crash, the "Hoosegow" and "The Clink") they'd either come from this freakish movement to "privatize" and subcontract government functions (yeah, like to Haliburton)...

OR the Google ad is pandering directly to an invisible subculture of facilities confining humans against their will, say for sweatshop labor, sex slaves, etc, in other words, a winked-at subculture reinstituting slavery.

Now that last bit is just pure speculation on my part, spinning out from that bizarro Google Ad Words phrase "Private Prisons," I suppose appealing to the eccentric millionare owning an island (if ads are out to reach these people they must be a dime a dozen) needing to enslave an entire facility of human beings for forced island labor.

See, I made that whole thing up too, OK?

I don't think there are hundreds of millionares in the market for private prisons. I don't know that a million would be enough to pull it off these days, unless you buy the island from some dictator in a currency-deflated devasted, poverty-stricken economy usually associated with the so-called "Third World," but now shown to be alive and well and propagating in the U.S. (see also Katrina and New Orleans).

So if we rule out elitist oligarchies hunkering down with a kidnapped slave class on islands and in isolated compounds, ready to open the plantation for business with the apocalypse at the end of the world's oil supply (within 30 years to one generation, sources say), what kind of market does that leave for "private prisons"?

Enough of a market to advertise on Google, I guess. Chinese factories? I dunno. The link above is definitely a site I will watch, to see if it is linked to such evils.

Anima

My favorite sound bite yesterday

Link: nancy1.mov (video/quicktime Object).

"At a news conference, Pelosi, D-Calif., said Bush's choice for head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency had ''absolutely no credentials.''

She related that she had urged Bush at the White House on Tuesday to fire Michael Brown...

''He said 'Why would I do that?''' Pelosi said.

'''I said because of all that went wrong, of all that didn't go right last week.' And he said 'What didn't go right?'''

''Oblivious, in denial, dangerous,'' she added."

Senate Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi discovers how clueless the president is, and it boggles her mind. Which is what makes this video clip so precious.

Yo Nancy! Most of us have that reaction to very nearly everything he has to say, like living in a world of one long non sequitur.

Or like how Keith Olbermann introduced his timeline of who knew what when regarding the Hurricane Katrina response, some of us feel like the only way people could entertain such diametrically opposite perceptions of the same events is if we are actually on different planets.

My problem is, one of those planets seems to be so unaware of how deeply its unconsciously racist assumptions go, it can't even dredge up normal-sounding or credible PR spin to rationalize the depths of inhumanity it is willing to stoop to.

The secret of lying with PR, as far as I can tell, is for the PR person to truly understand the perceptions of those she or he wants to persuade or plant an idea virus with, to achieve success. Karl Rove is good at planting idea viruses in the heads of bigots, homophobes, and it turns out, racists who don't know they are racists because they just think all black people are scary and want to hurt them, and who don't care if the black people are thirsty or hungry or drowning or dying in staggering numbers. His absurd words and assumptions sound like bizarro-world non-sequiturs to those of us who don't buy into that peculiar world view, and who find such a world view flatly immoral and about as unChristian as you can get.

We don't have to go very far back to remember when those attitudes were considered unthinkingly obvious to some powerful white people: just take a look at that  lynching photo exhibit that has made the rounds of so many galleries. Or perhaps the history of the South and also in the North, when Blacks weren't considered full human beings.

If these people ACTUALLY BELIEVED they were full human beings, their PR people would not have slipped so easily into the glib PR spin that is now being sneezed about by right-wing freepers chanting the planted phrase "blame game," just like earlier this year they chanted "up or down vote up or down vote" like trained parrots.

Do you think they are actually PROUD to be trained parrots?

Anima

ps here's a transcript of that bit from Keith Olbermann:

Olbermann's intro:

"Whether you are a Republican or Democrat, the thought may have already crossed your mind: Is this disconnect between the two sides simply political, or have the members of each policy simply begun to inhabit separate and mutually exclusive planes of existence -- you know, like separate universes?

Perhaps a simple recap of who has said what when since the advent of Hurricane Katrina might help bring us all back to the same solar system."

Here is the video. As Crooks and Liars says, "how in God's name could our President say something so false that is so well documented on national TV?"

WOW, check this out! South African anti-rape condom hooks sharp barbs into the penis

Link: Stuff.co.nz: South African anti-rape condom aims to stop attacks.

This looks like it comes from Reuters. The photo does at least.

South African anti-rape condom aims to stop attacks

02 September 2005

KLEINMOND: A South African inventor has unveiled a new anti-rape female condom that hooks onto an attacker's penis and aims to cut one of the highest rates of sexual assault in the world.

"Nothing has ever been done to help a woman so that she does not get raped and I thought it was high time," Sonette Ehlers, 57, said of the "rapex", a device worn like a tampon that has sparked controversy in a country used to daily reports of violent crime.

Police statistics show more than 50,000 rapes are reported every year, while experts say the real figure could be four times that as they say most rapes of acquaintances or children are never reported.

Ehlers said the "rapex" hooks onto the rapist's skin, allowing the victim time to escape and helping to identify perpetrators.

"He will obviously be too pre-occupied at this stage," she told reporters in Kleinmond, a small holiday village about 100km east of Cape Town. "I promise you he is going to be too sore. He will go straight to hospital."

The device, made of latex and held firm by shafts of sharp barbs, can only be removed from the man through surgery which will alert hospital staff, and ultimately, the police, she said.

It also reduces the chances of a woman falling pregnant or contracting Aids and other sexually transmitted diseases from the attacker by acting in the same way as a female condom.

[...]

Ehlers, who showed off a prototype yesterday, said women had tried it for comfort and it had been tested on a plastic male model but not yet on a live man. Production was planned to start next year.

But the "rapex" has raised fears amongst anti-rape activists that it could escalate violence against women.

[...]

Other critics say the condom is mediaeval and barbaric – an accusation Ehlers says should be directed rather at the act of rape.

"This is not about vengeance ... but the deed, that is what I hate," she said.

Anima

Moveon.org launches hurricane housing locator, but situation is grim

Link: MoveOn.org launches hurricanehousing.org.

This is neat. It has a housing distance locator, to match people with free housing offers, and a place for people with a spare room or basement or garage to offer housing to some refugees from New Orleans.

It just struck me as a clever way to offer an alternative to 4-5 months of staying in the Houston Astrodome, you know?

I also liked what the Louisiana senator said last night, about hotels being the perfect site for Red Cross housing for refugees, but for all the outpouring of aid in the U.S. and around the world (will offers of aid come in from Bangladesh next?!), it seems unlikely that hardcore capitalist hotel chains will offer an alternative to tent cities and massive trailer facilities, things that will have to be built and coordinated, while the high rise hotels outside the damage zone are just sitting there, full of rooms. Go figure, huh?

I'm hearing some horrific stories of conditions outside the New Orleans Convention Center. This below was on Eschaton.

Link: Eschaton.

Spellman Update

CNN

Spellman: Right now, and for several hours, a stream of people have been heading down Canal street heading for the the convention center looking for help. The Convention Center is along the Mississippi river on the southern side of town. They'lll be shocked at what they see when they get there. It's thousands and thousands of people who hav ebeen there all nigth sleeping out on the streets on the sidewalk wherever they can find a spot.

There's no one in control. No national guard. no police. And certainly no FEMA.

Inside we've gotten disturbing news of many dead bodies and nothing to be done with them. CNN's Chris Lawrence got word to us that right in front of him an infant died. That's where people are going for help and there's simply none for them.

[...]

Kagan: And Jim, when you were talking to us earlier you were saying among these thousands of people who are there, they're there with perhaps a false hope of immediate helpd, that they believe they are standing by waiting for a bus or a boat or someone to come get them. There's really no indication that's going to happen anytime soon.

Spellman: Indeed... it's rumors spreading throughout the group. The convention center sits on an area called the riverwalk which is a sort of promenade along the river. There's two riverboats, the last time I checked down there, that are sitting there, the Cajun Queen and another one I didn't get the name of. They're sitting there empty with no activity around them and many people believe these boats will take them away to safety and where they can start to regroup. Also buses, they think that buses are coming for them but there's been no indication that any buses are coming to the convention center. The only buses that we've seen leaving the downtown area are buses provided by hotels only for their guests.

Just heard a good podcast about the Convention Center on BBC Today too.

Once "Top Gun" in a codpiece, Bush "Jumps the Couch" like Tom Cruise too?

Maureen Dowd has some fun in the New York Times, but serious issues behind the lightness. She compares the president's August vacation antics to Tom Cruise nuttiness in jumping on that couch, and with another one of my favorite metaphors, compares the Rovian "non-reality-based universe" to the original version of Cinderella, where the ugly stepsisters cut off parts of their feet to jam them into the "reality" of the glass slipper.

Link: Bike-Deep in the Big Muddy - New York Times.

Op-Ed Columnist

Bike-Deep in the Big Muddy

By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: August 27, 2005
WASHINGTON

W. has jumped the couch.

Not fallen off the couch, as he did when he choked on that pretzel.

Jumped it.

According to UrbanDictionary.com, "jump the couch" has now become slang for "a defining moment when you know someone has gone off the deep end. Inspired by Tom Cruise's recent behavior on 'Oprah.' Also see 'jump the shark.' "

The former stateside National Guardsman who was sometimes M.I.A. jumped the shark by landing on that "Mission Accomplished" carrier. (With Tom Cruise cockiness.)

Then, as president, he jumped the couch by pedaling through the guns of August - the growing carnage and chaos in Iraq and Afghanistan.

He did do a few minutes of work this month, calling a Shiite leader in Baghdad a few days ago to lobby him to reach a consensus with the Sunnis, so Iraq doesn't crack apart. But the Shiites and Kurds ignored the president and skewered the Sunnis.

Iraq, it turns out, is the one branch of American government that the Republicans don't control.

W. had a barbecue for the press on Thursday night. (If only the press had grilled him instead.) He mingled over catfish and potato salad with the reporters, who had to ride past Cindy Sheehan's antiwar encampment to get to the poolside party.

Yeah, but did any of them STOP?

Dan Froomkin wrote on the Washington Post Web site that many of the reporters "fawned over Bush, following him around in packs every time he moved." W. chatted about sports and the twins, still oblivious to the cultural shift that is turning 2005 into 1968.

[...]

Gary Hart began his Washington Post op-ed piece this week by quoting from an anti-Vietnam War song, "Waist-deep in the Big Muddy, and the big fool said to push on."

The former campaign manager for George McGovern's antiwar campaign in 1972 wrote: "We've stumbled into a hornet's nest. We've weakened ourselves at home and in the world. We are less secure today than before this war began. Who now has the courage to say this?"

[...]

You'd think that by now, watching the meshugas in Iraq, the Bush crowd would have learned some lessons about twisting facts to suit ideology, and punishing those who try to tell the truth. But they're still behaving like Cinderella's evil stepsisters, who cut their feet to fit them into the glass slipper: butchering reality to make the fairy tale come out their way.

Eric Lichtblau reported in The Times this week that the administration was dumping the highly respected Lawrence Greenfeld, appointed by President Bush in 2001 to head the Bureau of Justice Statistics, because he refused superiors' orders to delete from a press release an account of how black and Hispanic drivers were treated more aggressively by the police after traffic stops. The Justice Department study showed markedly higher rates of searches and use of force for black and Hispanic drivers, compared with white drivers.

Fearing that the survey would give ammunition to members of Congress who object to using racial and ethnic data in terrorism and law enforcement investigations, Mr. Greenfeld's supervisors buried it online with no press release or briefing for Congress.

[...]

This last bit is just so telling. The party-line enforcement and goose-stepping has evolved to the point where they can have mini-Saturday Night Massacres and not even make a public announcement of the firing.

Question: if a Republican underling is fired for not altering reports to hide uncomfortably racist findings, and they don't tell anyone, did it really happen? In the "non-reality-based universe"?

And when those in charge of a party that claims not only NOT to be racist, but even supporting Hispanics (with a Hispanic Attorney General, no less!) goes out of its way to hide a blatantly racist bias, does that get added to the list of racist Republican acts for which the party can be held accountable for in the next election?

Anima