New Black Death, pt. XII

here:

BERLIN (AP) -- The deadly strain of bird flu was confirmed Tuesday in a cat in northern Germany, the first time the virus has been identified in a mammal in the 25 nations of the European Union.

The cat was on the northern island of Ruegen, where most of the more than 100 wild birds infected by the H5N1 strain were found, the Friedrich Loeffler institute said.

In 1994, I stayed for a couple of days in Ruegen with my friend Gino. At the time, the place seemed still very much like East Germany. Instead of staying at one of the gargantuan Soviet-style hotels, we rented a room in some dour woman's house, where there was an adorable little cat. "Katzen sind nicht doof," said Gino, discussing the relative intelligence of cats.

Excellent distillation from Glenn Greenwald on the wingnuts' reactions to the Mohammed cartoons

here:

As I’ve said before, I believe the press ought to publish those cartoons as a means of defending their right to publish ideas free of intimidation and attack. But the very last people from whom we ought to be hearing sermons about the importance of free expression and a free press -- and about the accompanying duty of the press to publish even those ideas which provoke controversy, outrage and offense -- are Bush supporters, who are plainly engaged in a serious crusade to punish any journalists who express ideas which they dislike or which they believe produce undesirable consequences.

content challenge march

I'm falling down on the posts a bit, so I guess I'd better have another content challenge. Who wants to join in for the March challenge?

I am pleased to note that I am unlikely ever to get Parkinson's Disease

From The Boston Globe:

They tend not to smoke, drink, or seek thrills. They work hard. They show up on time, keep their homes neat, and follow complex medical instructions to the letter.

Doctors have noticed for decades that their Parkinson's disease patients often seem to share certain personality traits.

Now, a growing body of research, including surveys of Parkinson's patients and laboratory studies in mice, suggests that the disease, which afflicts more than a half-million Americans and has no cure, really does tend to strike straight arrows.

[...]

Though no one has followed people for decades to see whether those with a ''Parkinson's personality" are more likely to develop Parkinson's, Menza says the ''weight of the evidence" supports the idea of a link. His list of traits associated with the disease include industriousness, punctuality, orderliness, inflexibility, cautiousness, and lack of novelty-seeking." Other doctors mention drive, ambition, altruism, cleanliness, and a tendency toward obsession with details.

Overheard chat in Filene's Basement

A dapper middle-aged black man, on bidding farewell to his acquaintance: "See you later. I love you, man. Freedom is on the march. Rather fight them over there than over here."

Abortion

My parents knew some people who voted for Bush in 2004 because he was good on security, Israel, and tax cuts for rich people. Let's leave aside the reality that Bush was not actually any good on security or Israel (fine, I'll give him tax cuts for rich people.). Those people my parents knew who voted for Bush on that basis told my parents that they didn't like any of his social policies but they didn't worry too much about them actually getting shoved down our throats. "What about the Supreme Court?" my parents asked. "Don't you care about Roe v. Wade?" Oh sure, those people said. But we're not worried. They wouldn't do that. We're sure Roe is safe.

There were lots of reasons to oppose both Roberts and Alito, not least that they were clearly chosen in part to protect the Administration in the event they are prosecuted for war crimes and their cases come before the Supreme Court. But Roe is an extremely important reason, and one that is also easy to explain to people who don't want to think about torture, spying, or other icky aspects of the GWOT or Long War or whatever they're calling it today. My father went around in 2004 saying "Do you want abortions to be illegal?" and all his little "We're gonna vote for Bush" friends said "Yes, of course, and Bush and his minions won't dare touch that."

Now, those of us who were paying attention knew that wasn't so. For example, we were not fooled by Alito's pledge to be open-minded on the issue. We didn't really need the very first case the new Sandy-free supreme court takes on to be about abortion. We didn't really need South Dakota to pass a law banning abortion outright, specifically so that it would be challenged and move to the Supreme Court as quickly as possible, where, the bill's supporters expect Roe to be overturned.*

But we hope those people who voted for Bush in 2004, certain he'd protect their right to choose, are paying attention now.

*Granted, it's pretty hard to get an abortion in South Dakota anyway. Prohibiting them outright couldn't make it too much harder, in fact. It's the whole court challenge that matters, in this case. Because basically, you don't want to be pregnant (and not want to be pregnant) in South Dakota.

Art Spiegelman on the Danish cartoons

from The Nation (reprinted on Alternet)

This notion that the images can just be described leaves me firmly on the side of showing images. The banal quality of the cartoons that gave insult is hard to believe until they are seen. We live in a culture where images rule, and it's as big a divide as the secular-religious divide -- the picture-word divide.

The public has been infantilized by the press. It's escalated to the point where it's moot whether one should reprint these pictures or not because now to do it puts you firmly on the side of the libeler, the defamer. And yet, it seems to me that to write about this without access to the pictures is an absurdity. The answer to speech, in my religion, is more speech, a lot of yakking -- and a lot of drawing. And if a picture is worth a thousand words, very often it requires 2,000 words more to talk about the picture, but you can't replace that thousand words with another thousand words.

If The Nation and the New York Times had simply said, "We're scared shitless," I could take that. I'm not only a cartoonist, I'm a physical coward.

"We let them choose the color of their feeding tubes. What more do you want?"

Is it inhumane to strap people down, thread tubes down their noses, and force-feed them several times a day because their hunger strike is 'disruptive' and stressing out the medical personnel? Nah, not if you indulge them by letting them choose the color fo their feeding tubes. In any case, it's not force-feeding, it's 'providing nutritional supplementation on a voluntary basis to detainees who wish to protest their confinement by not taking oral nourishment.'

There is a special circle in hell reserved for those who write such Orwellian things and aren't joking about them.

The NYTimes reports:

Detainees said the Guantánamo medical staff also began inserting and removing the long plastic feeding tubes that were threaded through the detainees' nasal passages and into their stomachs at every feeding, a practice that caused sharp pain and frequent bleeding, they said. Until then, doctors there said, they had been allowing the hunger strikers to leave their feeding tubes in, to reduce discomfort.

Military spokesmen have generally discounted the complaints, saying the prisoners are for the most part terrorists, trained by Al Qaeda to use false stories as propaganda.

In a letter to a British physician and human rights activist, Dr. David J. Nicholl, on Dec. 12, the former chief medical officer at Guantánamo, Capt. John S. Edmondson of the Navy, wrote that his staff was not force-feeding any detainees but "providing nutritional supplementation on a voluntary basis to detainees who wish to protest their confinement by not taking oral nourishment."

General Craddock suggested that the medical staff had indulged the hunger strikers to the point that they had been allowed to choose the color of their feeding tubes.

Two other Defense Department officials said a decision had been made to try to break the hunger strikes because they were having a disruptive effect and causing stress for the medical staff.

More right-wing lunacy

OK, so this is fucking bizarre: the Human Chimera Prohibition Act of 2005. (A tip of Roger L. Simon's sweaty fedora to the always superb Rude Pundit.)

Kafka's Non-reclassification scheme

The government is reclassifying documents that have been declassified for years. No reason, just for the heck of it. But no, they say, we're not declassifying at all:

The document removals have not been reported to the Information Security Oversight Office, as the law has required for formal reclassifications since 2003.

The explanation, said Mr. Leonard, the head of the office, is a bureaucratic quirk. The intelligence agencies take the position that the reclassified documents were never properly declassified, even though they were reviewed, stamped "declassified," freely given to researchers and even published, he said.

Thus, the agencies argue, the documents remain classified — and pulling them from public access is not really reclassification.

Mr. Leonard said he believed that while that logic might seem strained, the agencies were technically correct.

"he believed...the agencies were technically correct"? You mean, given that they insisted they were doing a perfectly legal thing, he felt he'd better believe they were? No further explanation?

(Hat tip Max, who emails me interesting things instead of posting them to the blog. Why, husband? You can post blog entries your ownself too!)

Liberating Bob Herbert

Sorry, NYTimes. Here is Herbert's op-ed piece from today, in full:

The Torturers Win
By BOB HERBERT
Published: February 20, 2006

Justice? Surely you jest.

Terrible things were done to Maher Arar, and his extreme suffering was set in motion by the United States government. With the awful facts of his case carefully documented, he tried to sue for damages. But last week a federal judge waved the facts aside and told Mr. Arar, in effect, to get lost.

We're in a new world now and the all-powerful U.S. government apparently has free rein to ruin innocent lives without even a nod in the direction of due process or fair play. Mr. Arar, a Canadian citizen who, according to all evidence, has led an exemplary life, was seized and shackled by U.S. authorities at Kennedy Airport in 2002, and then shipped off to Syria, his native country, where he was held in a dungeon for the better part of a year. He was tormented physically and psychologically, and at times tortured.

The underground cell was tiny, about the size of a grave. According to court papers, "The cell was damp and cold, contained very little light and was infested with rats, which would enter the cell through a small aperture in the ceiling. Cats would urinate on Arar through the aperture, and sanitary facilities were nonexistent."

Mr. Arar's captors beat him savagely with an electrical cable. He was allowed to bathe in cold water once a week. He lost 40 pounds while in captivity.

This is a quintessential example of the reprehensible practice of extraordinary rendition, in which the U.S. government kidnaps individuals — presumably terror suspects — and sends them off to regimes that are skilled in the fine art of torture. In terms of vile behavior, rendition stands shoulder to shoulder with contract killing.

If the United States is going to torture people, we might as well do it ourselves. Outsourcing torture does not make it any more acceptable.

Mr. Arar's case became a world-class embarrassment when even Syria's torture professionals could elicit no evidence that he was in any way involved in terrorism. After 10 months, he was released. No charges were ever filed against him.

Mr. Arar is a 35-year-old software engineer who lives in Ottawa with his wife and their two young children. He's never been in any kind of trouble. Commenting on the case in a local newspaper, a former Canadian official dryly observed that "accidents will happen" in the war on terror. The Center for Constitutional Rights in New York filed a lawsuit on Mr. Arar's behalf, seeking damages from the U.S. government for his ordeal. The government said the case could not even be dealt with because the litigation would involve the revelation of state secrets.

In other words, it wouldn't matter how hideously or egregiously Mr. Arar had been treated, or how illegally or disgustingly the government had behaved. The case would have to be dropped. Inquiries into this 21st-century Inquisition cannot be tolerated. Its activities must remain secret at all costs.

In a ruling that basically gave the green light to government barbarism, U.S. District Judge David Trager dismissed Mr. Arar's lawsuit last Thursday. Judge Trager wrote in his opinion that "Arar's claim that he faced a likelihood of torture in Syria is supported by U.S. State Department reports on Syria's human rights practices."

But in dismissing the suit, he said that the foreign policy and national security issues raised by the government were "compelling" and that such matters were the purview of the executive branch and Congress, not the courts.

He also said that "the need for secrecy can hardly be doubted."

Under that reasoning, of course, the government could literally get away with murder. With its bad actions cloaked in court-sanctioned secrecy, no one would be the wiser.

As an example of the kind of foreign policy problems that might arise if Mr. Arar were given his day in court, Judge Trager wrote:

"One need not have much imagination to contemplate the negative effect on our relations with Canada if discovery were to proceed in this case and were it to turn out that certain high Canadian officials had, despite public denials, acquiesced in Arar's removal to Syria."

Oh yes, by all means, we need the federal courts to fully protect the right of public officials to lie to their constituents.

"It's a shocking decision," said Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights. "It's really saying that an individual who is sent overseas for the purpose of being tortured has no claim in a U.S. court."

If kidnapping and torturing an innocent man is O.K., what's not O.K.?

The Very First Time I'm Commenting on Something I read on The Weekly Standard

I ended up on The Weekly Standard trying to figure out why they were suddenly our biggest referer. An article about "Web 2.0" and its perils linked to us because we own the domain name Kafka.com, and the author was, I gather, searching for something about Kafka. He liked the quote we have on our main page, wanted to use it, and, I suppose, felt compelled to give a nod to the blog as the source of the quote.

The article itself was on a subject that interests me, so I actually read it. And, despite appearing on a mad right-wing magazine's website, it does not seem especially mad itself. Mostly wrong, I think, but not mad.

This Web 2.0 dream is Socrates's nightmare: technology that arms every citizen with the means to be an opinionated artist or writer.

"This is historic," my friend promised me. "We are enabling Internet users to author their own content. Think of it as empowering citizen media. We can help smash the elitism of the Hollywood studios and the big record labels. Our technology platform will radically democratize culture, build authentic community, create citizen media." Welcome to Web 2.0.

[...]

The consequences of Web 2.0 are inherently dangerous for the vitality of culture and the arts. Its empowering promises play upon that legacy of the '60s--the creeping narcissism that Christopher Lasch described so presciently, with its obsessive focus on the realization of the self.

Another word for narcissism is "personalization." Web 2.0 technology personalizes culture so that it reflects ourselves rather than the world around us. Blogs personalize media content so that all we read are our own thoughts. Online stores personalize our preferences, thus feeding back to us our own taste. Google personalizes searches so that all we see are advertisements for products and services we already use.

Instead of Mozart, Van Gogh, or Hitchcock, all we get with the Web 2.0 revolution is more of ourselves.

[...]

The purpose of our media and culture industries--beyond the obvious need to make money and entertain people--is to discover, nurture, and reward elite talent. Our traditional mainstream media has done this with great success over the last century.

[...]

One of the unintended consequences of the Web 2.0 movement may well be that we fall, collectively, into the amnesia that Kafka describes. Without an elite mainstream media, we will lose our memory for things learnt, read, experienced, or heard. The cultural consequences of this are dire, requiring the authoritative voice of at least an Allan Bloom, if not an Oswald Spengler. But here in Silicon Valley, on the brink of the Web 2.0 epoch, there no longer are any Blooms or Spenglers. All we have is the great seduction of citizen media, democratized content and authentic online communities. And weblogs, course. Millions and millions of blogs.

The article is a bit of a fluff piece, if you ask me (which you didn't, and if you got here via the article itself, why would you listen to anything I had to say anyway, since I'm a mad left-wing blogger and am not reflecting your own thoughts right back at you?)

A number of different arguments 'against' Web 2.0 are made:

1) Economic: Web 2.0 is a lot of technological utopian hype that could result in a terrible bubble and crash.

Okay, sure, but what else is new? How is this relevant to the rest of the article, which makes a moral case against the very concept of Web 2.0?

2) Political ad hominem:Hippies are involved, and sometimes people who like Web 2.0 say something that sounds like Marx. Therefore, it must be bad.

Not even going to bother to address this one.

3) Delusional: The mainstream culture industry is primarily concerned with discovering, nurturing, and rewarding 'elite talent' and only, as a kind of prerequisite, to be mentioned as a mere aside, with making money. Therefore, those who are promoted by the mainstream media are deserving, and those who are left out in the cold to make their own podcasts and write their own blogs are not.

Can the author honestly believe that this is the case? Hitchcock may have worked within the studio system, and Mozart did get backing from powerful patrons, but Van Gogh as an example of how the MSM is important to nurturing artists? Many, many artists who are justly famous and respected now were not at the time they were making their art. The most famous, rewarded, nurtured, and promoted artists today are by no means the most talented. I freely admit that most of what's out there on the internet, produced by amateurs is mediocre, but I doubt that the wisdom of the crowd of internet users, choosing what to read, watch, and listen to on the basis of aesthetics, could turn out to be worse than the wisdom of those in the MSM who choose what to serve up to us on the basis of how much money it will make for their stockholders. No doubt the 'democratization of content' will change the 'culture industry', but I see no evidence that it will change it for the worse. Maybe not for the better, either, but it's more likely than not. Consuming quality culture may arguably be a better use of time than producing junk, but given the culture we're offered by the MSM, frankly, we may as well produce our own junk instead.

4) Interesting, but not as big a worry as the author thinks it is: Personalization results in ever-increasing self-absorption -- we read only our own thoughts and consume only things we already like. This will destroy our shared culture and replace it with overwhelming mediocrity, which will be so huge and mediocre that we won't be able to remember anything about it, and will fall into amnesia.

This is the only interesting argument given, and it's one that we agree with, but only in reference to the provision of news, and, even more narrowly, only to the provision of news in the form of facts.

We believe that facts exist. It would be nice if we all got our facts from the same sources, and could agree that those sources were, in general, making a good faith effort to provide the correct facts. As long as we are all working with the same set of facts, I see no reason why bloggers are unqualified to provide their own analysis and interpretations of them.

Unfortunately the MSM news services have fallen down on their jobs of providing even the facts, so bloggers are having to take up the slack there. (Not me -- I don't do the fact-digging, but lots of bloggers really do - they make calls, go to courthouses and photocopy documents, cultivate sources, etc.) And, I'd argue, the news services are failing precisely because increasingly, their purpose is the purpose of the rest of the MSM -- make money.

I can't speak for the Web 2.0 venture capitalists out there -- presumably they think there's some way to make money off the whole thing, and I guess that, as before, a few of them will, and most of them will fail spectacularly. But there is something truly amazing about the number of people producing their own content on the web through purely volunteer efforts. Sure, a lot of it sucks. A lot of it is self-absorbed. But there's also a lot of very good amateur writing out there. People donate their time to blogs for many different reasons. Most blogs that get read at all (even if by just a handful of people, as ours is) are not intended as vehicles for a kind of resentful and aggressive self-realization "I'm as good as any of your published authors, damnit!".

Take The Biscuit Report, for example. We are nobody important, merely reasonably informed citizens trying to participate in the conversations that are essential to democracy. It is not the product of resentful anti-elitism to want to constructively contribute to such conversations. We should not have to leave this conversation to MSM-approved commentators. All writers, artists, etc., amateur and professional, good and not-good, are driven in some part by ambition, or narcissism, or something self-interested, and we would not claim to be otherwise. But if we offered nothing to our readers, they wouldn't bother reading us. They'd be too busy reading their own damn blogs.

In any case, despite the dream of a perfectly personalized web, we are not yet and may never be entirely there. There is still an element of serendipity on the web: a writer for The Weekly Standard looks up Kafka and reads Biscuit; and then I read The Weekly Standard. Look! Someone else's thoughts! Even ones worth commenting on.

Finally, a new and distinguished entry in the Biscuit Compendium of Pessimism

Sarah Vowell in the (select) New York Times

Alas, I see my initial worries about the current administration as the greatest betrayal in my whole life by my old pal pessimism. I attended the president's inauguration in 2001. When he took the presidential oath, I cried. What was I so afraid of? I was weeping because I was terrified that the new president would wreck the economy and muck up my drinking water. Isn't that adorable? I lacked the pessimistic imagination to dread that tens of thousands of human beings would be spied on or maimed or tortured or killed or stranded or drowned, thanks to his incompetence.

I feel like a fool. All those years of Sunday school, and still the apocalypse catches me off guard.

Dear Internets, We Are a "Mad Left-Wing Blog"

Max noticed we had a number of referrals from The Weekly Standard this week. Here's why: "Presumably, if Kafka had had a website, it would be located at kafka.com which is today an address owned by a mad left-wing blog called The Biscuit Report."

We are honored indeed.

Rumsfeld on Propaganda

Rumsfeld says:

while the al Qaeda terrorist network and other "extremist" movements "have successfully . . . poisoned the Muslim public's view of the West, we in the government have barely even begun to compete in reaching their audiences."

Oh, no, Mr. Rumsfeld. We're reaching their audiences just fine.

The Third Hunter

Maybe it's because Ari is really into watching The Third Man, and therefore I've seen it about a billion times.

(Why, you may ask, is Ari into The Third Man? It happens to be a movie we had around. And we figured, hey, if our kid is going to watch a movie a million times, let's have it be something worth watching. This has stood us in good stead. The music, filmography, story, and actors in the movie are all amazing, and we are not yet tired of having it on.)

Anyway, this AP story reminded me of The Third Man. A terrible accident, an incomplete investigation, shifting stories, and even a mysterious third hunter, who has so far evaded media scrutiny and has barely been mentioned in the mainstream press. So the big question is: What did the porter see, and when will he be killed?

Up is Down

From WaPo:

" My family and I are are deeply sorry for everything that Vice President cheney and his family had to go through this week," Whittington said, appearing emotional in front of television cameras.

Well, at least someone sincerely apologized for the accident.

Wal-Mart News

From NYT:

In a confidential, internal Web site for Wal-Mart's managers, the company's chief executive, H. Lee Scott Jr., seemed to have a rare, unscripted moment when one manager asked him why "the largest company on the planet cannot offer some type of medical retirement benefits?"

Mr. Scott first argues that the cost of such benefits would leave Wal-Mart at a competitive disadvantage but then, clearly annoyed, he suggests that the store manager is disloyal and should consider quitting.

Also:

"Wal-Mart's focus has been on lower income and lower-middle income consumers," he wrote. "In the last four years or so, with the price of fuel being what it is, that customer has had the most difficult time. The upper-end customer got a tremendous number of tax breaks about four years ago. They have been doing very well in this economy."

Hmm. One wonders why Mr. Scott wouldn't make this point about the sufferings of his lower-income customers in public.

Republicans After Bush

Sometimes people tell me that we've only got three more years of Bush and then things will be okay-ish again. They are wrong.

Orcinus says that the authoritarian cult we are witnessing is not a cult of Bush, per se, but, as Digby says, a cult of Republican power:

The discrete conservative movement is structured such that it needs a "charismatic" figure at its head; it's essentially a psychological imperative for this kind of belief system.

So if the leader it elevates happens not, in fact, to actually be charismatic, as Bush really is not, then the movement will tailor its reality to make him so. True Believers -- having been steadily propagandized with Fox News and RNC talking points about Bush's superior character -- now really do see Bush as a charismatic figure, which leaves most non-believers shaking their heads.

But he is in essence disposable, an empty suit filled by the psychological needs of the movement he leads. He's sort of like a Fraternity President on steroids: Bush's presidency is all about popularity, not policy. He's a figurehead, a blank slate upon which the movement's followers can project their own notions of what a good president is about. And when his term is up, the movement will create a new "charismatic" leader.

Leaders like this, as True Believers themselves, usually have a symbiotic relationship with the movement they lead. Most of the time, his initiatives and policies are perfectly in synch with the rest of the movement, and they feed off the cues they give one another. But the movement itself will quickly reel in any leader who presumes that the movement is about him.

Republicans like Rove and Norquist did not spend their lives building their movement only to shoot their wad on Dubya. We should not kid ourselves that our troubles will be over as soon as they can't elect him again. "The King is Dead. Long Live the King."

Dear Internets...Today I Went Zero Carbon!

My family and I are no longer emitting carbon. That's right, we stopped breathing!

Okay, no, we bought carbon offsets from CarbonFund.org. They are tax-deductible and provide an endless source of eco-superiority. You should buy some carbon offsets too. All the kewl kids are.

I have less cheerful things to report, but I thought I'd save that for another post.

I'm a Torturer. Are you?

Australian TV has broadcast 'new' images of Abu Ghraib.

The Guardian reports that the U.S. government has been pressuring U.S. news stations not to show the new footage, and, from my survey of websites, they're so far successful. The Times has no story on it yet at all.

While the Washington Post has a story on the Australian photos and video, the photos and video posted next to the story are the 'more tame' previously-released footage. The Post does not make this clear, so one could easily click on these photos, view them, and think: hmm, same old, same old. CNN has a small story on the photos, and also chooses a very tame selection to show.

When really, the new photos show people lying in pools of blood and smeared with shit.

Please be curious and visit the following sites to look at the pictures of what we did:

Guardian's photos
BBC's photos

(Unfortunately the original story's producer, SBS TV, appears overwhelmed with traffic, so it's very, very slow.)

Aren't we a great country?

The brilliance of the Daily Show

One of the very few things that makes me regret that we don't have a TV signal: we get all of the material from "The Daily Show" secondhand:

The shooting was fertile ground for Jon Stewart, the host of "The Daily Show," the popular fake news program on Comedy Central. On Monday night one of the show's correspondents, Rob Corddry, introduced as a "vice-presidential firearms mishap analyst," said that "according to the best intelligence available, there were quail hidden in the brush," and "everyone believed there were quail in the brush," and "while the quail turned out to be a 78-year-old man, even knowing that today, Mr. Cheney insists he would still have shot Mr. Whittington in the face."

How it might happen, or be happening, or be laying the groundwork for happening, or be pseudo-happening...

From Sadly, No!:

It's begun to seem, recently, like something more than a super-cosmic coincidence that the Bush Administration has been carefully setting up a system whose every particular matches the classic template of dictatorial powers and political repression ('terror' is such an ugly term). The only thing glaringly missing from such a scheme would be a large, Federally-organized enforcement arm directly under the authority of the president -- and smarter people than us have already been scratching their heads at the Administration's push against posse comitatus, and at the new Federal mystery-police thingo in the Patriot Act.

You'd certainly think that the Administration would be more worried about appearances than it is -- or, for that matter, that with all these startling 'anti-terrorist' powers springing up all over the place, that they'd have a serious and abiding interest in securing the country and catching terrorists. Which, funnily enough, they don't.

Let's rejoin Katherine for one sentence. (The entire post lives here.)

At some level, I think we read these things and think: well, they can't really mean that.

She's right. But it might be useful to imagine: If you were a brash right-wing billionaire, for instance, or a GOP party zealot, or a Straussian neoconservative, or any of a number of such characters, and you wanted to set up an apparatus of political repression in America in order to push your opponents permanently off the political map, how

would you go about it? It's both a legal problem and a logistical one -- these things don't simply happen on their own; they require planning and hard work. Purely instrumentally, you'd need either to change the Constitution in a way that would be quite difficult to achieve, and that people would tend to notice with all sorts of attendant mess and fireworks, or you'd need to find very specific ways around its protections.

Your to-do list would lack the shock of the unfamiliar. It's the standard panoply of generalissimo powers, issued in emergency decrees after every Latin American coup or African power-grab. You'd want to be able to conduct widespread surveillance on people of your choice without probable cause that they'd committed a crime, and if you decided to arrest and detain someone, you'd want to do it without judicial oversight and away from public scrutiny. There'd need to be some kind of setup for secret interrogations, with or without torture, and you'd have to be able to indefinitely 'disappear' people, if and when you felt it necessary, whether in prisons or (under your authority) by means of execution. This program didn't get off the ground, but it shows the kind of playbook you'd be using (it might have read better in the original East German edition). There's also the sticky, little-assimilated detail that Bush's NSA surveillance program was apparently authorized before 9/11 -- sticky details abound; it's quite a jam-smeared, sticky world in which we now live. But in any case, if you wanted to set up

something like that, with all the legal claims properly paper-trailed and all the operational links in their proper places in the chain, it would take time, canny lawyering, and a certain admixture of restraint and boldness, and you'd probably want to have a huge propaganda apparatus constantly pumping out fog so that America didn't understand (or believe) what kind of government you were striving toward. It might take several presidencies to get your 'permanent majority,' but you'd move forward with due alacrity when you were able.

But they wouldn't do that, would they? And as Katherine asked, at what point are we going to take their claims seriously?

All the news you won't get from the U.S. Press: CIA torture edition

CIA chief sacked for opposing torture

The CIA’s top counter-terrorism official was fired last week because he opposed detaining Al-Qaeda suspects in secret prisons abroad, sending them to other countries for interrogation and using forms of torture such as “water boarding”, intelligence sources have claimed.
Robert Grenier, head of the CIA counter-terrorism centre, was relieved of his post after a year in the job. One intelligence official said he was “not quite as aggressive as he might have been” in pursuing Al-Qaeda leaders and networks.

Vincent Cannistraro, a former head of counter-terrorism at the agency, said: “It is not that Grenier wasn’t aggressive enough, it is that he wasn’t ‘with the programme’. He expressed misgivings about the secret prisons in Europe and the rendition of terrorists.”

Grenier also opposed “excessive” interrogation, such as strapping suspects to boards and dunking them in water, according to Cannistraro.

via King of Zembla

And

Revealed: the terror prison US is helping build in Morocco

THE United States is helping Morocco to build a new interrogation and detention facility for Al-Qaeda suspects near its capital, Rabat, according to western intelligence sources.
The sources confirmed last week that building was under way at Ain Aouda, above a wooded gorge south of Rabat’s diplomatic district. Locals said they had often seen American vehicles with diplomatic plates in the area.

The construction of the new compound, run by the Direction de la Securité du Territoire (DST), the Moroccan secret police, adds to a substantial body of evidence that Morocco is one of America’s principal partners in the secret “rendition” programme in which the CIA flies prisoners to third countries for interrogation.

A Question for Orcinus

You write:

Do I think this is a sign of incipient fascism? No. I only think it's another progression in a trend I've already discussed at length, namely, that conservatives appear (consciously or not) to be laying the groundwork for an eventual outbreak of genuine fascism.

Practically speaking, what's the difference? You're always writing that what we're seeing in the States is not fascism or protofascism, but pseudo-fascism. And maybe I missed the part where you explained why you're so careful to make that distinction, but to me it sometimes seems like you do it just to avoid Godwin's law. I admire your work tremendously, but what you have to write is very disturbing, and not made less so by this distinction without a difference that is pseudo-fascism vs. incipient fascism vs. proto-fascism.

I know you write that what we are seeing today is different in many respects from the 'original' fascisms. But wouldn't that always be the case, since it's a different time and place? What is the difference, particularly, between 'incipient fascism' and 'laying the groundwork for the eventual outbreak of genuine fascism"?

When you say "pseudo-fascism", it makes it sound like whatever is going on, since not fascism, is not actually that dangerous. Do you do this just to calm the tin-hatters? Because everything else you say makes things sound pretty darn dangerous. It looks like fascism and quacks like fascism. Sure, it's not just like the fascism we all know and love from our history books. But it's not an entirely other species. It's not like the difference between a king snake and a coral snake, the difference between harmless and deadly.

I could go on, but I think you get the point. Why "pseudo-" instead of "proto-", "neo-" or "Americo-"?

Department of Opposite Headlines: BBC vs. NYTimes Edition

From the Times:

Response to Katrina Was 'Unacceptable,' Chertoff Says

The Department of Homeland Security fell far short in its response to Hurricane Katrina, Secretary Michael Chertoff acknowledged today. But he said the department is moving fast to improve its capabilities, and he denied that natural disasters take second place to terrorism on the agency's agenda.

From the BBC:

Chertoff defends Katrina response

US Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff has strongly rejected criticism of his department's response to Hurricane Katrina last year. He conceded the "fog of war" had led to communications failures, but announced steps to overhaul the embattled Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema).

Curiosity

A couple months ago, Ari had an obsession with Curious George. We had a new copy of the original book, and in Max's parents' attic we found an old copy. In the old copy, the book opens by stating that George was a good little monkey with only one fault "he was too curious". In the new edition, George is not "too curious': he is a "good little monkey and always very curious."

In both editions, George ends up in the States because the Man With The Yellow Hat kidnaps him. In the movie version, it appears, George follows the man back to the States, (presumably out of curiousity?)

The societal changes hinted at by these alterations in the story line would be an interesting topic for a paper or article on Children's Literature, but actually, all that's totally tangential to this post, which is to talk about curiosity in my own life.

I've always thought of myself as a pretty curious person. Too curious, no doubt. Of course, I don't know anyone these days who thinks of themselves as 'not very curious' -- as George makes clear, curiosity is no longer considered a fault. (Though the other George, the incurious one, is trying very hard to make it one again.)

But however curious we are, in general, there are always aspects of life that we are so utterly incurious about that we don't even realize how little we know, how little we've wondered, how little we've seen that thing at all.

It is a great gift to discover curiosity about something in your life you'd never noticed before. It's like one of those dreams in which you find, suddenly, a hidden room in your house. It was always there, but somehow, you didn't know it. You have more space, suddenly, than before, and the space is filled with interesting things -- your things, but you've never seen them before. Your life is larger, and yet larger in a familiar way.

This happened to me the other day. I discovered the moon.

It is not that I have been unaware of the moon -- who could be? But recently, I've actually learned a couple of things about the moon that made me realize how shockingly incurious I've been about the largest and loveliest gaze-able object in the sky. (The sun may be large and lovely, but it's only gaze-able, if you've a clear shot of the horizon, which I don't, for a few minutes every day).

It's impossible, of course, not to be aware that the moon waxes and wanes, that it is sometimes full and sometimes a crescent, sometimes something in between, that this happens on a 28-29 day cycle. Most people will also admit, if they think about it for a moment, that sometimes they see the moon during the day, but not at night. It's obvious that the moon does not always rise and set at the same times. So it must follow a cycle.

I have been alive for 30.5 years, and I have spent countless hours looking at the moon during that time. But I never thought about, and never knew, that the moon rises around sunset and sets around dawn when it is full, and it rises at dawn and sets at sunset when it is new, and when it is waxing, it rises later and later every day, and earlier and earlier when it is waning. I never knew that you could tell whether you were looking at a waxing crescent or a waning crescent by the direction of the crescent and by the time and place in the sky that you saw it. These things seem obvious to me now. How could it be otherwise?

I know I did not know these things before. And now that I know them, I want to understand more about the moon. Not just facts, like that the moon rises about 51 minutes later each day, and so the tides also are about 51 minutes later each day, too. I mean that I want to be familiar with the moon, not just to know about it. Because I have found, suddenly, that I have not been familiar with the moon. That it's been a stranger on the street, that I have passed by it every day and never noticed that today it wore a pink hat, or that every Tuesday it carried three books home from the library.

The new room I've found in my house is filled with beautiful things. Unfortunately, not everything about which we are habitually incurious will turn out to be a beautiful room with beautiful things. In the past couple of years, for example, I've found more rooms than I care to think about that were full of bloated, dead bodies and torture devices. When one finds such a room, one's curiosity does not seem like such a gift. Who wants to see such things, to know they exist in your very own house? In Bluebeard's castle, isn't it better to not to open some doors?

Of course, you know what I think the answer to that question is. And it's not because I believe in narcissistic naval gazing and 'letting it all hang out'.

It's just this: If we cannot see the truth, how can we hope to change it? Here's me, in December 2004

Why do I talk about my depression so much here? Because I think it has everything to do with politics today. The facts are frightening; the facts are horrifying; the facts are bad for your health.

The Bushists won because the facts, for many people, are too difficult to bear. And it is not just Bush supporters who are ignoring the facts now. Since November, I have seen an increasing number of Democrats retreat into the safety of illusions. They believe that the right to an abortion is not really in danger. They are sure that a backlash against Bush is coming, and that the moderates in the Republican party will revolt and save us from further destruction. They are hopeful that Bush is leaning toward a more inclusive foreign policy, that the next four years will be better than the last. Before the election, they believed that if Bush won, things would get very bad indeed. Now that he has, they have retreated. Things will be okay, they say. It's just another four years. They wouldn't really do that. The people won't let them. They don't have the mandate. Things will only get really bad if we have a financial crisis, or another major attack. And that probably won't happen. It's not so bad now.

This is unwarranted optimism, my friends. Today, right now, our nation tortures as a matter of policy. Today, people making the minimum wage cannot afford to live. Today the gap between rich and poor is growing, and the environmental regulations are weakening, and our soldiers are dying. Some 48% of those who voted did so for Kerry, but most of them also live in a world where most of the facts do not matter. Most of these people are not mobilized to fight creeping fascism; they have turned their eyes away from it.

If we are to overcome the Bushites, we must make reality more bearable for these people. If they cannot see it, they will not mobilize to change it. I don't know how to do this, since I can sometimes hardly bear reality myself. But I feel there are answers here somewhere -- some hopeful alternative to blind optimism, some spoonful of sugar that can make the medicine of reality go down, so that we may change it, and not, to steal Mr. Bush's words, "drift toward tragedy."

And me, six months later, in June 2005:

For a year now I've been torture girl, screaming and nagging and begging people I know and love, not just 'those other people out there, in the Red States', to look at the torture. And yet so many people will not. And I've wondered in desperation how to get people to see, why won't people see, why won't they pay attention? And the more I shouted and jumped up and down, the more people did not pay attention, and the more alone I've felt, and I've been filled with the frustration of seeing what others won't see. And I've been so angry. I've bee so angry at all of you, and you know who you are -- for covering your eyes.

But my anger and my agitation and my arm-waving hasn't gotten me anywhere. So, you who cover your eyes -- have you read this far, even? will you read this far? -- this is what I would like to say to you:

You ask me what good it will do to turn our eyes to the torture. Tell me what to do, you say, and I will do it, but don't ask me to look at something and feel helpless in its face. And I say, if you will not look at a thing, how can you begin to know what you can do to fix it? You stand in a different place than I do -- what good will it do for me to tell you what I must do about torture? What you must do, what you would see you must do, if you looked, if you saw it as it is, not out of the corner of your eye, but straight on, will surely be different.

Tell me it can be fixed before I look at it, you say to me, and I say to you that no such promise can be made. But if we cannot fix it, if we cannot make our government stop, then we must learn to live with it, and how can we do that unless we see it for what it is? Do you not have the sense, some part of each day, that there's something enormous that you're avoiding? Like that pile of bills on your desk, some of which are no doubt overdue. But you don't pay the bills, and you don't even open them, and you don't even look at them, and instead you think about easier things. And yet the bills are there, a hole of discomfort, a gravitational force that pulls at your mind. As long as those bills sit unopened, parts of you are sloughing off and drifting toward them.

Such is the power of unpaid bills, so imagine the great black hole that is torture. My friends who will not look, do not imagine that you thereby protect yourselves from the terrible force of this fact. Your fear grows and grows. You are afraid, and you feel guilty and ashamed that you are afraid, and all of these feelings are awful, and you hope, by not looking, that you will not have to feel them so much.

Feel your fear, friends -- it's a fearsome thing. Feel guilt and shame too. I certainly do. But do not let those feelings keep you from turning toward torture. Only by turning toward it can we hope to stop it. And if we cannot stop it, then, if we see it together, we can comfort one another. We can share the burden of seeing together. Surely that is better than staying locked, each in our own private horror. If we cannot stop the torture, then let us cry for it together. Let us beat our breasts and tear our hair together, in our guilt and shame and helplessness and fear and our despair. Let us witness, and witness honestly, and not convince ourselves that if we do not look that it does not affect our humanity.

In this moment, while torture again is in the news, we have the opportunity to pay attention, and to ask one another to pay attention to it.

I beg you to see, in this moment, and the next, and the next, and the next after that.. If we cannot help one another to do this, then there will be no end to our shame.

Well, friends. We have not stopped the torture. We have not stopped terrorism, or the war in Iraq, or this President's lies or his packing of the Supreme Court or his illegal activities. Things have only gotten worse, not better.

Still, I argue, be curious. It's our only hope, and if it does not set us free, at least it may enlarge our prison.

Glenn Greenwald on why the bushies are not conservatives

Here:

As much as any policy prescriptions, conservatism has always been based, more than anything else, on a fundamental distrust of the power of the federal government and a corresponding belief that that power ought to be as restrained as possible, particularly when it comes to its application by the Government to American citizens. It was that deeply rooted distrust that led to conservatives’ vigorous advocacy of states’ rights over centralized power in the federal government, accompanied by demands that the intrusion of the Federal Government in the lives of American citizens be minimized.

[..]

For a glimpse of how actual conservatives quite recently used to think, one should read this article at FreeRepublic.com, which decries the dangerous loss of liberty and privacy as a result of the Clinton Administration's use of a "secret court" (something called the "FISA court") which actually enables the Federal Government to eavesdrop on American citizens! Worse -- much worse -- the judicial approval which the Government (used to) obtain for this eavesdropping is in secret, so we don't even know who is being eavesdropped on! How can we possibly trust the Government not to abuse this power if they can obtain warrants in secret?

Conservatives used to consider things like this to be quite disturbing and bad -- and the eavesdropping then was at least with judicial oversight. Now, George Bush is in office, and all of the distrust we used to have of the Federal Government exercising these powers has evaporated, because we trust in George Bush to do what is best for us. He should not just have those powers, but many more, and he should exercise all of them in secret, too, with no "interference" from the courts or Congress.

That is why I say that whatever else these Bush followers are, they are not conservative.

Anne Lamott: The Best Kind of Jesus Freak

On Abortion:

Most women like me would much rather use our time and energy fighting to make the world safe and just and fair for the children we do have, and do love — and for the children of New Orleans and the children of Darfur. I am old and tired and menopausal and would mostly like to be left alone: I have had my abortions, and I have had a child.

But as a Christian and a feminist, the most important message I can carry and fight for is the sacredness of each human life, and reproductive rights for all women is a crucial part of that: It is a moral necessity that we not be forced to bring children into the world for whom we cannot be responsible and adoring and present. We must not inflict life on children who will be resented; we must not inflict unwanted children on society.

During the reception, an old woman came up to me, and said, "If you hadn't spoken out, I would have spit," and then she raised her fist in the power salute. We huddled together for awhile, and ate M&Ms to give us strength. It was a kind of communion, for those of us who still believe that civil rights and equality and even common sense will somehow be sovereign, some day.

(Via Mr. Drum)

Department of False Advertising, URL Edition

Max sent me a link via IM:

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/politics/AP-Cheney-Hunting-Accident.html

Wow, I thought. That sounds really promising.

Then I saw the article, and it turns out Dick is still with us. Can't control his gun, apparently. Wonderful.

Chattelizing women

in South Dakota, and in Indiana.

Anyone who thinks this court is not going to overturn Roe v. Wade is dreaming.

Sedition

here:

Laura Berg is a clinical nurse specialist at the VA Medical Center in Albuquerque, where she has worked for 15 years.

Shortly after Katrina, she wrote a letter to the editor of the weekly paper the Alibi criticizing the Bush Administration.

After the paper published the letter in its September 15-21 issue, VA administrators seized her computer, alleged that she had written the letter on that computer, and accused her of “sedition.”

Everything's coming up ominious, part the second

8) Larry Wilkerson (former right-hand man to Colin Powell), on a PBS interview:

DAVID BRANCACCIO: We've been talking grand policy. The then director of the CIA, George Tenent, Vice President Cheney's deputy Libby, told you that the intelligence that was the basis of going to war was rock solid. Given what you now know, how does that make you feel?

LAWRENCE WILKERSON: It makes me feel terrible. I've said in other places that it was-- constitutes the lowest point in my professional life. My participation in that presentation at the UN constitutes the lowest point in my professional life.

I participated in a hoax on the American people, the international community and the United Nations Security Council. How do you think that makes me feel? Thirty-one years in the United States Army and I more or less end my career with that kind of a blot on my record? That's not a very comforting thing.

9) Lindsey Graham wants the NSA to listen to me and you. Why? Because we are the "fifth column".

10)Election fraud, Florida, 2000.

11) Cronyism does not make us safer:

State Department officials appointed by President Bush have sidelined key career weapons experts and replaced them with less experienced political operatives who share the White House and Pentagon's distrust of international negotiations and treaties.

The reorganization of the department's arms control and international security bureaus was intended to help it better deal with 21st-century threats. Instead, it's thrown the agency into turmoil and produced an exodus of experts with decades of experience in nuclear arms, chemical weapons and related matters, according to 11 current and former officials and documents obtained by Knight Ridder.

[...]

An inquiry by Knight Ridder has found evidence that the reorganization was highly politicized and devastated morale:

-Thomas Lehrman, a political appointee who heads the new office of Weapons of Mass Destruction Terrorism, advertised outside the State Department to fill jobs in his office. In an e-mail to universities and research centers, a copy of which was obtained by Knight Ridder, he listed loyalty to Bush and Rice's priorities as a qualification.

Lehrman reportedly recalled the e-mail after it was pointed out that such loyalty tests are improper.

12) Total Information Awareness: New brand name, same old creepy all-seeing eye.

13) Force-feeding non-hostiles at Gitmo:

Lawyers who have visited clients in recent weeks criticized the latest measures, particularly the use of the restraint chair, as abusive.

"It is clear that the government has ended the hunger strike through the use of force and through the most brutal and inhumane types of treatment," said Thomas B. Wilner, a lawyer at Shearman & Sterling in Washington, who last week visited the six Kuwaiti detainees he represents. "It is a disgrace."

The lawyers said other measures used to dissuade the hunger strikers included placing them in uncomfortably cold air-conditioned isolation cells, depriving them of "comfort items" like blankets and books and sometimes using riot-control soldiers to compel the prisoners to sit still while long plastic tubes were threaded down their nasal passages and into their stomachs.

14) Halliburton contracted to build "immigrant detention centers".

15) Remember when the air force had to tell its chaplains to please not tell non-Christians they are going to hell and must accept Jesus Christ in their hearts? That was a long time ago, way back in August. Times have changed, and now that they've cleared up all their religion problems, it's okay to try to convert the heathens again.

16) Hijacking airplanes with shoe bombs:

The reported West Coast plot had been disclosed before but never in as much detail. The president's speech came on the same day as a Senate hearing into the Bush-ordered warrantless surveillance of telephone calls and e-mail by Americans and their contacts overseas, but aides said his comments were not related to the dispute over the program.

Of course not. I doubt the two things have anything to do with each other, but three years from now, 73% of Americans will believe that the NSA spying shut down a plot to hijack airplanes with shoe bombs. Even though:

One intelligence official said nothing has changed to precipitate the release of more information on the case. The official attributed the move to the administration's desire to justify its efforts in the face of criticism of the domestic surveillance program, which has no connection to the incident.

17) Libby claims that Cheney authorized him to leak classified stuff. And hey, if the Veep authorizes it, it must be legal, right?

18) George Deutch, Douchebag, speaks out:

Also Friday, George C. Deutsch, 24, a NASA spokesman who resigned this week after allegations that he had edited scientists' writings to conform to administration views and tried to limit reporters' access to Hansen, e-mailed reporters to say there is a "culture war" in the government over climate change. Deutsch's resignation came after it was learned he had not graduated from Texas A&M University, as he claimed on his résumé.

"There is no pressure or mandate, from the Bush administration or elsewhere, to alter or water down scientific data at NASA, period," Deutsch said, adding that after being tasked to work with Hansen, "I quickly learned one thing: Dr. Hansen and his supporters have a very partisan agenda and ties reaching to the top of the Democratic Party.

"Anyone perceived to be a Republican, a Bush supporter or a Christian is singled out and labeled a threat to their views. I encourage anyone interested in this story to consider the other side, to consider Dr. Hansen' s true motivations and to consider the dangerous implications of only hearing out one side of the global warming debate," Deutsch said.

19) Are these the immigrants we're building the detention centers for?

One is a second grader in Manhattan. Over the protests of his American mother, immigration officials have been trying to deport him ever since he returned from a brief visit to his native Canada without the right visa. Another is an Irish professor of literature invited to teach at the University of Pennsylvania last month. He was handcuffed at the Philadelphia airport, strip-searched, jailed overnight and sent back to Europe to correct an omission in his travel papers.

Then there are the seven Tibetan monks who were visiting Omaha two weeks ago. After their church sponsor abruptly withdrew its support, their religious visas were revoked and a dozen immigration officers in riot gear showed up to arrest them.

The details in these cases vary, as do the technical visa infractions committed by each of the foreigners. But they all testify to a larger issue looming on the front lines of immigration enforcement: how low-level gatekeepers and prosecutors in the customs and immigration system are using their growing discretionary power over travelers who pose no security risk.

[...]

The Irish professor, John McCourt, 40, said that on Jan. 7, an immigration officer at Philadelphia International Airport initially offered to correct a paperwork omission on the spot if he paid a $265 fine. Professor McCourt said he readily agreed, but five minutes later, the officer returned and said she had changed her mind — "that I was a university professor and should have known better" and would be sent back the same night.

In an e-mail message, Professor McCourt, a James Joyce specialist at the University of Trieste in Italy, wrote: "I was told that if I protested I would simply be deported and never be let back."

At 11 p.m., six hours after his arrival, he was transported in handcuffs to the Montgomery County jail, along with another traveler denied entry, Kerstin Spitzl, a pregnant German woman who says that immigration officers abruptly canceled her visa, insisting that she was planning to violate its terms by working.

Worse than the cold, windowless cells at the jail, they said in separate interviews, was a sense of powerlessness. "You're scared," said Ms. Spitzl from her home in Wuppertal. "You have no rights. You cannot contact nobody, nobody can contact you."

20) "No one could have predicted that the levees would break":

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Bush administration officials said they had been caught by surprise when they were told on Tuesday, Aug. 30, that a levee had broken, allowing floodwaters to engulf New Orleans.

Federal officials at the White House and elsewhere learned of the levee break in New Orleans earlier than was first suggested.

But Congressional investigators have now learned that an eyewitness account of the flooding from a federal emergency official reached the Homeland Security Department's headquarters starting at 9:27 p.m. the day before, and the White House itself at midnight.

21) Okay, this is not as nefarious as it first seemed, since it resulted from a clerical error, but I still think that a bill should only become a law after it's actually, you know, been voted on:

Morrison said courts would take a dim view of the idea that it is OK for the Speaker of the House - who along with the Senate's President Pro Tempore signed the official copies of bills sent to the president - to endorse a bill that's different from what the House voted on. That could set a precedent that could be abused.

"It's not the mischief in this case that would cause the (Supreme) Court to be worried," Morrison said. "It's the next case or the case after that where there isn't a clerical mistake but there's an effort to deceive or change the result."

Oh well, not to worry then, who would do a thing like that?

Did I mention that everything sucks? Did I?

Everything's coming up ominous, Part 1

Everything sucks. Here's why:

1) Creation Evangelism:

Ham encourages people to further their research with the dozens of books and DVDs sold by his ministry. They give answers to every question a critic might ask: How did Noah fit dinosaurs on the ark? He took babies. Why didn't a tyrannosaur eat Eve? All creatures were vegetarians until Adam's sin brought death into the world. How can we have modern breeds of dog like the poodle if God finished his work 6,000 years ago? He created a dog "kind" — a master blueprint — and let evolution take over from there.

2) The only two U.S. judges who were briefed on the wiretapping program (successive heads of the FISA court) thought it was unconstitutional. Not just illegal, mind you, but unconstitutional. In the same article, a new journalistic way of saying: "The Administration Lied" without, you know, saying it:

Shortly after the warrantless eavesdropping program began, then-NSA Director Michael V. Hayden and Ashcroft made clear in private meetings that the president wanted to detect possible terrorist activity before another attack. They also made clear that, in such a broad hunt for suspicious patterns and activities, the government could never meet the FISA court's probable-cause requirement, government officials said.

So it confused the FISA court judges when, in their recent public defense of the program, Hayden and Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales insisted that NSA analysts do not listen to calls unless they have a reasonable belief that someone with a known link to terrorism is on one end of the call. At a hearing Monday, Gonzales told the Senate Judiciary Committee that the "reasonable belief" standard is merely the "probable cause" standard by another name.

Several FISA judges said they also remain puzzled by Bush's assertion that the court was not "agile" or "nimble" enough to help catch terrorists. The court had routinely approved emergency wiretaps 72 hours after they had begun, as FISA allows, and the court's actions in the days after the Sept. 11 attacks suggested that its judges were hardly unsympathetic to the needs of their nation at war.

So these judges are confused and puzzled. Hmm.

3) Bizarre and idiotic case of a six-year-old suspended from school for sexual harassment. He touched a girl on the back.

4) Bush dumps his entire social security privatization scheme into the budget, without telling anyone. As in: Make It So. Because who needs democracy anymore, any-old-how. Democracy is so pre-9-11.

5) Why should the President and CEO of Wal-Mart get to put a Wal-Mart PR ad disguised as an Op-Ed in the Washington Post? Shouldn't he have to buy ad space:

If we closed our doors in Maryland, a lot of things would happen, and none of them would be good for the working families of this state. Seventeen thousand associates work for us in Maryland. Every one of them -- both full-time and part-time -- can become eligible for health coverage that costs as little as $23 per month. Our stores here collect $112 million in sales taxes and generate $13 million more in tax revenue for state and local governments. We buy $678 million worth of goods and services from 667 Maryland suppliers. Thanks to our foundation and good works in our stores, we donate $3.7 million to local charities in Maryland. And when it comes to our customers, we save the average household more than $2,300 per year by offering the products people want at affordable prices in one convenient place.

We think those are valuable things we do for the working families of Maryland. And we're planning to do more. We will build more stores, create more jobs, offer even more affordable health care, generate more tax revenue, do more business with suppliers and give more money to local charities. Though the General Assembly passed a bill that affects our company and our company alone, we will not flinch in our commitment to our customers, our associates and the communities we serve. Working families want us in Maryland, and we're staying in Maryland.

6) Speaking of corporations ruling the world, there's this:

This just in for the snaking lines of air passengers waiting in their socks to pass through airport security: homeland security officials have proudly approved the diversion of 16 screeners from Kennedy International Airport to a private heliport entrepreneur so Wall Street executives can purchase speedy velvet-rope clearance and chopper right to their planes for $150 or so.

Our point here is not to gripe about the can-do prowess of the private sector, but rather to object to underwriting this venture with scarce federal resources. In July, the Port Authority, which runs the New York area airports, protested the federal decision to cut the number of local security screeners by more than 240 slots — a 6.5 percent drop despite a growing market of waiting travelers.

Now that same Port Authority has blessed the heliport screenings, including shifting security equipment at no charge from Kennedy to the heliport. "Well, why not?" asks Charles Gargano, the authority's vice chairman, who says the service will be "selective" and help business.

7) Yet another person has come forward to say that the Administration lied us into the war, this time from the CIA:

A C.I.A. veteran who oversaw intelligence assessments about the Middle East from 2000 to 2005 on Friday accused the Bush administration of ignoring or distorting the prewar evidence on a broad range of issues related to Iraq in its effort to justify the American invasion of 2003.

That's not the half of it, but I'm sick of writing now.

The "Ex-Gay" Idiocy

Dan Savage, in the NYT, tangentially regarding Brokeback Mountain: "And if anyone reading this believes that gay men can actually become ex-gay men, I have just one question for you: Would you want your daughter to marry one?"

Quote of the day

"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."

-- Milan Kundera

(ran across while reading Paul Rogat Loeb's Soul of a Citzen: Living With Conviction in a Cynical Time. )

I have many other things I'd like to blog about: spying, social security, Guantanamo, peak oil, gardening, and my newest obsession, Experiments in Fermentation, but I've got a bunch of errands to run before we are snowed in this weekend, so that will all have to wait.

State of the Union: "We Have No Plans To Be Anything Less Than Ruthless"

This is a transcript of George W. Bush's State of the Union address from last week.

Today our nation lost a courageous mother, a loving wife, and a helpmeet to the nation. Tonight we are comforted by the fact that I will no longer have to endure her endless harassments during my extended ranch vacations. Tonight, some NSA investigators removed Cindy Sheehan in an unmarked van; she won’t be heard from again. God rest your soul, Mrs. Sheehan.

Each time I step up to this podium thingy, I smirk condescendingly at the lot of you pathetic bastards kowtowing to me. It makes me feel powerful; it makes me feel hard. We have gathered here today under this Capitol dome to celebrate the remarkable, honorable achievements of my Administration. We are living through trying times, and I plan to win against those times. I and nobody else. I accept responsibility for the accolades; I will not accept defeat or defeatism.

In a great country like ours, which once was run by two parties, we will on occasion allow a token size of dissentionizing from the positions designated by my patriotic Administration. We will feign civility while preparing our devices of infinite justice to be used when the public has lost interest. The castor oil funnels. The waterboards. The nipple electrodes. The suffocation bags. By using or merely threatening to use these on our opponents, we will squelch unpatriotic speech; speech that degrades the public morality. The public space. The public sphere. The public mind. The public fluids. Tonight, the state of our great, God-blessed nation is strong and rock-hard, and getting more so even as we speak.

The year that I act decisively is the year that you know that it’s time to drop a load in your pants. We will choose to defy all of those who would smirk in disgust and advocate defeatism, death, decay, moral turpitude, or retreat from the motoring way of life. We will increase prosperity among the very wealthiest of us, and since the wealthiest of our citizens are the most generous and morally superior, we can naturally assume they will spread their wealth – and their goodness – to their inferiors. In a globally interdependent time like this, the only way to defend our peace, our way of life, our monster trucks, is to assure safety and security for the wealthiest among us. Anything else would be folly. Following? No! Leading is what the American people do best, and lead they will, as the great Thomas Jefferson said, “With a Feare in thine Heart of Our Lord Jesus.” So leading it is, and leaders we will be.

Abroad, we are committed to reshaping the worldscape in the best way we know how. Violence. Depradations. Hummvees. Hummer H2s. Explosions. Strip malls. Strip searches. We seek to spread American Democracy throughout the world. Some would say that that is an elusive goal. Some would argue that it’s not fair. Some traitors would even say it’s unjust. (In Texas, we know how to deal with such people. We don’t have a lot of trees in Texas. But we have a lot of rope. And we know where the trees are. Enough said.) But after September 11, 2001, September 11th happened. You remember that fateful day. With a tear in my eye, I courageously flew from Air Force base to Air Force base, personally torturing and then eviscerating every terrorist that I found on site. (And defecating on their mauled corpses.) And then followed the heroic event with the bullhorn in Ground Zero of World Trade City. No American – no free citizen of the world – can forget the heroism that went on there that day, atop the smoldering heap of World Trade City. Because terror is terrifying, and we are united and strong. And since we are strong and united, we will defeat terrorism. Terrorism will not continue, because it will be defeated by us. By any means that are required. By all means that we have available. Freedom is the cause for which all of us work. And there is no greater work than freedom. And after September 11th, I stood my ground and together, the American people made freedom ring! And march!


The advance of freedom is not a hopeless dream. Would you call its forward march futile? It is not! It is something that will continue, despite the attempts of dictators like Osama bin Laden and Jacques Chirac to stop it. In 2000, thanks to the perfidy of Bill Clinton and the United Nations, there were under a dozen democracies in the world – and that’s counting Puerto Rico separately from the rest of the USA. Today, thanks to my efforts, there are 122. And we’re going to make more. A whole lot more. We’ve got folks linin’ up in the streets of Afghanistan, Iraq, and San Marino to have their voices counted. Their voices counted. Their fingers tattooed in purple ink to indicate their permanent commitment to democracy. Their bodies dissipated into a reddish spray, in a deafening boom. Even in Syria. Sudan. Burma. Iran. Zimbabwe. They are free, and getting freer. Freedom is on the march. Even Iran, our greatest enemy, the ally of Osama bin Laden, is becoming more free, because the demands of justice insist that freedom progress like an influenza virus, but in a good way.

Terrism

No one will ever again be permitted to deny the inexorable forward march of freedom. I have authorized the various branches of our Federal government to assure that – much like a private insurance company, except one backed by an army, torture centers, and nuclear weapons. (Oh, and don’t forget napalm.) And, of course, radical Islam will once again be rearing its ugly head. Much like the fanaticisms it encourages, we will remove our dagger from its scabbard, and decapitate that head. Once the head has been decapitated, we will force-feed it to traitors and subversives within our own homeland. Terrorists like Osama bin Laden may talk a tough game, but they don’t have the nukes. Not yet, anyway. Not much we can do to keep from getting them, either, so me must be watchful. Watchfulness is our watchword. And the onward march of freedom is also our watchword!

Their aim is to consolidate their power in France and use it as a safe haven to launch attacks against America and the true patriots and freedom marchers of the world. Lacking the military strength to take out our nucular missile silos, they choose cowardly gestures like killing everybody in that school there in Russia. Or blowing up folks tryin’ to get to work in London. (A bit baffled myself why those folks weren’t driving to work in armor-plated SUVs, followed by a security detail.) But, as a Christian, I have always said: an eye for an eye. The terrists kill a school full of children, we wipe Fallujah off the map. And we did! And there was light. Those who doubt our motivations give comfort and release to our enemies. They become one with our enemies. They attempt to impede the onward march of freedom. To stop that march is to show contempt for our Lord. And for them, there cannot be mercy.

America rejects the false comfort of rationalism. We are the nation that saved Europe from communism, fascism, and baccarat. We liberated the United Kingdom from its non-decimal monetary system. We rose democracies, we ran them up the flagpole, ran them to heights humans had never been before. We defeated an evil empire. We sank Hitler’s toy ship; sank it deep in the cake. We shook up his house and we bent his new rake. We oppressed the oppressors and freed the unfree. And what did freedom do? Continued its forward march – ever onward!

We remain somewhat committed to stopping terror networks, although frankly I think we’re making more progress by domestic surveillance; covert “abuse”; and extraordinary – what are they, Dick? Renminbi? Right, Renditions. We are on the offensive in Afghanistan. Against those who would stop the march of freedom in Iraq, where a fine president, a fine Parliament, and seven armed police officers are staving off the slavering, rabid, murderous hordes of Islam. We are creating the democracy of the Middle East from our very own flesh; while flesh turns out to be less malleable than clay or plasticine, it turns out you can’t make a democracy out of clay. As for plasticine, we’re running out of raw petrochem materials; more on that later.

Eye-Rack

We are totally offensive in Eye-Rack, with an unbelievably muddled plan that will lead to tens of thousands of deaths, and which will sow chaos that will leave thousands more dead. First of all, we’re getting our first foot marching forward constructing an inclusive, possibly even non-religious government, which will quash old resentments, which will not need to suffer dissenting opinions, and which will marginalize – and, hopefully, exterminate – every member of the insurgency, and anybody related to any insurgent (if you’re a 3rd cousin, you’ll probably get off with just a couple of waterboardings.) Third, we are still looking for WMD. Some of the cynical among you – those who appear on the Domestic Traitors List (CFR 5.2419) – sorry, I didn’t just say that aloud, did I ? – Never mind. Anyway, some cynics, some opposed to the inexorable forward march of F-R-E-E-D-O-M, for those of you at home who know how to spell, might be wondering why we didn’t just fabricate evidence of WMD. And to those people, I’ll say this: September 11th, 2001. Iraqi Bin Laden. Valerie “Hitler” Plame. Not sure what else you need to know there.

Anyhoo, that country has gone from dictatorship to liberation in three mere excruciating years. “Excruciating,” for those of you who don’t know that word, well, we don’t use words like that in Texas, but I understand it’s a lot like “liberating.” More keywords: victory, troops home, lead (both as in “to lead” and as in “eat hot lead, you A-rabs”), coalition, freedom, Washington, D.C., homeland.

In the coming year, I will appear at vetted audiences, make sure that protesters are arrested, and will feign soliciting feedback from the American people. Hindsight is not wisdom, but it is 20/20. Second guessing is not a strategy. And the wisdom of the American people who agree with my quest is not to be undermined, examined, or questioned.

Our courageous, uninsured boys and girls in uniform are making sacrifices. They’re dutiful. As of tomorrow, Feburary 1st, 2006, they will all sign a personal oath of allegiance to the Commander-in-Chief, yours truly, so as to ensure complete loyalty. They know what it’s like when one of their comrades isn’t loyal. Back in the’Nam, where I proudly served this country, there was a term called “fragging.”

Marine Staff Sgt. Dan Clay was killed yesterday in a dank basement in a former Securitate torture center in Romania. He had begun to express opposition to the war, so we – wait, what, Dick? Sorry, folks, let’s rewind a few seconds. Marine Staff Sgt. Dan Clay was killed last month fighting in Fallujah. His dying words, as his buddy Cpl. Clay Dan later told his family, were “Make sure that Little Billy takes his chocolate milk on Tuesdays. Give him my flag. And don’t forget about Jesus, and how the Holy father himself created all of the animals.” Then Sgt. Clay expired, Cpl. Dan ritually cremated the body by throwing it into the ruins of a smoldering house, and burned Sergeant Clay’s uniform and personal effects in a barrel, because that’s how Sergeant Clay would have wanted it.

Staff Sgt. Dan Clay’s wife, Lisa, and his mom and dad, Sara Jo and Bud, are with us this evening. Little Billy turned out to be quite the teenage anarcho-syndicalist, so he wasn’t exactly welcome under the Capitol dome. But Lisa, Sara Jo and Bud sure are happy to help create this veneer of a democracy! And I’m grateful to them, and you are too. The American military is the backbone of our society, and without a backbone, what is a society? A jellyfish. And what is a backbone without a society? It’s a dessicated skeleton fragment, that’s what it is.

Other Concerns Abroad

Terror is not only terrifying, but it is also offensive. As such, we must go on the offensive against it. The only way to kill the terrorists is to reduce their hateful vision of hatred and fear to a smoldering, plutonium-contaminated ruin. So the United States of America supports tactical use of nucular weapons across the Middle East.

Show elections are vital, but they are just the beginning. Running a democracy up the flagpole means several things. Rule. Law. Preventing minorities. Institutions of all types that last far longer than you could ever have imagined, and do far more than you will ever know. The great people of Egypt have just voted in an election that was rigged, just like the great people of America did. So it’s like we’re kissing cousins. And that’s the opposite of Islamic radicalism.

The Palestinian people voted in an election too. Let’s be frank: that didn’t work out too well. How about Saudi Arabia, though? They’ve got a vibrant democracy. A robust economy. The most liberated female workforce in Western Asia. The most equitable distribution of income between Jordan and Oman. And a healthy inclusion of religion into the public space, because God belongs not only in our hearts, but in our classrooms and tattooed acrosst our chests -- sorry, Ken. (That one’s for my main man Ken Mehlman. He’s a Jew. Jews don’t get tattoos, apparently.)

Iran is a country of great oil, and many people. And I just heard the most amazing, amazing thing! Did you know that they’re not even Arabs? Coulda fooled me. And those oil reserves are really, really impressive, even if in decline. (More about that later.)

Tonight, I have a few words for the people of Iran: “I love you. I am with you, but not against you. Are you with me? Because those who are not with us are against us. The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic. Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas?”

Dangers. There are a lot of them in the world. We must offensivize them by incenting economic growths, and launching preemptive strikes against disease. Hope, also. We must airlift bulk quantities of it to hopeless lands, so that the hope supply may be replenished. Dangerous internal enemies would have us isolate. Isolateism gives comfort and more comfort to our enemies, and also encourages them. Yet still, we must compassionize abroad, because Americans are a profoundly Jesus-ridden people who think that even a fetid African villager with AIDS, or a South American greaser with malaria can be led to salvation. We are compassionate, because as Americans, that’s what we do. Also, we lead. We lead and we compassion.

Recently, we have taken unprecedented inaction towards AIDS and malaria. Obviously, the populations have not been receptive, since these people don’t simply choose the simple choice of abstinence? It’s almost like they want to get AIDS, and malaria. Still, the march of progress – and freedom – continues.
Shortchanging my initiatives in combating disease would only rain down holy retribution on our internal traitors. I urge all members of Congress to approve my pending initiatives in advance, in order that I might work faster to spread goodiness throughout the world, even the poor parts.

Heimatsicherheit

Our homeland must also be very offensive against terrorism in the “soft targets” of the Republican-voting heartland. The list of places – our “Roster of Fear” -- is endless. Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. Bartlett, Oklahoma. Shawnee Mission, Kansas. Muscle Shoals, Alabama. It’s obvious that the terries will attack these places next, and that’s why I’ve chosen to lavish those barely-populated, politically overrepresented areas with vast federal funds to combat terrism. Also, any Congressional traitor not voting to reauthorize the USA PATRIOT Act will be incarcerated after this speech. If atheists and dissenters are allowed to operate freely in Alabama, there is nothing to stop the terriss.

It’s said that on 9/11, the attacks of September 11th happened. And that our government failed to act. Well, I’ll tell you what. There’s no way that we could have know that anything was going to happen. We simply were not aware of any plans, thanks to the successful anti-intelligence, pro-terrorist efforts of the Clinton-Gore years. So if you’re looking to mete out some divine retribution, look no further than Westchester and Nashville.

We now know that terriss have been known to use telephones. Therefore, to protect the great American people – this amazing collective flesh – I have personally authorized wiretapping, without the cumbersome interference of the court system. Our courts are crawling with unideintified ACLU members and other terrorist operatives. In order to keep the American people safe, we can, and will, continue to listen in on telephone conversations. Nobody is going to prevent me from personally rescuing the American people. And you can take that to the bank.

Our own destiny is tied to the timeless conflict against terror, terrism, and hatred of all kinds. American leaders, except my predecessor, have all known this, and acted accordingly. And accordingly, I ask you and yours for you and yours. Support, that is. And there we have it.

Economic Agenda

Here, in these great United States, we are offered the uniquely unique opportunity. Of building our country. Of prosperitizing the prosperous. Of strengthening the leadership of America in the world.

Our economy is strong and hard, and growing stronger. And hard, and fast. Since I last addressed you on this here podium thingy, we have added well over 7.8 billion jobs, more than the number of people currently living on earth. Even in the face of challenges like high energy prices, the American people have met the challenge by continuing their freedom-affirming 100-mile commutes in their enormous SUVs. And for that, we are the envy of the world.

The American economy is dominant, but we cannot pretend to be the only economy on earth. Because there are other economies as well. China. India. Kellogg. Brown. And Root. And those are things to be afraid of, so naturally my opponents revive the ancient specters of yore. Poverty. Isolationism. Some would say that government should play a positive role in their lives, rather than an invasive, negative one. And to those somes, I say this: the conservaterian movement – the compassionate one – has always been about saying one thing and doing another. The mouth says small gummint. The hand – the well-lubricated hand – increases the gummint. But it’s not out of callow hypocrisy. It’s out of a firm, solid love for the American corpus. And that’s a fancy-pants way of saying “the public.”

Keeping America competitive begins at home. What does it mean? It means growing our economy. And all that takes is more consumption. More money to spend. More money to save, but also to spend. On goods. Services. Products. Other things that are produced, and other things that are consumed. All of the above. My tax relief plan will create growth opportunities for hundreds of Americans. And as we continue to erode the tax systems, the opportunities for those on top will only increase. And for those in the middle and at the bottom of our sushi-economic speculum, as the tops are inclined – and incentivized by our society -- to fully incentivize the bottoms.

Energy Initiations

Keeping America competitive requires oil. Huge, tremendous amounts of oil. And we are going do do what we can to keep getting that oil – even if it means war.

The best way to keep getting this oil is to avoid developing alternative energy programs, and above all, never succumbing to the weakness of attempting to reduce energy usage. Reducing usage would be an attack on the American way of life, and I as your president will not permit that. Not now, not ever. Those who would attack the God-given right to live in a 4000-square-foot house and drive alone for two hours a day in a Chevy Suburban would be those who would attempt to deny Americans their life. And that will not stand, any more than freedom will not simply lie down and refuse to march.

We will, where it suits our business cronies, develop some ridiculous boondoggles. Ethanol, for example. What better a way is there to pretend we’re reducing hydrocarbon usage when, in fact, we’re using more coal, oil, and natural gas to produce the stuff? We as Republicans get the additional electoral bonus of fealty from the Congressionally overrepresented voters in the flyover states. How about hydrogen? We are well on the way to a hydrogen economy! We haven’t figured out how to store hydrogen on a mass scale, and we are much further away from figuring out how to produce it without just burning hydrocarbons, and simply displacing CO2 emissions. But we are getting there, and getting further every day. The hydrogen economy, much like freedom, marches forward. Actually, it’s marching with freedom. Together, hand in hand. Does freedom have a hand? I think it does. Does hydrogen? Well, I guess you could consider the one electron to be a “hand.” So, hand in electron, then.

And to keep American competitive, one commitment is necessary, even more necessary than other necessities. We must continue to lead the world in human creationist talent. Our most bloated advantage has been our obese, SUV-driving, Republican-voting fundamentalist Christians. They fund the American way of life. And to throw them a bone, I am tonight announcing the American Competitive Initiative, to encourage innovation throughout our economy, put an end to the anticompetitive field of so-called stem cell research, and squelch our country’s most important scientists. And do little else of import.

First, I propose to double the Federal defense budget. This funding will serve two purposes. First, it will provide bacon to major defense contractors, providing tens of thousands of jobs. Second, I propose to end taxes permanently on the top tier of earners, to spur innovation, investment, and education. With more research in both the public and private sectors, we will improve our quality of life and ensure that America will lead the world in opportunity and innovation for numerous, maybe even endless decades to come.

Third, we need to find out some way for children to learn more math-type education, and also some of this so-called science stuff. Some people say it’s critical to our competitionness levels, and they’re probably right. I don’t really know what they’re talking about, and you probably don’t either. The No Child Left Behind Act, though unfunded, should probably take care of this problem, addressing such things as Advanced Placement courses in mathiness and scientology, and stopping so-called stem-cell research, and saving anencephalic patients from having their feeding tubes disconnected.

Preparing our great nation to compete in this world is a shareable goal, for each and every one of us, even for minorities. I urge you to support this initiative, whatever it was that I called it, even though it will be utterly forgotten three days from today. Together, we will show the world what American means when America says it means business. Or education, or mathautomatics, or scientism, or whatever.

‘A Hopeless Society’

America is a great force for marching freedom and galloping prosperity. Yet our greatness is not measured in power or luxuries, but in megawatts and Rolexes. So we strive to be a kick-ass society, survival of the fittest. Bring ‘em on!

In recent years, thanks to me and Vice President Cheney, America has become a more hopeful nation. Violent crime: finished, since I personally reinstated the death penalty nationwide. Welfare queendom: Over, since I signed legislation abolishing it. Drug use: No longer an issue. It is almost miraculous, but the fact that we say that it is true makes it so.

These gains are evidence of my quiet omnipotence, as well as my potent potency. It is a quiet revolution, a revolution where a thousand flowers may bloom, and where freedom may march hand in hand with personal responsibility. (I’m pretty sure that personal responsibility does in fact have a hand.) My government, though not that of my predecessor, has played a role in this potent revolution. And every person here tonight, every one of you Republicans, has a right – nay, a responsibility, a duty – to be proud of this record.

Yet some Americans, mostly people I would hesitate to call real Americans, appear to have concerns about the direction of our culture and the health of our most basic institutions. While it is true that some Hollywood liberals are still permitted to craft anti-family and anti-American propaganda at an unpresidented level, I say to you: Be patient. We will take care of this problem. Other Americans, who may not be treasonous but are still misguided, may have other fears. Disease. Terrism. But they need not fear, for those who have accepted Jesus into their hearts will be welcomed into the Kingdom of Heaven.

A hopeless society – the one that I am building, together your help – depends on absolute subservience to me and my principles. Once you can establish that article of faith with me and the Republican Party, you no longer will be requirous of hopes or needs of your own. A hopeless society depends on courts absolutely dedicated to executive privilege and compassionate principles. The Supreme Court now has two terrifyingly superb new members on its bench, Chief Justice John “Bob” Roberts and Justice Sam Alito. I thank the Senate for rubber-stamping both their confirmations. I will continue to nominate compassionate men and women who understand that judges must be servants of the executive, and must not legislate from the bench.

Today marks the official retirement of a very special American. For 24 years of faithful service to our nation, the United States is thankful that Justice Sandra Day O’Connor is retiring. Justices Breyer, Ginsburg, Souter, and Stevens: I’ve got your number.

A hopeless society has a resolve of steel and a backbone of glass. It has the heart of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the intestine of our Speaker of the House of Representatives, Denny Hastert. It has mediciney and sciency institutions that to not tread on the word of the Lord. Tonight I ask you to pass legislation to prohibit any further meaningful medical research, especially anything having to do with human-animal hybrids, embryos, Petri dishes, fetuses, or genetics. Human life is a gift from the Lord Almighty, and that gift shouldn’t be tampered with in any fashion.

A hopeless society expects all officials to do the bidding of a corrupt central government. Spineless cowards in both my party and in the token opposition have pledged to weaken remaining ethical standards in Washington, and Lord knows I support their efforts. Each of us has made a pledge to be worthy of that bizarre mantra catchphrase “personal responsibility,” and that is a pledge that you can take to the bank, when you are marching to it during the 4th of July parade, hand in hand with freedom.

A hopeless society pledges aid to fellow citizens in times in suffering and emergency, stays around for photo ops, and then evaporates. And that’s just what we’re doing in New Orleans. We have pledged well over $987 billion to the people of the Gulf Coast, and we’ll keep talking about that figure, and we have delivered a lot of that aid already – well over $1.2 million dollars, by some optimistic measures. The city is finished, gone, not to return, but we will be certain that rapacious real-estate developers can build enormously wasteful McMansions on the cleared land. In New Orleans and in other places, many of our fellow citizens have felt the cool machined carbon steel of a silenced 9mm semiautomatic at the backs of their necks, and heard the quiet pop.

A hopeless society knows better than to address diseases like HIV/AIDS, and knows to blame a marginalized population for its spread. In fact, that same marginalized population might be a very good scapegoat for other further diseases. Scapegoats are a wonderful, wonderful thing for those who seek to consolidate power – power that is required to run American homes and businesses, to keep the American economy humming, and to energize the ongoing miracle that is America.

Fellow citizens, I have been installed at the helm in a period of consequence. We have entered a great conflict that we would never have had any way of forseeing, and that we never, ever had any role in creating. We see threatening changes in science. We know that the best approach to red-alert level emergencies like global warning is to discredit the messenger, since if you don’t name the problem, it doesn’t exist.

And yet the stopping point of history is determined by human action, and at every great turning point, there comes a point of turning. Lincoln could have accepted peace at the cost of a shabbily refinished White House bathroom. Martin Luther King could have had a happy job as a short-order fry cook. The United States could have allowed the permanent division of Europe – and could even have been complicit in the oppression of others – which never happened, of course. Today, having come far in our own journey, will we decide if we turn back, or finish, or will we reverse course toward an uncertain, unknowable future? The turning point comes, and we arrive at it. We have no plans to be anything less than utterly ruthless in our pursuit of human freedom - the destination to which humans strive to march.

Before history is written down in those printed thingies what my mother, “the Enforcer,” harps about – huh? Yeah, books – it is written in the blood of courage. Like Americans before us, we will pour our blood as ink all over that page. Will we finish? Yes! And well, to boot. We will lead freedom’s advance, and will also cause it to march forward. We will continue to direct, in a God-like fashion, everything in the world. We will renew our commitment to the Lord Almighty. And so we move forward, hand in hand with freedom, optimistic about our country, faithful to the flag and to the apple pie, and confident of devastating victories to come.

May the Lord Jesus Christ continue to spew his blessing across America.