Like an infection

Looks like Der Gropenfuhrer has taken a move right from the Administration handbook, taping a political ad that looked like news.

This advertisement is filmed to look like a real news report. It’s narrated by an actual former TV reporter who, no longer a journalist, now works for the state. The ad pushes a new, government-backed, corporation-friendly proposal which would kill mandatory lunch hours. California workers - construction workers, waitresses, nurses, farm workers and a forklift operator - are shown in “interviews,” extolling the benefits of the proposal.

You'd think this would be transparent, but history shows we don't like to have to fact-check the evening news. Anchors for these stories even used the promo points provided with the footage...

A collection of quotes for grey days

"My heart is afraid it will have to suffer," the boy told the alchemist one night as they looked up at the moonless sky.

"Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams, because every second of the search is a second's encounter with God and with eternity."

--Paulo Coelho,
The Alchemist

Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach.

--Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Do not wait to strike
till the iron is hot;
but make it hot
by striking.

--William Butler Yeats

I like Lech Walesa's answer to the question "How did Solidarity start?"
"By talking loud at the bus stop."

(first three via A Mindful Life; last from a comment at Body and Soul)

Matters of conscience

Jeanne at Body and Soul has a good piece on words and actions and how we recognize moral clarity. It is not always clear which actions are "brave" versus "cowardly" when we speak of abstractions (and I am reminded of the great scene in Tim O'Brian's The Things They Carried in which he sits on a boat just off the Canadian coast and faces up to what it would mean to go to war or to refuse to go to war). We all have to keep our eyes open for moments when principle and reality meet in the flesh.

She can take it

A great story over at XOverboard about this year's Razzies -- awards for the worst movies and performances of the year. Top prize this year went to Halle Barry for Catwoman, and she actually turned up and showed herself to be a good sport.

She thanked everyone involved in "Catwoman," a film she said took her from the top of her profession to the bottom.

Tee hee. Read the rest.

Repressed intelligence?

A bit of a grim post by Hunter at dailyKos about more invisible maneouverings with regard to the flow of intelligence information to and within the Administration, the tendency to condone torture, and the muzzling of the CIA (and any other source of dissent). The pattern is getting harder and harder to ignore.

[I]ntelligence information originating from the CIA is now going to be filtered, before reaching the President, by not one but two deeply questionable Bush appointments. Porter Goss, who has sought to "purge" the intelligence agency of undesirable opinions, and Iran-Contra figure John Negroponte, who has an explicit previous record of ignoring intelligence on horrific human rights abuses in order to further administration goals. It's a safe bet that Bush will hear only what he wishes to hear, and that CIA analyses contradicting neocon "beliefs" will either be silently ignored (by Negroponte), or actively punished (by Goss).

If this doesn't worry you, it should. Far from being appalled at the increasing evidence of poor intelligence and systemic abuses, the Bush folk are seeking to make those problems permanent. Choosing to make important decisions in a fact vacuum can be nothing but foolhardy for the long term.

The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none.

-- Thomas Carlyle, writer
(1795-1881)

(quote via A Word A Day)

Who gets access?

For the most part I haven't covered the blogger-frenzy or media cold-shoulder that are the Jeff Gannon scandal (uh, fake reporter for a fake news agency getting hard-to-come-by daily access to Whitehouse briefings, and using that access to lob softball propaganda-push questions). But I do find the story disturbing, less for its circus-like collapse than for what it further reveals about the Administration's ongoing interest in misleading the public. Echidne does a good job of summarizing some related news and also getting at my underlying discomfort in her post on Eberle and Gannon.

I believe that there is a clear ethical problem in letting political activists infiltrate the press corps for the purpose of asking planted questions or steering the questioning into a safer direction. This makes the White House press conferences into total farces. It is also an attempt to manipulate public opinion in ways that are at least sneaky if not outright nasty.

Other problems with careless screening of journalists should be obvious to even the White House. For example, a terrorist could get in on a day-pass.

Yes. These are the two parts of the real story. Lascivious photos lead to a snarky feeling of triumphalism, but in the end they distract from the real meat. Is this a government that belongs to its citizens or not?

Chipper Iraq update

Jeanne over at Body and soul sums up the latest bad news from Iraq, including the rumor that Chalabi withdrew from candidacy for President because he was offered more lucrative pastures as head of oil, finance, and other trade...

The Fascist Eye

By which I mean, the eye into every woman's bedroom and life, as demanded by Kansas Attorney General Phill Kline -- he wants the complete medical files of all women who've had late-term abortions, so that he can track down possible criminal cases that need prosecuting.

Mr. Kline emphasized statutory rape at a news conference here but also spoke obliquely of other crimes that court documents suggest could include doctors' providing illegal late-term abortions and health professionals' failing to heed a state law that requires the reporting of suspected child sexual abuse.

Heck, why doesn't he just demand access to all medical records in the state, so that he's aware of every possible abuse, gunshot, or other crime that needs a bloodhound? Confidentiality, anyone? Oh, do you think this could be related to his anti-abortion pogrom? hmmm...

[M]any here on both sides of the abortion debate said they suspected that his real target was doctors who provide late-term abortions.

Bingo. And there's even some political payback blended in:

Kansas has become a national magnet for late-term abortions because of a doctor in Wichita who performs hundreds of them each year. The doctor, George Tiller, funneled at least $150,000 through political action committees to Mr. Kline's opponent in the attorney general's race in 2002, and his clinic, Women's Health Care Services, is one of the two whose records are being subpoenaed.

This whole idea is unacceptable on many levels, but enhancing your job security at the expense of your citizens' privacy is a really stomach-turning spectacle.

Update: Atrios weighs in with some additional good points about the hypocrisy in this story. If the subpoenas were all about catching statutory rape crimes, then the net should widen to maternity wards and STD clinics (where any underage boy showing up would be an automatic crime victim). Yeah, right. Your privacy is of course sacrosanct unless you are making a decision of which Mr. Kline disapproves.

The best of the left

The year's funniest post by a lefty blogger went to Poker with Dick Cheney, an inspired one-act play at The Poor Man. Go have a giggle if you missed it the first time (in June).

For those in need of more excuses for high-brow procrastination, you can see the whole array of 2004 Koufax Award winners, from Best Blog to Most Deserving of More Recognition. Congrats to all.

More secret agendas

The renomination of unreasonable judges and the frontal assault on Social Security may have something in common: a theory called "The Constitution in Exile," which is based on a belief that The New Deal (and much social-protection legislation right down to minimum wages) survives because of a judicial "revolution" in 1937. This is another quiet and creepy motivating philosophy for right-wingers of various stripes, and is well described in this essay. All of this is part of a radical agenda that the right is foisting on most of America while they're not looking...

The economic role of the federal government is now deeply in question, and the Constitution in Exile judges, just like the Social Security privatizers, want to roll back the clock a lot futher than 1973 or 1961.

Wake up, wake up!

A cartoon worth some large number of words

About the recent move by Bush to renominate a bunch of judicial prospects previously rejected: Hats off to Tom Toles for this pithy take. (Washington Post; registration probably required)

(via The Return of Ignatz)

Modern-day cecession

Apparently many GOP wackos think that another way to help take over the nation (what, three branches of government aren't enough?) is to subdivide battleground states such as Washington so that narrowly blue states could be changed into one each red and blue state (with ta da! two new red-state senators). Subtle stuff, modern-day politics!

A pip if ever there was one

Happy birthday to my grandmother Eloise,
who turns 99 today.



May I take from life even half the joy she's found,
and give back to those around me
a fraction of what she shares every day.

My last post about The Gates

I saw them live, but missed the further opportunity to see them in the black-and-white setting of Central Park after snow. Bare trees in fresh snowfall are already a photographer's dream, but they make the orange apparitions all the more surreal. Thanks, Internet, for vicarious experience!

Life in Iraq

Lots of rather dismal reading out there about how life has changed in Iraq in the new post-Saddam era. The consensus seems to be that life for women is much worse than before. Barry at Alas has a good summary with related links in two posts here and here.

Of course women suffered under Saddam. I fled his cruel regime. I personally witnessed much brutality but the subjugation of women was never a Baath Party goal. What we are seeing is deeply worrying: a reviled occupation and an openly reactionary Islamic armed insurrection taking Iraq into a new dark age.
(secondary pull-quote from Media Girl)

A little chilling to hit his summary rumination:

Increasingly, when I hear people saying we’ve “liberated the people of Iraq,” I have to wonder if by people they mean men.

It makes me shiver.

Very thematic

This is a very interesting site, especially for Just Between Strangers communication: PostSecret, a collection of secrets (and confessions) shared anonymously -- I guess it's an ongoing performance art project, as well as a fascinating blog. They distribute the postcards all over the place and people can send in their secrets anytime...

(via coworker L)

Playing to the folks at home

I did wonder, when I heard clips from Bush's victory lap diplomatic tour of Europe, whether anybody was being convinced. I mean, when a reporter asked whether he would be inviting Chirac to his ranch soon, his laugh almost made the hair stand up on the back of my neck -- no disguising the "I'm playing nice for mom, but I wouldn't let that guy touch my toys" tone there. Apparently, nobody in the EU is being fooled either.

Javier Solana [EU foreign policy chief] disputed the American view that last month's elections in Iraq had vindicated the U.S. decision to invade and questioned whether the Bush administration's promises of a new era in relations with Europe meant anything.

He's not so dumb, I guess. I also liked this Rumsfieldian jab:

Peter Mandelson, the EU trade commissioner, said European leaders realize that Mr. Bush "is the president Europe has to deal with, rather than the one it might want to deal with."

Yeah, I know how you feel.

(via Sisyphus Shrugged)

Update: apparently a classic-Bush-style "town hall meeting" with German citizens has been cancelled because die Deutscher are unwilling to play to a script (or sign loyalty oaths, who knows which).

Because it explains nothing, that's why

Well, that's not the author's argument, really, but this New York Times Magizine article does one of the best jobs I've seen of succinctly explaining why Intelligent Design fails as a scientific explanation and offers nothing substantive to a theist either.

From a scientific perspective, one of the most frustrating things about intelligent design is that (unlike Darwinism) it is virtually impossible to test. Old-fashioned biblical creationism at least risked making some hard factual claims -- that the earth was created before the sun, for example. Intelligent design, by contrast, leaves the purposes of the designer wholly mysterious.
. . .
But if we can't infer anything about the design from the designer, maybe we can go the other way. What can we tell about the designer from the design? While there is much that is marvelous in nature, there is also much that is flawed, sloppy and downright bizarre. Some nonfunctional oddities, like the peacock's tail or the human male's nipples, might be attributed to a sense of whimsy on the part of the designer. Others just seem grossly inefficient. ... If this is evidence of design, it would seem to be of the unintelligent variety.

Stephen J. Gould did a pretty good job of explaining how many "mistakes" and other design oddities fit well into evolutionary theory, provide evidence for it rather than undermining it (see The Panda's Thumb, for instance). A bit of humor is found in the current article from the notion that an intelligent agent would sow similar chaos...

(apologies to my referer; flu grogginess caught up with me just in time to erase all traces of who you were...)

Thought for the day

Can one know one's self? Is one ever somebody? I don't know anything about it any more. It now seems to me that one changes from day to day and that every few years one becomes a new being.

-- George Sand

The Intimate Journal of George Sand
September 1868 entry

(via whiskey river)

You gotta' be kidding!

Just when you think that the uber-secretiveness (and carefully crafted misinformation) of the Bush Administration can't get any thicker, new heights of the absurd:

ATTORNEYS FOR the Justice Department appeared before a federal judge in Washington this month and asked him to dismiss a lawsuit over the detention of a U.S. citizen, basing their request not merely on secret evidence but also on secret legal arguments. The government contends that the legal theory by which it would defend its behavior should be immune from debate in court. This position is alien to the history and premise of Anglo-American jurisprudence, which assumes that opposing lawyers will challenge one another's arguments.

They're no longer content with keeping all of their "facts" secret (because, you know, by the light of day they might not look so great), but now even their lines of reasoning are too much for the public to handle. Kafka has nothing on these guys.

It should be noted that the case in question here involves a U.S. citizen. None of us can afford to be complacent about these antics!

(via kos)