Among Possible Presidential Duties: Breaking the Law

According to Chris Matthews, our yellow-headed Tweety bird, it might just be the case that the American President's duties include breaking the American laws. Media Matters for America gives us the relevant clip:

From the January 12 edition of MSNBC's Hardball with Chris Matthews:

MATTHEWS: I'm asking you, you're our guest here. You're from NSA, you've been there. Do you have any evidence that we're spying on regular, you know, just regular political Americans, who maybe have views on all kinds of things? Or are we limiting it to people who are actually engaged in conversations or emailing with people in highly suspicious situations in the Mideast?

TICE: I can't say one way or the other, and I can't go into the details of how NSA does their business; it would be classified. But the question arises: Why would you do this beyond the FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] Court?

MATTHEWS: Because, apparently, when you want to do this mining by going by topic rather than by who's on the phone, you would never get a court order.

TICE: That's true. That's true.

MATTHEWS: Well, then, how can you do it?

TICE: Well, I -- all the Middle East -- a large broad-brush approach could be used where you -- you know, if you have a haystack of information, you suck it all in to try to find the needle.

MATTHEWS: We're under attack on 9-11. A couple of days after that, if I were president of the United States and somebody said we had the ability to check on all the conversations going on between here and Hamburg, Germany, where all the Al Qaeda people are, or somewhere in Saudi [Arabia], where they came from and their parents are, and we could mine some of that information by just looking for some key words like "World Trade Center" or "Pentagon," I'd do it.

TICE: Well, you'd be breaking the law.

MATTHEWS: Yeah. Well, maybe that's part of the job. We'll talk about it. We'll be right back with Russ Tice. You're watching Hardball on MSNBC.

Bolds are mine. If breaking the law is part of the Dear Leader's job then we no longer live in a democracy. I'm not sure what to call the resulting governance structure: Tyranny? Dictatorship? Whatever it is, democracy it ain't.

Osama bin Laden has succeeded past his wildest dreams. He is indeed destroying the cultures that he so hates, by making "freedom" something only available in Iraq and by turning the process of democratic decision-making into a farce. Good going, Tweety.

News from the Olympus

I visited my divine pals on the old home mountain. I partied a little, went to a cocktail bash held by some naiads (they had a wet bar) and met a few interesting monsters. After all that I have decided to go on a diet: no more than one wingnut is going to be devoured per week. By me. It's my New Year's Promise.

If the above paragraph makes no sense to you, be content. You don't want to know about the monsters and how they tasted. They had been on some weird diet themselves, Atkins or some such. All lard. Ugh.

Back to the party news: Ares is back in circulation, having been released by the succubi who snared him at Nascar races in Tennessee. He thought that they were Bible-reading wingnut ladies, in for the ride of their lives with him, and perhaps they were. But it was poor Ares who got ridden... He is so modest these days, the poor boy, though he still dreams about converting George Bush to Ares-worshipping. George loves illogical and poorly planned wars so I can see Ares's point.

Ares's droopiness ruined my tentative plans of re-igniting our little flame, and I ended up mostly circulating and picking up gossip about various divinities. Did you know that Thor has been spotted amongst the mortals? He is half-crazed and not very visible, but the neo-Nazis have worshipped him enough to make him almost-materialize. That is how making gods and goddesses work: if enough people believe in us we become real. Except for me. In my case it is the snakes that keep me going, and there has been no snake Enlightenment so I should be safe for a few more millennia. Safe from evaporating. That is what happens to dead gods. And whatever evil tongues say that son of a goat, Zeus, is still evaporated. May he stay so.

Other than that it was godly life as usual. Aphrodite had a new boyfriend she was dragging along. The poor guy needed some sleep, desperately, but he was dying of fatigue with a smile on his face. Athena has applied for a job with the Hudson Institute, a wingnut think-tank. A daddy's girl to the last breath, our Athena. But she won't qualify because she hasn't written any books that smear feminists and she hasn't broken the law like Scooter Libby. So I nailed a nice smile on my lips and listened to her ramblings about her great future career as the head of the Independent Women's Forum (google it), and I nodded and I urged her on. It was fun.

Boredom

This is the week for Echidne's moral sermons, it seems. Today's topic is boredom. The advertizing industry in the United States has been successful in turning most Americans into creatures which crave instant satisfaction and constant entertainment. Or that is how I will begin because I want to thunder about this concept that boredom is an undesirable trait in life.

The Alito hearings are boring, we are told by various journalists. The journalists deserve to be entertained, I guess, not just do their jobs. And the readers and watchers and listeners deserve to be entertained, too. If it's not entertaining, change the channel. Yet all the time the forces of Gilead are sharpening their spears and adding to their power over our lives. But they do it in a boring way so look elsewhere.

Boredom is...like...a really bad thing. Professors are now expected to tapdance across the podium or students will fall asleep. Soon I expect my dentist to sing a little ditty while she pokes around in my maw. I can always take my beautiful teeth and my credit card and go elsewhere. So better keep me entertained.

Politics doesn't work very well with a citizenry trained in expecting entertainment. But bread and circuses works for those in power; they have no real interest in making politics interesting for the non-wonks. Don't buy it if it isn't entertaining! Too bad that you buy it whether it is entertaining or not.

Boredom is an essential part of life, and better than some other parts of life. There is no way of sailing through totally unbored unless your life is short and violent. The proper approach to boredom is to crack through it and pay attention.

End of sermon.

The Tears

Alito's wife cried in the hearings. What does this mean? Was it her migraine headache that made her cry? Or what Lindsay Graham said when she started crying? No, it was the rude Democrats attacking her husband for hours on end.

Alito's wife cried in the hearings. What does this mean? Women are emotional and should be closed out of public life? The only valid emotion is rage? Wingnuts like to see women crying and use this to their advantage? The media will run with this because the hearings are b-o-r-i-n-g and who on earth cares about the tears that Alito will cause sitting on the bench?

I sympathize with Ms. Bomgardner. It must be hard to hear your husband's beliefs and qualifications questioned publicly. But that is what the nomination hearings are for. What on earth are family members doing at the hearings in the first place? Is their presence so important that from now on nobody can ask a nominee a sharp question because it might upset the minor son or daughter of a nominee? How are we going to ask about something like pornography?

And the Republicans are using all this for misdirection. Look elsewhere! Nothing here to see! Just a b-o-r-i-n-g man being nominated to take us into Gilead. Then there will be plenty of tears for all of us. But they won't be televised.

Today's Action Alert

The National Women's Law Center urges you to call your Senator and to tell him or her that Alito is not your choice. Go here to find out how to do it.

Getting What You Deserve

The Alito hearings have brought up the argument that there should be no questioning of Alito, and certainly no filibustering, because Bush "won" the elections and the wingnuts won and they can nominate whomever they want. The spoils of war. A country consisting of winners and losers. One of the worst aspects of the two-party system, I think.

Then there is the slightly different but ultimately the same argument that people wanted Alito on the bench because they voted for Bush who campaigned on these issues. It is the same argument in the sense of telling us "losers" to shut up and offer our necks for the victor, but it is also slightly different because it makes an argument that can actually be studied for relevancy, and that is the one about Bush running on the issues that Alito represents.

He did run on the anti-abortion issue, true. But he didn't really go around telling that blacks and women shouldn't have good jobs or that ten-year old girls should be stripped naked in front of police officers if they and their mothers happened to visit a suspected drug dealer's house at the time when the police had a warranty to strip-search the drug dealer only. Yet these are the kinds of things that Alito supports.

It can be argued that Bush ran for all oppressive and vile things and that his base knew this. He talked to them in code about this, but it was in code for the very reason that most Americans would have vomited if they had known what he was proposing. Thus, to argue that the voters who picked Bush wanted Alito is far-fetched and mostly wrong. What most of them probably voted for was the sitting president at a time of war. Traditionally war-presidents are not kicked out and does Bush know this. We are most likely to have eternal war from now on.

The war is also used to change the basic nature of democracy: the arguing. The most recent wingnut interpretation of political debate is that there should be no disagreement with the president on anything. Disagreement is treason. The winners take all. We have always been at war with Eurasia, and Alito hearings are boring.

Wanna Know Whom I Call?

John Aravosis at Americablog just bought the cell phone records of General Clark for the time period of a few days last November. It seems that anyone can do this with just the number and a credit card. We could all compete with the NSA on terrorism watch! Also, we could find out all the dirt on public officials and politicians...

What John did was unethical, and that was the point of doing it; to show that our privacy is unprotected provided that the other side has our number and some money.

What Should We Call Him?

Sam Alito, I mean. Like a beloved child he needs a use-name. The left blogosphere has called him Stripsearch Sammy and Scalito, and these are good, but only for those in the know about Alito's legal opinions. We need something stickier, something easily grasped and funny.

Bob has blogged on some possibilities and links to other blog posts on this important question. What do you think of them? Can you suggest any others that we have overlooked so far?

Something Alito Will Never Experience

Is sex discrimination at work. Martha Burke has written an excellent article on why Alito's nomination is bad for employed women:

Alito's confirmation, if it happens, could also have profound implications for working women, only from the opposite point of view. Like the other seven men on the Court, he's never experienced sex discrimination firsthand, so he doesn't see it as a problem. His record is clear -- big business rules.

During his 15 years on the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals, he compiled a stunning record of backing corporations over workers in sex and race discrimination cases. He has bragged that he is "particularly proud" of his work in opposing affirmative action, and never expressed regret for joining a militantly anti-woman club dedicated to keeping women out of Princeton. This mindset does not bode well for female employment rights.

One case that could come before the Court in the near future just happens to be the largest sex discrimination suit in history, Dukes v. Wal-Mart. Current and former female employees of the nation's largest employer are seeking class-action status to pursue pay and promotion discrimination claims. They've won in lower courts, and Wal-Mart is of course appealing. If the case reaches the Supremes a vote against the women could effectively torpedo female workplace rights for a generation.

Burke also notes that the Judicial Committee holding the hearings on Alito has exactly one woman member. One out of eighteen. To decide on putting the eighth man on the court of nine Justices.

But the most important point in the article is the one I highlight in my title for this post. There are things that men or whites in this society do not experience, and having eight men and one woman and only one black Justice on the Supreme Court will not provide a balanced menu of possible human experiences.

Your Tax Money At Work: Harassing The Poor

Another totally illogical and cruel practice:

Tax refunds sought by hundreds of thousands of poor Americans have been frozen and their returns labeled fraudulent, blocking refunds for years to come, the Internal Revenue Service's taxpayer advocate told Congress today.

The taxpayers, whose average income was $13,000, were not told that they were suspected of fraud, the advocate said in her annual report to Congress. The advocate, Nina Olson, said her staff sampled suspected returns and found that, at most, one in five was questionable.

A computer program selected the returns as part of the questionable refund program run by the criminal investigation division of the Internal Revenue Service. In some cases, the criminal division ordered that taxpayers be given no hint that they were suspected of fraud, the report said.

Most of the poor people whose returns the computer flagged as fraudulent were seeking the earned income tax credit, a benefit for the working poor. The credit can return all of the income taxes and Social Security taxes withheld from the paychecks of poor people. Without the credit, many poor people coming off welfare and going to work would receive less money because of taxes taken out of their paychecks and the loss of health benefits, I.R.S. data and other government documents show.

The average refund sought was $3,500, which under the rules for obtaining the credit means that the vast majority of those suspected of fraud were single parents or married couples with children. The maximum benefit for singles is less than $400.

Ms. Olson said the I.R.S. devoted vastly more resources to pursing questionable refunds by the poor, which she said cannot involve more than $9 billion, than to a $100 billion problem with unreported incomes from small businesses that deal only in cash, many of which do not even file tax returns.

I am so angry that I can't really write about this. But the practise of harassing the poor in this way is both stupid, for how much money could we ever get that way?, and cruel, because the most powerful nation in the world doesn't even bother telling the poor what has happened to the prayed-for refund, the refund that has probably been used a thousand times in imagination, for things like shoes and car repairs and, yes, perhaps even booze. It's not a fun life, being poor, and the last thing you want is the IRS on your back like that.

Do You Remember When...

George Orwell's 1984 has the protagonist, Winston Smith, work in a job where he changes the past newspaper records to accord with the newest interpretation of events. Anything that actually happened but is no longer deemed desirable to have happened goes into the Memory Hole: a slit in the wall of Winston's office. When the government starts a new war any evidence of the fresh foe having once been a bosom buddy is erased. Hence the famous quote from the book: "We have always been at war with [add the name of the current enemy]."

This is all chillingly familiar in the new faith-based world George Bush has built us. "Facts" change overnight, and nobody seems to remember the old ones. It is not that many years ago that conservatives thundered about the big government. It was the Democrats who were seen as the spendthrifts. Today the situation is reversed and this causes little astonishment or surprise.

Winston Smith would find all this familiar: We went to war because Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. Then we didn't go to war for that reason at all, but for the Long March of democracy! No, I got it wrong: We went to war to build a bigger and smarter mousetrap in Iraq so that we would have no mice at home! No. It's democracy and purple fingerprints we want!

History changes the minute it is over, events slip into the Memory Hole, and every dawn the journalists accept the administration's most current construction of history. Revisionism at its finest, because it is not only the public history that is continuously being reinterpreted, but the participants appear to have blank slates for their own memories, too, slates which can be rewritten with any new message from the Bush administration.

All this is frightening, of course, and very frightening when I read some pundits tell me that looking at the past is a waste of time, that we should storm ahead, into the bright new future. But how do you even understand what future is if you no longer have a reliable past, no longer possess a memory of the real events? Wouldn't this future just hover there, like a bright balloon, not moored to anything? Wouldn't it be as fragile as a balloon, too, and as childish?

Perhaps memory is what really distinguishes children from adults. Adults have more memories, and because of that adults have the ability to learn from experiences on a much wider scale. If we as a society condemn our collective memories into the Memory Hole, can we ever really grow up?

There are days when I think that this is the greatest sin of the current administration: that they have made the Memory Hole much bigger. Imagine what you would be like without any memories at all. How would you cope? What or whom would you love? I fear that the same thing can happen to a country which refuses to have real memories, and that would be a terrible crime, on par with those in Orwell's 1984.

Something To Read

This Kos diary and especially the attached comments are worth reading for what they say about the impact of wingnuts like Alito on women's lives and more widely on the lives of all of us. For example, when they have taken away the reproductive choices that availability of abortion provides (which I admit are less than real in vast areas of the country already), do you think that they will just sit back and relax?

No. Next they will remove our access to contraception and the federal laws against sex and race based discrimination at work. When Alito is asked about the Commerce Clause it is partly because the laws banning sex and race discrimination rely on that. Wingnuts want to get rid of these laws. Then the blacks will stay in their place and the women in theirs. It is as simple as that, the wingnut religion.

Tierney's Fatherhood Initiative

John Tierney is the Men's Rights Activist on the New York Times. Or an activist for anything that can possibly be seen as putting women down. A weird guy.

His last column recommends gender equality in pregnancy. No, Tierney is not offering to carry fetuses to term in the linings of his stomach. He argues that men should have the right to a "financial abortion". In other words, if a man gets a woman pregnant he can then argue that he doesn't want the child and may skip paying child maintenance. I couldn't figure out if Tierney would extend the "financial abortion rights" to men who happen to be married to the women they have impregnated, because by the column's end he has backed off from this idea, noting that it has a few teeny weeny problems. Like totally ignoring the rights of the child.

This is what Tierney says on the issue:

Judge Samuel Alito is a reactionary - at least according to feminists horrified by his notion that a woman can be required to notify her husband before an abortion. But Alito's critics in the Senate face two big obstacles this week if they try to make that label stick.

The first is public opinion. Most Americans tell pollsters that they think a husband should be notified before an abortion, and the Pennsylvania law that Alito approved was hardly a draconian version of that principle. It merely required a woman to say, without presenting any proof, that she'd told her husband. If she said she feared physical abuse, she was exempted.

The second obstacle is the logic of feminism. Spousal notification has been denounced as retrograde by the same advocates who have been demanding gender equality in the workplace and at home. If men are expected to be parents with equal responsibilities, shouldn't they at least be allowed to discuss whether to have a child?

This is an easy question for those on the pro-life side of the abortion debate. They'd like men to be not only notified of pregnancies, but also given veto power over abortions.

Being pro-choice, I don't agree with that position, but I admire the logic. It's a gender-neutral policy: if either parent thinks it's wrong to end the pregnancy, then the pregnancy must proceed.

If the pro-choice side adopted a gender-neutral policy, then either the man or the woman would have the right to say no to parenthood. I don't know of anyone advocating that a woman be required to have an abortion, but there's another right that could be given to a man who impregnates a woman who isn't his wife. If the woman decided to go ahead and have the child, she would have to notify him and give him the option early in the pregnancy of absolving himself of any financial responsibility for the child.

I bolded out the bit which shows Tierney's true colors. First, pro-lifers don't believe this; they believe that nobody has the right to terminate a pregnancy. The most extreme ones believe this to be the case even if the mother will die giving birth. Second, that Tierney added no mother's-health exemptions to his statement demonstrates that he doesn't think at all about how the child is actually created: in the mother's body, at the expense of her energy and at her pain and possible risk of death. In many countries giving birth is still the major health hazard women face.

And this is where we come to the problem with Tierney's whole argument: the process in which he demands equal dibs for men takes place in a woman's body, and it is she who bears the risks. Until the day comes when prospective parents hand over their sperm and egg to the laboratory technician when they want the child everything Tierney says is academic.

Now to something more serious: The question whether current abortion laws are unfair to men. There are two different questions in this, I believe, and they are the right of men to become fathers and the right of men not to become fathers. I'm not sure if any of us has the "right" to be a parent, actually, but until parthenogenesis is perfected for humans every single person wanting to be a parent must find someone else to contribute; either by the direct addition of sperm or eggs or via some form of adoption. None of us can legally force this other contributor to contribute, and that includes men.

But it is really the right of men not to become parents that Tierney speaks about, and I do have a lot of sympathy for a man who is led into having unprotected sex in the belief that his partner is taking oral contraceptives and then finds that he is going to be a father, with a monthly payment for the next eighteen years. A lot of sympathy. It is wrong to con people into parenthood.

Though doesn't this sound familiar in reverse? How many times have I read or heard about a man saying that he will pull out in time, that one never gets pregnant on the first time around and so on? Having sex is a risky business if you are absolutely sure that you don't want to be a parent, and anyone concerned about this would be well advised to take care of contraception themselves. This is actually a lesson many women learn quite early in life, and it is a good lesson to all our daughters and sons.

The Word-Perfect Alito

If true, interesting:

In the first hours of Samuel Alito's Senate confirmation hearings on Monday, Judiciary Committee member Lindsey Graham, the Republican senator from South Carolina, may very well have irreparably compromised himself.

At the hearing, Graham told Alito, nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court, that he had already decided in Alito's favor. "I don't know what kind of vote you're going to get, but you'll make it through. It's possible you could talk me out of voting for you, but I doubt it. So I won't even try to challenge you along those lines."

That certainly ought to be the case. Graham is one of a group of Republicans who have been coaching Alito behind the scenes. The Wall Street Journal's Washington Wire reported before the hearings began:

"On Thursday, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, one of the 'gang of 14' who sits on Judiciary, joined a so-called moot court session at the White House."

I'd love to know what took place in this moot court. Did they practise how to be really boring and bland while uttering the most spine-chillingly extreme plans for this country?

Deep Thought for The Day

By a Republican, of all things:

"We simply have too much power," says Rep. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., speaking of lawmakers' ability to target tax dollars for particular projects, contractors or campaign donors. "We Republicans have abused that power badly over the past several years."

And, I might add, the Republicans will continue to abuse that power badly if they retain absolute control of all three branches of the government. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and so on.

Combine this with the hearings on the Alito nomination, hearings, which are aimed at getting a believer in the absolute power of George Bush into the Supreme Court of the United States. And then ask yourselves what the outcome might be.

Alito, the Absent-Minded Judge

I'm worried about Alito's bad memory. How can he keep large amounts of judicial information in his mind if he has trouble remembering the events of his own life?

Fact Check: Fact Check: Judge Alito and the Concerned Alumni of Princeton
NOW:

Today, when asked about his involvement in a Princeton campus group formed in opposition to the admission of greater numbers of women and minorities to the university, the Concerned Alumni of Princeton, Judge Alito said, "Well, Senator, I have wracked my memory about this issue, and I really have no specific recollection of that organization." [1/10/06]

Judge Alito elaborated: "And the issue that had rankled me about Princeton for some time was the issue of ROTC. I was in ROTC when I was at Princeton, and the unit was expelled from the campus, and I thought that was very wrong. I had a lot of friends who were against the war in Vietnam, and I respected their opinions, but I didn't think that it was right to oppose the military for that reason." [1/10/06]

THEN:

Judge Alito touted his involvement with the Concerned Alumni of Princeton when applying for a political job with the Reagan Justice Department. Now that he is being considered for the Supreme Court, he is distancing himself from Concerned Alumni of Princeton.

* In a statement promoting his conservative credentials attached to a November 18, 1985 application for a promotion within the Justice Department, Judge Alito said he was "a member of the Concerned Alumni of Princeton University, a conservative alumni group," including it as one of only two group memberships mentioned in the statement.

And what did the Concerned Alumni of Princeton care about? The adjective "Concerned" should tell you that these alumni cared about something very conservative, along the mode of the Concerned Women of America. Specifically, they didn't want to see Princeton become coed and they didn't want to have minorities on the campus:

The Concerned Alumni of Princeton University was founded the same year Samuel Alito graduated from Princeton, 1972, and was well-known for favoring restrictions on the admission of minorities and women to the University.

Can a leopard change its spots? Or does Alito still mull over the horrible events of the 1960s? Does he want to "correct" them?

I have no idea, but appealing to a faulty memory is not an adequate answer.
---
Via MyDD.

So Little Time, So Many Anti-Feminists

There is a new book on the enormous power and horrible effects of feminism, by one Kate O'Beirne. It has a really long title to make sure that even the most stupid reader gets that this book is about Hillary Clinton and how she is destroying the America we all love. Or which we must leave if we don't love it. That sort of shit.

I will post more on Kate's little rant later on, when I have actually had time to learn what she is saying. But I can speculate, even without reading a word, that she blames feminists for most everything that has ever gone wrong, and that she doesn't care to use proper evidence to support her claims. Because this is how the gals' auxiliary of wingnuttery does the deed they are paid for, the one task (other than childbearing) that women must do in the wingnut-world, and that is to bash other women, to nail down the heads that are trying to stand up. It's like all women are nails and all men are hammers, except for women like Kate O'Beirne who can also be hammers as long as they tell how good the nails have it. If you get my meaning.

Wilder Donkeys

Atrios gave his wanker of the day award to Joe Klein, a pundit whom I hadn't read before. I have now made up for that deficiency, and in my humble opinion Klein's wankership award is well deserved, especially as he is supposed to be the token liberal columnist on Time's rolls.

Think of the fact that he calls me a wilder donkey. Well, not me personally, but people who argue the way I have been known to argue. This is what he says about us:

But these concerns pale before the importance of the program. It would have been a scandal if the NSA had not been using these tools to track down the bad guys. There is evidence that the information harvested helped foil several plots and disrupt al-Qaeda operations.

There is also evidence, according to U.S. intelligence officials, that since the New York Times broke the story, the terrorists have modified their behavior, hampering our efforts to keep track of them—but also, on the plus side, hampering their ability to communicate with one another.

Pelosi made clear to me that she considered Hayden, now Deputy Director of National Intelligence, an honorable man who would not overstep his bounds. "I trust him," she said. "I haven't accused him of anything. I was, and remain, concerned that he has the proper authority to do what he is doing." A legitimate concern, but the Democrats are on thin ice here. Some of the wilder donkeys talked about a possible Bush impeachment after the NSA program was revealed.

I bolded the relevant bit so that it is easier for you to see what I mean. And what, exactly, are the "concerns" which pale in comparison to our donkey stampedes? This is what preceded the above quote in Klein's diatribe:

The liberal reaction is also an understandable consequence of the Bush Administration's tendency to play fast and loose on issues of war and peace—rushing to war after overhyping the intelligence on Saddam Hussein's nuclear-weapons program, appearing to tolerate torture, keeping secret prisons in foreign countries and denying prisoners basic rights. At the very least, the Administration should have acted, with alacrity, to update the federal intelligence laws to include the powerful new technologies developed by the NSA.

Do you think that I might have misunderstood Klein? Perhaps he is writing satire? Going to war on false pretenses, torturing people and keeping secret prisons in foreign countries all pale before what?

Klein must be joking. For later in the article he states:

Most polls indicate that a strong majority of Americans favor the [Patriot] act, and I suspect that a strong majority would favor the NSA program as well, if its details were declassified and made known.

In fact, liberal Democrats are about as far from the American mainstream on these issues as Republicans were when they invaded the privacy of Terri Schiavo's family in the right-to-die case last year.

Klein may suspect whatever he likes but the truth is that a slim majority of Americans disagree with him:

Over the past three weeks,
President Bush and top aides have defended the electronic monitoring program they secretly launched shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, as a vital tool to protect the nation from al-Qaida and its affiliates.

Yet 56 percent of respondents in an AP-Ipsos poll said the government should be required to first get a court warrant to eavesdrop on the overseas calls and e-mails of U.S. citizens when those communications are believed to be tied to terrorism.

Can Klein really be a Liberal? If he is counted as one in this new faith-based world then what am I? Oh, I forgot. I'm a wilder donkey.

More Dignity

I was kidding when I wrote in my previous post about dignity that the word must have been passed down from the top wingnuts. But after listening to the Alito hearings I can only conclude that it was handed down, to be used, often and often. - The evidence on one central wingnut beebrain is mounting.

Clearly, this dignity business is the start of something new and beautiful: a different drinking-game. One gulp for each time when Alito's dignity is mentioned. Two if it is combined with something about him being a classy guy.

If you don't drink you can do the same with chocolates!

Opinions on Alito Vary

It's almost like the old saw about opinions on the shape of the earth varying. According to Washington Post:

A majority of Americans favor the confirmation of federal appeals court judge Samuel A. Alito Jr. to the U.S. Supreme Court and an even larger proportion believe Alito would not vote to overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 high court ruling that legalized abortion, according to the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll.

As hearings begin today in the Senate on his nomination, the survey found that 53 percent of the public says Alito should be confirmed to serve on the court--virtually identical to the proportion that supported John Roberts' confirmation as chief justice four months ago. One in four--27 percent--say Alito should be rejected by the Senate.

But one in five Americans remain undecided about the nominee, who is expected to face tough questioning this week by Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee over his past writings on abortion, affirmative action, and the constitutional limits on presidential power.

The survey also found that most Americans expect Alito, if confirmed, would not vote to strike down Roe v. Wade. In the weeks since he was appointed by Bush, abortion rights advocates have grown increasingly vocal in their opposition to Alito. They fear he may be the fifth and decisive vote on the court to overturn Roe--a decision that would instantly inflame national debate over an issue that already is one of the most divisive in American politics.

Instead, the survey suggests that the public expects Alito to follow a middle course on the court.

Middle course, indeed. How do people end up with these opinions? Let me guess: They look at Alito's pictures and see no horns on his head or rivers of bile flowing out of his nostrils, and they have to pay the bills and the son is in trouble with the sports coaches and the daughter just had her tongue pierced and the old arthritis is bothersome again and maybe the job isn't as secure as they thought, what with the Bush boom and all. They don't have time or interest for this stuff and, besides, the future is still in the future and can take care of itself.

This is how the world crumbles, by the way. Not with a big bang but with a tiny whimper, made up of the millions of uninterested and tired sighs.

Those who have the leisure and the interest to follow politics more closely have a rather different opinion on Alito:

LEADERS of the Christian right gathered in a Philadelphia church on Sunday night to build support for Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito on the eve of his confirmation hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Conservative religious leaders want to follow their success in the elections of 2002 and 2004 by winning a fight over a Supreme Court nominee and defeating their Democratic and liberal adversaries.

The Alito nomination, which polls show a majority of voters support, is opposed by many organisations on the left.

Republicans and Democrats agree that if Judge Alito succeeds Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, the court is likely to shift to the right, especially on abortion issues and in disputes over the separation of church and state.

The "Justice Sunday III" speeches by Focus on the Family's James Dobson, former Moral Majority chairman Jerry Falwell and the Family Research Council's Tony Perkins were broadcast on several Christian television networks and directly into churches across the country.

"The threat to our religious liberties has not diminished," Mr Perkins told journalists. He cited rulings against the Pledge of Allegiance, restrictions on the public display of the Ten Commandments and a decision barring the Indiana House of Representatives from beginning sessions with prayers that refer to Jesus Christ.

"These are not theoretical threats. They present a clear and present danger to religious freedom in our country," Mr Perkins said. "We are not interested in creating a theocracy in America, we have no interest in a church state. What we want is a church that is free to speak the truth."

Don't believe Perkins. He does want a theocracy in this country, and getting Alito on the bench is part of the master plan. As was the anointing of the seats in the hearings room.

My opinion? Alito will increase the power of the radical religious clerics and the president and he will do his utmost to overturn Roe, to gut our privacy rights and to remove barriers against sex and race discrimination. But other than that, yeah, he is a guy with class...

Today's Word: Dignity

Do you think this came down from the top wingnuts, too? George Bush's speech on the Alito hearings started like this:

THE PRESIDENT: Good morning. I just had breakfast with Judge Alito. I told him I think he conducted himself with such dignity and class in the weeks leading up to the confirmation process, which begins today.

What did he expect Alito to do? Throw somersaults? And what is this reference to "class"? I thought all the rich wingnuts were totally opposed to class warfare.

Then Atrios posted this, also in the context of Alito hearings:

Miles O'Brien, just now:


The Senate is a dignified place, but there's also talk about a filibuster. How dignified could that be?

I have become allergic to "dignity" because the anti-feminists, especially the radical religious clerics, love to talk about the "dignity of women". That is what they promise to us, in lieu of equality and fairness and being treated like a human being. I'm not sure what they mean by "dignity" but I suppose it's that pedestal stuff, in payment for agreeing to be submissive.

But why is dignity brought out in the context of the Alito nomination? The only explanation I can think of is an attempt to forestall filibustering by the Democrats.

The Costs of War

How many lives were lost this weekend?

When we economists talk about costs we mean the value of what is lost because resources were used in one way rather than in the next-best alternative use. This meaning of costs is not the one accountants use. Accountants are interested in only those costs that the institution they work must pay. Economists tend to be interested in the costs of some activity wherever they happen to fall, or at least in a wider definition of costs than the accounting one. For example, while a U.S. government cost accountant would calculate the costs of taking care of the war-wounded based on what the government will pay, an economist would add the costs that the rest of the society must pay towards the treatment of the wounded veterans.

Linda Bilmes and Joseph E. Stiglitz have written an article about the costs of the Iraq war using the economic definition of costs. Their final conservative estimate puts the total measurable costs of the Iraq war at one trillion dollars. One trillion dollars. And this estimate does not include the value of foreign lives lost or any of the costs falling to Iraqis or other nationals but Americans. It also doesn't include some hard-to-measure costs of the war. How would you put a monetary value on the loss of American prestige in the world?

All this means that the trillion dollar total is an underestimate of the true costs of the war. But it is a much bigger estimate than anything the U.S. government has come up with. The government estimates would not take into account the costs that fall to the families of the military personnel, for example, or the impact the war has had on oil prices. Or the economic value of the American lives lost in the war. Neither do the government estimates appear to allow for the future costs of this war, in the form of greater health care costs of the wounded veterans. But even allowing for these differences the administration estimates are still far too low. The important question to ask is whether the administration even knew what the true costs of the war would be, even if costs are given the narrower accounting definition. And if they did know the magnitude of these costs, did they believe that the war was worth them? And how do they justify spending like this while trying to make the tax breaks for the wealthy permanent?

Slick Seats

Religion has entered political space in a big way, medears:

Insisting that God "certainly needs to be involved" in the Supreme Court confirmation process, three Christian ministers today blessed the doors of the hearing room where Senate Judiciary Committee members will begin considering the nomination of Judge Samuel Alito on Monday.

Capitol Hill police barred them from entering the room to continue what they called a consecration service. But in a bit of one-upsmanship, the three announced that they had let themselves in a day earlier, touching holy oil to the seats where Judge Alito, the senators, witnesses, Senate staffers and the press will sit, and praying for each of the 13 committee members by name.

"We did adequately apply oil to all the seats," said the Rev. Rob Schenck, who identified himself as an evangelical Christian and as president of the National Clergy Council in Washington.

I get visual images of large bottoms sticking to the chairs and only removing themselves with an audible "plop". I get visual images of dark stains on the backsides of politicians. And of large dry-cleaning bills, all sent to Rob Schenck.

For the sake of fairness they should now let me and my snakes enter the rooms and put some counterspells in place. I could send Ares over, too. And Aphrodite. If we are going to have religion in politics my folks are definitely interested and ready.

Frank Rich In Righteous Anger On Snoopgate

Rich's New York Times column is behind a paywall. You, my dear readers, have paid for me to get past it so I can comment on what happens on the other side. In hindsight this was not the cleverest of arrangements, and I may decide to stop blogging on articles that are only available for some.

But not before I give you the gist of Rich's newest. He's blowing hot and cold and saying most excellent things about the president's defence of the illegal wiretapping of Americans:

That the White House's over-the-top outrage about the Times scoop is a smokescreen contrived to cover up something else is only confirmed by Dick Cheney's disingenuousness. In last week's oration at a right-wing think tank, he defended warrant-free wiretapping by saying it could have prevented the 9/11 attacks. Really? Not with this administration in charge. On 9/10 the N.S.A. (lawfully) intercepted messages in Arabic saying, "The match is about to begin," and, "Tomorrow is zero hour." You know the rest. Like all the chatter our government picked up during the president's excellent brush-clearing Crawford vacation of 2001, it was relegated to mañana; the N.S.A. didn't rouse itself to translate those warnings until 9/12.

Given that the reporters on the Times story, James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, wrote that nearly a dozen current and former officials had served as their sources, there may be more leaks to come, and not just to The Times. Sooner or later we'll find out what the White House is really so defensive about.

Does Rich have something more than guesses as the ground for the last sentence? If so, I would have loved to hear it.

How To Write in Blogosphere

I once wrote a funny post about picking a style for a blog. But this one is meant to be more serious, what with the New Year and all, and a smidgen of sternness is called for. So imagine me typing away in my best bib-and-tucker, with a frozen look on my divine face.

The above paragraph is an example of the voice I picked for this blog. It's not the easiest of voices, and if I had known that I would have picked something else, something that requires less energy to manage, something that would allow me to use a little longer sentences and to be less snarky. Though I could have picked an even harder voice if I had decided to write pure comedy like Jesus's General or the gentle folks of Fafblog. Then there are the inimitable but immediately recognizable voices of Amanda at Pandagon and Jeanne d'Arc at Body and Soul.

The voices bloggers pick probably is not a topic of great interest to anyone but other bloggers. I started thinking about it because of the Koufax awards and the class of Best Writing. Because how well someone writes also depends on the voice that person chooses, and different voices are either easier or harder to do. Which is a long way of saying that everybody should have voted for my blog in that category because I'm in need of adulation. - See how I now keep falling into the Echidne-voice even when I try not to?

And that is the problem with a voice. It grows on you, and then it's hard to change into a different scale. I think I can still do it, but it's easier in my other writings than on the blog.

A voice is not an artificial add-on to blogging. Echidne's voice is one of my natural voices, and I'm not lying to you when I write in that voice. But I have other voices, too, and they clamor to be heard, especially the Weepy-Winifred one. I try to keep her under control because the last thing people want to read is more wailing and tooth-grinding. The wingnuts give us quite enough of that.

Probably the best voice to pick would be a neutral one, a journalistic type or a scientific one. These would be easier to write than snark, too. Snark is both fun and irritating at the same time, to write, at least. I'm not sure how it is to read.

But picking a snarky voice has a problem I didn't anticipate, and that is the problem of snark coming across as non-objective, even when the facts are neutrally expressed. It's hard to know how to correct that, though what I do is cut back on the snarkiness when I give numbers and stuff. But then the whole post comes across as boring. Decisions, decisions, and none of them of any interest to readers.

But Will The King Listen?

The first nonpartisan assessment of Bush's eavesdropping policy has concluded that it is not legal:

A report by Congress's research arm concluded yesterday that the administration's justification for the warrantless eavesdropping authorized by President Bush conflicts with existing law and hinges on weak legal arguments.

The Congressional Research Service's report rebuts the central assertions made recently by Bush and Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales about the president's authority to order secret intercepts of telephone and e-mail exchanges between people inside the United States and their contacts abroad.

The findings, the first nonpartisan assessment of the program's legality to date, prompted Democratic lawmakers and civil liberties advocates to repeat calls yesterday for Congress to conduct hearings on the monitoring program and attempt to halt it.

There you go.

Moonbat Media

We don't have one. Moonbats, for those of you who have never heard the term, are us: liberals and lefties. I like the term. It brings to mind lovely moonlit nights with the dark shadows of brave fliers silhouetted against the full moon, until, suddenly, they swoop! "Moonbats" and "wingnuts" are political terms of endearment for the other side.

A moonbat media would be something like what the wingnuts have been telling that the United States has. It has never existed, and the media today is pretty much in the backpocket of the Republican party. The media is also very dependent on the advertising income they get from corporations. This makes it tough to criticize the government or the firms. The safe thing to criticize is moonbats.

A real moonbat media would be a move against this. We do need one, though we also need a neutral media. But we are not going to get the latter, so the next best thing would be to have at least a tiny moonbat media to counteract all that wingnut fairandbalanced propaganda. Air America Radio is an attempt to do that, and perhaps it will end up working. But talkshows is not really the sole answer to what we need. Pacifica is not enough, either.

Now a new television network is being planned: Independent World Television. It will not take advertizing which makes it immune from commercial pressures. But not taking ads means that the network will need other sources of income, like donations. You can donate at the link.

I believe that Independent World Television would aim at being a neutral network. But if it turned out to be a moonbat one I'd be almost equally delighted, for the reasons spelled above. Because we really need to have an opening for all voices to be heard and for all types of news to be forecast. If the traditional media won't have us then we can't have just the traditional media.
---
Laura Flanders is great, by the way, if you are looking for well-done radio with a liberal slant.

The End of the deLay Era

Tom deLay is not going to return to his post as the majority leader. He wrote a letter which is available in the Washington Post. This bit is especially interesting:

During my time in Congress, I have always acted in an ethical manner within the rules of our body and the laws of our land. I am fully confident time will bear this out.

...

While we wage these important battles, I cannot allow our adversaries to divide and distract our attention.

Who are "our adversaries"? I bet you anything that he doesn't just mean the terrorists. DeLay has always practised politics as if it was war, and probably assumed that everything is allowed in such a war. But he is mistaken. Politics is not war and there are rules to the game. Heck, even war has rules. Too many wingnuts these days think that the game of politics is all about changing its rules. As long as you don't get caught.

Money News

If true, this could be worrisome news for the United States:

China has suggested it may diversify its foreign reserve holdings away from a current heavy focus on the US dollar.

'We will perfect the management of our foreign exchange reserves and actively explore new ways to use our reserve assets even better,' State Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE) chief Hu Xiaolian said in a statement late last night.

'We will further improve the currency and asset structure in the foreign exchange reserve portfolio and continue to broaden the investment channels for our reserves,' he added.

The statement, posted on SAFE's website, said the diversification would serve the twin purposes of strengthening risk management and boosting the yields of currency reserve assets.

China is currently holding a lot of dollar deserves. If this changes, the value of dollar might drop. And you know what that means.

Elsewhere, Bush is touring to celebrate the "strong" economy. Against all evidence and economic logic he argues that things are good and that they are good because of the tax cuts to the superwealthy:

Their appearances were to follow the government's release of its employment report for December, which most economists forecast will show a net gain of about 200,000 payroll jobs for the month. That would be slightly less than the 215,000 jobs created in November - unless that number is revised downward - but would still represent another decent month for the U.S. jobs picture.

Economists also predict unemployment to hold steady at 5 percent and believe there will be modest job gains throughout 2006.

...

``The tax cuts that we passed are working to create jobs and economic opportunity,'' White House press secretary Scott McClellan said.

Democrats, on the other hand, note high prescription drug costs and confusion about the new Medicare prescription drug plan, high heating bills, displaced workers in the Gulf Coast and rising federal deficits.

The economy isn't terrible, true. But it's not doing wonderfully. Never mind, the definitions of "a strong economy" and "a victory in Iraq" are different now. But do keep in mind that the Chinese are funding a large share of this economy...

Friday Dog Blogging

This is a Wheaten Terrier. A very nice Wheaten Terrier, after a nice play in the mud.

I spent yesterday afternoon at the local veterinarian hospital, waiting for Hank's chemotherapy session. She is still doing well.

Imagine an emergency room waiting room, only with less shininess and patients which mostly just pant in fear rather than moan, and you have the waiting room of this particular animal hospital down pat. It's really not a nice experience to wait there. But I met a lovely little girl with the Red Ruby Shoes from the Wizard of Oz and a cat called Oreo (who was in for a routine spaying), because the little girl loves Oreo cookies which she showed me by stuffing about a ten in her mouth in one go. Then she did the tour of the waiting room bothering everybody and asking to ride the big dogs (which she wasn't allowed, of course). And suddenly we were all talking to each other and sharing the worries and the reliefs.

Scooter Libby Finds A Soft Nest

He has been hired by the Hudson Institute, a conservative propaganda tank. Next time you read about some quasi-research results from the Hudson Institute, remember that Scooter works there.

The wingnuts do take care of their own, don't they? A nice job with a good salary and a pulpit from which to still affect American foreign policy. Plus, there is even time for extra consulting!

I chose the wrong political stance. That pesky conscience!

IRS Tracking Party Affiliation

Hesiod on Atrios threads linked to an article about the Internal Revenue Service tracking the party affiliation of tax payers:

As it hunted down tax scofflaws, the Internal Revenue Service collected information on the political party affiliations of taxpayers in 20 states.

Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., a member of an appropriations subcommittee with jurisdiction over the IRS, said the practice was an "outrageous violation of the public trust" that could undermine the agency's credibility.

IRS officials acknowledged that party affiliation information was routinely collected by a vendor for several months. They told the vendor last month to screen the information out.

"The bottom line is that we have never used this information," said John Lipold, an IRS spokesman. "There are strict laws in place that forbid it."

My bolds in the quote. Now how can you write irony when real-world commentary does it better? Not fair.

Now we need a good, independent study on the correlations between belonging to the Democratic party and getting audited. And by a good study I mean one which controls for all the other reasons to get audited.

Iraq

A bad day today:

IN ONE of the darkest days in Iraq in recent months, insurgents killed about 130 people in a series of deadly explosions targeting Shia pilgrims in the south, Sunni police recruits in the west and US soldiers.

The slaughter was the worst in Iraq since the December 15 elections, and came only a day after guerrillas killed more than 50 people, mostly Shia mourners blown up at the funeral of a bodyguard who was shot dead in an assassination attempt on a local politician.

How would Pat Robertson interpret the wrath of God here, hmh? And has more blood shed recently than oil? Does anyone know?

Remind me again how much better off we are now that Saddam is no longer in power.

This post explains why I don't write much about Iraq. I get too upset and angry.

And God Punishes...

Interesting, given my earlier post on disasters as God's punishment, and the comments on the attached thread about Pat Robertson not really saying that New Orleans got a hurricane to punish its citizenship for the lesbianity of its famous daughter, Ellen deGeneres. Because now Robertson seems (see how careful I am here?) to have said that Ariel Sharon got a stroke because of his crimes:

The Rev. Pat Robertson said Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is being punished by God for dividing the Land of Israel. Robertson, speaking on the "700 Club" on Thursday, suggested Sharon, who is currently in an induced coma, and former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, assassinated by an Israeli extremist in 1995, were being treated with enmity by God for dividing Israel. "He was dividing God's land," Robertson said. "And I would say, Woe unto any prime minister of Israel who takes a similar course to appease the E.U., the United Nations or the United States of America. God says, This land belongs to me. You better leave it alone."

Sharon is also 77 years old, of course. But perhaps God would have let him go on for ever if he had acted according to Robertson's wishes.

It's stupid to write about what Pat Robertson says. I would never comment on him if we lived in a reality-based world.

Some Recess Appointments to the Royal Court

Bush has taken advantage of the vacation lull to appoint lots of controversial people, many of them without any debate. A royal act, wouldn't you say? Here is a list:

Floyd Hall, of New Jersey, to be a Member of the AMTRAK Reform Board.

Enrique J. Sosa, of Florida, to be a Member of the AMTRAK Reform Board.

Nadine Hogan, of Florida, to be a Member of the Board of Directors of
the Inter-American Foundation (Private Representative).

Roger W. Wallace, of Texas, to be a Member of the Board of Directors of
the Inter-American Foundation (Private Representative).

Gordon England, of Texas, to be Deputy Secretary of Defense.

Benjamin A. Powell, of Florida, to be General Counsel of the Office of
the Director of National Intelligence.

Ronald E. Meisburg, of Virginia, to be General Counsel of the National
Labor Relations Board.

Julie L. Myers, of Kansas, to be Assistant Secretary of Homeland
Security (Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement).

Tracy A. Henke, of Missouri, to be Executive Director of the Office of
State and Local Government Coordination and Preparedness at the
Department of Homeland Security.

Arthur F. Rosenfeld, of Virginia, to be Federal Mediation and
Conciliation Director at the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service.

Ellen R. Sauerbrey, of Maryland, to be Assistant Secretary of State
(Population, Refugees, and Migration).

Dorrance Smith, of Virginia, to be Assistant Secretary of Defense
(Public Affairs).

Robert D. Lenhard, of Maryland, to be a Member of the Federal Election
Commission.

Steven T. Walther, of Nevada, to be a Member of the Federal Election
Commission.

Hans Von Spakovsky, of Georgia, to be a Member of the Federal Election
Commission.

Peter N. Kirsanow, of Ohio, to be a Member of the National Labor
Relations Board.

Stephen Goldsmith, of Indiana, to be a Member of the Board of Directors
of the Corporation for National and Community Service.

I have blogged about Julie Myers and Ellen Sauerbrey before. Neither has experience in the field that she will direct. But Myers is related to Bush cronies and Sauerbrey is a pro-life wingnut needing to be rewarded. And here is what Washington Post says about a few of the other appointees:

Bush appointed Tracy A. Henke as executive director of the Office of State and Local Government Coordination and Preparedness. She had been accused in her politically appointed post at the Justice Department of demanding that information about racial disparities in police treatment of blacks in traffic cases be deleted from a news release.

...

For the Federal Election Commission, Bush picked Justice Department employee and former Fulton County, Ga., Republican chairman Hans von Spakovsky for one of three openings. Von Spakovsky is widely viewed as a key player in two disputed Justice Department decisions to overrule career staff in voting rights cases.

A Democratic vacancy will be filled by union lawyer Robert D. Lenhard. He has provoked opposition because of his participation as an attorney for the American Federation of State, Council and Municipal Employees in efforts to have the Supreme Court rule that the 2002 McCain-Feingold law is unconstitutional. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) indicated that he would fight the Lenhard nomination when Democratic leaders first announced it in 2003.

I suspect that democracy is legally dead now. Long live the king!

Fighting Homosexuality

Wingnut style. One way is to attack the Barbie website:

A poll on the Barbie Doll's website asks children to select their gender, and there are not two, but three choices. ''I don't know'' is the third option, and Christian ministries point out the homosexual agenda behind this latest move made by Mattel, the toy company that owns Girl Dolls, Fisher-Price, and Hot Wheels.

This new feature by the iconic and trend-setting Barbie Doll can cause gender confusion among children, according to Concerned Women for America (CWA).

Director of the ministry's Culture & Family Institute, Bob Knight, gave the inside look behind this latest move.

"It's the idea that well, maybe people aren't born a particular biological sex, or they are but that shouldn't determine their gender identity," Knight said. "And that's a very big component of the homosexual activist agenda now."

There's also a little diatribe against the Barbie as not contributing towards the proper Christian view of how women should behave.

The other way is to preach against homosexualism from the pulpit or in the political arena. Here is one example:

Lonnie Latham, senior pastor at South Tulsa Baptist Church, was booked into Oklahoma County Jail Tuesday night on a misdemeanor charge of offering to engage in an act of lewdness, police Capt. Jeffrey Becker said. Latham was released on $500 bail Wednesday afternoon.

Latham, who has spoken out against homosexuality, asked the officer to join him in his hotel room for oral sex. Latham was arrested and his 2005 Mercedes automobile was impounded, Becker said.

Calls to Latham at his church were not immediately returned Wednesday.

When he left jail, he told Oklahoma City television station KFOR:

"I was set up. I was in the area pastoring to police."

I'm not sure which of the two approaches are more effective...

Carnival of Feminists, No. 6

It is out now and you can get it here.

The Disappearing Amanpour

This is all over the blogs. It seems that NBC is changing its transcripts from what actually went on in an interview about Bush's illegal eavesdropping program which was supposed to net only terrorist suspects, not, say, professional journalists like Christiane Amanpour. Kos , for example, gives us the original:

Mitchell: Do you have any information about reporters being swept up in this net?

Risen: No, I don't. It's not clear to me. That's one of the questions we'll have to look into the future. Were there abuses of this program or not? I don't know the answer to that

Mitchell: You don't have any information, for instance, that a very prominent journalist, Christiane Amanpour, might have been eavesdropped upon?

Risen: No, no I hadn't heard that.

Now the second question and its answer have been deleted. Which of course just strengthens the rumors that Amanpour might have been spied on.

Disasters as God's Punishment

The Sago mine explosion. Many hopeful prayers and statements about God and miracles. When it was thought that twelve out of the original thirteen miners had survived we heard on television how God is great. When the grim truth of just one survivor was revealed did these commentators call God small? Not on the whole, though some relatives did voice their anguish:

News of the 12 deaths came hours after church bells pealed and friends and family of the miners celebrated and sang hymns when word spread that 12 miners had survived. West Virginia's governor said there were indications within 20 minutes the initial report of 12 survivors was wrong. Friends and family were not told for about three hours.

"It hit people's hearts so hard ... One guy said what in the hell has God done for us, but just a few minutes before that we was praising God, because they believed that they was alive," John Casto, a friend of the miners, said on CNN.

Virginia Dean, whose uncle was in the mine, said: "Only one lived. They lied."

But mostly people don't put the blame of natural disasters on God acting immorally. In our arrogance we believe that it was something we did that caused the disaster, and sometimes it was, of course, but the belief is usually not based on things like perhaps badly maintaining a mine. It is based on the belief that the moral fiber of humans has failed and that God is punishing us all, indiscriminately, for the sins of the few.

The outcome of such blaming is not too bad when all it does is make the survivors go around in hairshirts and whips, to be used on their own bodies, as happened after some of the horrible plague epidemics of the past. But it can get very frightening very fast when the blaming is used to attack the traditional scapegoats of the society.

In the United States, Pat Robertson is a good example of this medieval mindset*:

Hollywood – Pat Robertson on Sunday said that Hurricane Katrina was God's way of expressing its anger at the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences for its selection of Ellen Degeneres to host this year's Emmy Awards. "By choosing an avowed lesbian for this national event, these Hollywood elites have clearly invited God's wrath," Robertson said on "The 700 Club" on Sunday. "Is it any surprise that the Almighty chose to strike at Miss Degeneres' hometown?"

The conclusion Robertson wants us to draw is a sinister one: if only we could discipline the gays and lesbians in our midst God would stop sending us hurricanes.

In Indonesia, it is the women who caused the tsunamis:

MARLUDDIN JALIL, a Sharia judge who has ordered the punishment of women for not wearing headscarves, was uncompromising: "The tsunami was because of the sins of the people of Aceh."

Thundering into a microphone at a gathering of wives, he made clear where he felt the fault lay: "The Holy Koran says that if women are good, then a country is good."

A year after the disaster which many see as a divine punishment, emboldened Islamic hardliners are doing their best to eradicate sin — and women are their prime targets.

With reconstruction slow, irrational fears of a second tsunami high, and nearly 500,000 still homeless along 500 miles of coastline, the stern message falls on fertile ground. A Sharia police force modelled on Saudi moral enforcers enthusiastically seeks out female wrong doers for public humiliation.

"Enthusiastically seeks out female wrong doers". Yes, there is enthusiasm in all this, a feeling that, finally, it is a good thing to act viciously, that God wants it. What a coincidence that it is someone else who is to blame for the disaster, someone who in any case deserves to be controlled, restrained or punished. How nice that the sins are the sins of others.

It remains to be seen whom Robertson will blame for the Sago mine disaster, but it's unlikely to be the mining company.
----
*Ok, so Robertson maybe didn't say this. But Falwell did blame the ACLU and abortionists for 911 and Pat concurred.

Digby Makes It Clear

I'm quoting a tiny snippet of Digby's excellent post on the way many in the media try to argue that the Abramoff scandal is not really a Republican problem but just a bad apple problem. Like Lynndie England, you know. And Democrats do it, too, so it's a bipartisan problem. Isn't it wonderful to be all bipartisan suddenly?

Well, Digby is having none of this:

This characterization of the scandal as being "bi-partisan" is typical bad mainstream journalism, particularly the emphasis they are placing on the very small handful of Democrats who've even been mentioned (much less included in any legal procedings.) Not only are they creating some equity and illegality where none exists, by doing it they are missing the real story, as usual.

This isn't a story about power corrupting or about a few bad apples. This is about a corrupt political machine --- a system of money laundering and public corruption on behalf of one political party. It's about a party that has used every tool to legally and illegally enrich itself and enhance its power. It's right there. It's unravelling before our eyes.

The Republicans have also had a conscious policy of refusing to deal with lobbying firms which employ Democrats. This means that most of the lobbyists in Washington are Republicans and when they bribe someone it's going to be another Republican. A funny outcome from a policy which was aimed at destroying the Democrats.

What's This Thing Called Love?

One quote in Tierney's column struck me with unusual vividity. It is by an evolutionary psychologist David Buss:

"Of course, some women marry for love and find a man's resources irrelevant," Buss says.

Color me naive but I assumed that most people in the western world who marry do so at least believing that it is for love. Am I totally mistaken in this? Is it true that only "some women" marry for love and that the others, presumably, marry for money? I don't know a single case of anybody, man or woman, marrying for money amongst my acquaintances but perhaps my acquaintances are atypical?

The Sago Mine Explosion

I fervently hope that the miners will be found alive, and that similar accidents will never happen again. For the latter hope to be realized we need to learn what caused this explosion. Though the causes may have been unpreventable, this daily Kos diary and especially the first comment in the thread by the diary writer suggest (though obviously only suggest) some other troubling possibilities.

Abramoff

Jack Abramoff, the lobbyist who has had legal trouble pleads guilty:

Jack Abramoff will plead guilty to three felony counts in Washington today as part of a settlement with federal prosecutors, ending an intense, months-long negotiation over whether the Republican lobbyist would testify against his former colleagues, people involved with the case said.

Mr. Abramoff, 46, is pleading guilty to fraud, public corruption and tax evasion, setting the stage for prosecutors to begin using him as a cooperating witness against his former business and political colleagues. In exchange, Mr. Abramoff faces a maximum of about 10 years in prison in the Washington case.

...

Now, after more than two years of investigations, prosecutors have developed a list of at least a dozen lawmakers, congressional aides and lobbyists whose work appears suspect and who are now at the core of the case. With Mr. Abramoff's cooperation, the Justice Department will have a potentially critical witness to alleged patterns of corruption or bribery within the Republican leadership ranks, which in some cases they believe also took the form of campaign donations and free meals at Mr. Abramoff's downtown restaurant, Signatures.

Already, prosecutors have a key witness in Michael Scanlon, once press secretary to Mr. DeLay. Mr. Scanlon reached a plea agreement last year, putting pressure on Mr. Abramoff to reach his own deal. Now that Mr. Abramoff has done the same, one person involved in the case said: "When some people hear about this, they will clamor to cut a deal of their own."

Bolds are mine, and they point out the important bit in this quote. The fun is just beginning. Though as Atrios points out, there is already talk that the corruption isn't especially about Republicans. Which would mean, naturally, that there is no point in changing the party in power...

Firedoglake has more legal analysis.

Read This

A Life, Wasted
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Via this Kos diary.

Woman-Bashing Week?

It might be the topic that the top wingnuts have handed down to their underlings this week. How else can one explain not one but two New York Times topics on the sad and lonely lives of successful women? I wrote about David Brooks's column below. I am not going to write about John Tierney's column as it's even worse. But the gist of it is that we must create affirmative action for men in college admissions. And why? Because otherwise all those educated women won't be able to marry!

Tierney really is a misogynist. I don't call people that lightly but I have never read this man write a single column on women which didn't have the intention of somehow hurting us or at least ridiculing and stereotyping us. Yet the Times gives us both his and Brooks's warnings about the dangers that women face if they veer away from the path traditionalists hold as the ideal one for women, a path which, not coincidentally, also keeps women in the position of nursemaids for men like Tierney and Brooks. These guys are scared shitless. Of us. And the solution seems to be to make us non-threatening.

But the fear these men feel is no excuse for the Gray Lady to have their gender matters addressed by two patriarchs. It is time to stop subscribing to the Times, or at least time to tell them that you will stop unless the coverage gets more objective.

You can contact the Times at letters@nytimes.com

What Would You Do?

I have sometimes wondered if I'd have the courage of these Italian women who refused to be released by the kidnappers until the two men in their company are released, too. I hope that I could do what they are doing but I can't tell for sure. They are admirable:

Three Italian women kidnapped in north Yemen have refused to go free until their abductors release two Italian men held with them, Yemeni tribal and state officials said Monday.

The Italian tourists were abducted Sunday in Marib Province, about 75 miles northeast of the Yemeni capital, San'a. Hours later, officials said the kidnappers had released the three women after a government negotiator convinced them that abducting women violated tribal values.

But the women declined to leave the kidnappers' hideout until the tribesmen freed their male colleagues, tribal authorities and security officials said on condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to address the media.

The kidnappers, who have a history of abducting foreigners and Yemenis, want the government to release eight members of their tribe. One of the eight faces murder charges and was extradited to Yemen from the United Arab Emirates.

Power Is In The Kitchen

The holidays are now officially over. David Brooks is back typing away with his mitten-covered hands. Today's topic is Linda Hirshman's article about the need of women to fight harder for the option to have a career (on which I blogged earlier here and here) and how Hirshman is wrong because power is in the kitchen so women should stay there. Not that David is planning to join the powerful, of course. He is quite happy writing his little powerless column about the powerless guys waging war in Iraq.

Here are some meat-and-potato quotes from Brooks about why Hirshman is supposedly wrong:

First, she's wrong with her astonishing assertion that high-paying jobs lead to more human flourishing than parenthood. Look back over your life. Which memories do you cherish more, those with your family or those at the office? If Hirshman thinks high-paying careers lead to more human flourishing, I invite her to spend a day as an associate at a big law firm.

Second, she's wrong to assume that work is the realm of power and home is the realm of powerlessness. The domestic sphere may not offer the sort of brutalizing, dominating power Hirshman admires, but it is the realm of unmatched influence. If there is one thing we have learned over the past generation, it is that a child's I.Q., mental habits and destiny are largely shaped in the first few years of life, before school or the outside world has much influence.

Children, at least, understand parental power. In "Eminem Is Right," a Sidney Award-winning essay in Policy Review, Mary Eberstadt notes a striking change in pop music. "If yesterday's rock was the music of abandon, today's is the music of abandonment." An astonishing number of hits, from artists ranging from Pearl Jam to Everclear to Snoop Dogg, are about kids who feel neglected by their parents. This is a need Hirshman passes over.

Her third mistake is to not even grapple with the fact that men and women are wired differently. The Larry Summers flap produced an outpouring of work on the neurological differences between men and women. I'd especially recommend "The Inequality Taboo" by Charles Murray in Commentary and a debate between Steven Pinker and Elizabeth Spelke in the online magazine Edge.

One of the findings of this research is that men are more interested in things and abstract rules while women are more interested in people. (You can come up with your own Darwinian explanation as to why.)

Ok. Let's summarize David. His three points are that staying at home is more fun than working, that staying at home is where the real power is and that women are wired for that kind of power whereas poor men are not. If you read me regularly you already know how I resent this false dualism of "work-vs.-home"; most people need and want to have both children and meaningful work, but some of us are not allowed to have both by people like Brooks.

But leaving that aside, the question of where human beings flourish best is not one that can be answered by inviting someone to spend a day as the law associate of a big firm without also letting that person get the income of the law associate and the respect that person gets as well as the exciting problems he or she is invited to analyze. Likewise, David himself should be invited to spend a day with four children under ten in an isolated suburban home, with laundry to wash and three meals to prepare. All I did here was a reversal of his argument; I'm not arguing that staying at home with children isn't fun and rewarding, too. But so is being a law associate in a large firm.

The question of power at home is interesting. This is an old argument: The Hand That Rocks The Cradle Rules The World. If this were actually true we'd see mothers and nannies blamed for the Iraq war and the illegal wiretappings in this country. It is not true, for the simple reason that no cradle-rocker has influence over more than just a few children, whereas anybody running the United States has power over most of the world. And that it is not true is the reason why David Brooks is not in the kitchen.

David's third and grossest mistake is to refer to Charles Murray as an expert on race and sex differences. Charles Murray! Now a New York Times columnist recommends Charles Murray's ravings and rantings as a good source of scientific information! Your liberal media in action, my dear readers.

Let's give a little more attention to one of David's wholesale conclusions, this one:

One of the findings of this research is that men are more interested in things and abstract rules while women are more interested in people.

If this is true, shouldn't women be running all political systems in the whole world? And how would you divide fields such as medicine? After all, people have things inside them. People also do things. So confusing, isn't it? Much easier to argue that women are more interested in people and that means that women are better suited to rearing children and men for everything else.

Cathy Young discusses some of this on her blog in a different context. In particular, she talks about the monkey study which wingnuts love, because it seemed to tell us that girl monkeys like to play with saucepans and dolls and boy monkeys with cars. Which tells us, naturally, that even girl monkeys are genetically wired to be in the kitchen, even if girl monkeys don't yet have kitchens. And boy monkeys will all be cab drivers one day. As all wingnuts knew to be true to begin with, except that we are not supposed to have evolved from the same ancestor as monkeys. Oops! But I digress. What the monkey study actually found was this:

Of the 88 laboratory-living vervet monkeys in the study, 33 males and 30 females had some contact with one or more of the toys they were offered (playing with a toy or picking it up and examining it).

For the males, about 16% of the contact was with a toy police car. For the females, the corresponding figure was about 8%. Another toy rated as "masculine," an orange ball, was handled by males about 20% of the time and by females about 10%. (The figures are approximate because the article shows them as bars on a diagram, not as specific numbers. The graph can be found here at Obsidian Wings.)

A red pan, also classified as a "girl toy," accounted for about 27% of the females' contact with the toys. And for about 17% of the males'.

The biggest difference was in the handling of a doll. About 22% of the females' toy contact consisted of picking up, handling, and examining the doll. The corresponding figure for males was about 8%. (There were no significant gender differences in monkey interest in a furry dog toy.) It should be noted that among vervets, adult males do not participate in infant care at all, though juvenile males apparently handle infants; the females' behavior toward the doll was rather similar of female vervets' handling of infants.

Let's say that all these differences are solid and related to gender and biology (though I find it hard to believe that female monkeys would perceive a pan as a "feminine" object -- last time I checked, monkeys don't cook). They still clearly show a great deal of intra-gender variation. So why is it that, if male monkeys play with a toy car 16% of the time and female monkeys 8% of the time, this is translated into "boys love trucks"?

Incidentally, there was no overall difference between male and female monkeys in favoring "object toys" versus "animate toys" (the doll and the dog). So much for the notion that females are person-oriented and males are object-oriented.

Put that in your pipe, David Brooks, and then do something politically incorrect with it.
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Read Amanda's take of the article here.

Ah! All Has Been Made Clear!

By our dear leader. This is what he said about the necessity for illegal wiretapping by his administration:

President Bush on Sunday strongly defended his domestic spying program, saying it's a limited initiative that tracks only incoming calls to the United States.

"It's seems logical to me that if we know there's a phone number associated with al-Qaida or an al-Qaida affiliate and they're making phone calls, it makes sense to find out why," Bush said. "They attacked us before, they'll attack us again."

It seems logical to me to point out that nothing stops him from doing this. He just needs to tell the courts, and he can even delay that part 72 hours. Nobody is trying to stop him from wiretapping terrorists, as long as he stays within the law.

It also seems logical to me to point out that there are better things for Bush to do than twiddle his thumbs while waiting for a phone call from al-Qaida, and I don't mean clearing brush. He could go and get the terrorists. You know, guys called Osama bin Laden.

Lastly, it seems logical to point out that Bush's whole argument would sound lacking and immature if it came out of the mouth of a five year old.

Condi, Hillary and Mr. Bush

Can you tell what this post is about? I bet you can; it's all in the title. For some odd reason powerful women get called by their first names on television and radio whereas powerful men get called Mr. powerful-man's-last-name. And what does this mean?

Take a guess. I think it is a way of trivializing these women's messages, a way of making them less powerful. It could also be that they are seen as more approachable than their high-and-mighty male equivalents. But I doubt that.

Interesting, in any case.

James Comey

So nice to begin the new year by writing about a Republican who is ethical. James Comey is one of those rare creatures:

A top Justice Department official objected in 2004 to aspects of the National Security Agency's domestic surveillance program and refused to sign on to its continued use amid concerns about its legality and oversight, according to officials with knowledge of the tense internal debate. The concerns appear to have played a part in the temporary suspension of the secret program.

The concerns prompted two of President Bush's most senior aides - Andrew H. Card Jr., his chief of staff, and Alberto R. Gonzales, then White House counsel and now attorney general - to make an emergency visit to a Washington hospital in March 2004 to discuss the program's future and try to win the needed approval from Attorney General John Ashcroft, who was hospitalized for gallbladder surgery, the officials said.

The unusual meeting was prompted because Mr. Ashcroft's top deputy, James B. Comey, who was acting as attorney general in his absence, had indicated he was unwilling to give his approval to certifying central aspects of the program, as required under the White House procedures set up to oversee it.

With Mr. Comey unwilling to sign off on the program, the White House went to Mr. Ashcroft - who had been in the intensive care unit at George Washington University Hospital with pancreatitis and was housed under unusually tight security - because "they needed him for certification," according to an official briefed on the episode. The official, like others who discussed the issue, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the classified nature of the program.

Funny how every leaker now prefers to stay anonymous. Does this tell us something about the current government's attitude towards whistleblowers? Or are all programs now classified? Same difference, really. - In any case, Mr. Comey refused to rubber stamp possibly illegal maneuvers by this administration, and he is to be applauded for that.

Read firedoglake for more on Mr. Comey.