Via aTypical Joe…  That new federal grant program for students majoring in science, engineering, mathematics, and some foreign languages…?  Heh…well if your major is in the evolutionary sciences…forget it…

Like a gap in the fossil record, evolutionary biology is missing from a list of majors that the U.S. Department of Education has deemed eligible for a new federal grant program designed to reward students majoring in engineering, mathematics, science, or certain foreign languages.

That absence apparently indicates that students in the evolutionary sciences do not qualify for the grants, and some observers are wondering whether the omission was deliberate.

The question arises at a time when evolution has become a political hot potato at all levels of education. While the theory of evolution has overwhelming support from scientists, some conservative Christian groups argue for alternative explanations of the origins of life, including "intelligent design," which holds that an intelligent agent guided the creation of life.

Joe explains that the grants are worth up to four-thousand dollars, and are awarded in addition to the Pell Grants.

The [Department of Education] has an index of classification numbers — referred to as "CIP codes," for the Classification of Instructional Programs — for all academic areas of instruction,

Under that classification scheme, there is a heading for "Ecology, Evolution, Systematics and Population Biology," under which 10 biological fields are defined. For instance, ecology is 26.1301, and evolutionary biology is 26.1303.

But on a list that defines majors eligible for the grants, issued by the department in May, one of those 10 is missing. On that list, the classification numbers rise in order from 26.1301 to 26.1309 — with the exception of a blank line where 26.1303, or evolutionary biology, would fall.

Tell me that’s not deliberate.  Go ahead.  Tell me that some Bush gang religious right policy wonk didn’t redline evolutionary biology from the list of eligible majors either because God told them to, or because Karl said it would keep the base happy.  I have a modest proposal.  If these kooks are that dead set against the study of evolution, they should all be willing to sign pledges stating that they will not partake of any medication or treatment of any kind, nor life enhancing technology, that was developed using evolutionary biology in some way, even if their doctors tell them it would mean saving their own lives.

But then…they don’t keep their own marriage or virginity pledges very well do they…

So for some god forsaken reason I was watching the network news last night.  Oh…right…I know what it was.  I was watching for stories about that escaped convict that killed two people down in southern Virginia.  First of all I have family down there, but secondly the crime itself seemed just dumbfoundingly stupid.  Stupid beyond stupid being its own excuse.  Here’s this…kid, basically…who was in jail for attempted armed robbery, and he tries to escape and in the process kills two people and now he’s facing a death sentence.  Far as I could tell it was his first arrest so there was no "three strikes" kind of thing going on there.  What kind of drooling moron turns a few years in prison into an appointment with the gas chamber?  Making an escape attempt if the opportunity just threw itself at you I could see (it’s still dumb, but not catastrophically dumb), but when the guns come out, hey, just go quietly man.  It’s just attempted armed robbery.  Just do the fucking time and deal with it.  But no…and now he’s 24 and headed for death row.  So I was searching for any insight into this guy I could snatch from the news stream.  That’s why I happened to be watching CBS News last night…

…and among the stories Bob Schieffer read to me was a little nugget about the Jose Padilla case.  Padilla, you may recall, had been in a South Carolina brig for over three years as an ”enemy combatant”…an American citizen accused but never charged in the Bush administration way of doing things, of planning to set off a ”dirty bomb” somewhere in the U.S.  Padilla is one of the guys the Bush administration has been holding out as a reason for doing away with that troublesome bill of rights that gives aid and comfort to terrorists and liberals.  But rather then loose a fight over it in the supreme court before he could pack it with enough right wing lunatics who were willing to declare Bush King George The First, the Bush administration finally brought Padilla into court.  Schieffer casually informed me last night that the judge had thrown out one of the three counts against him.  And as I was busy searching for news about the Virginia killings, I casually shrugged off the story just as Schieffer did while he was reading it.

But…no…there was more to it…

Judge drops Padilla terror charge

MIAMI, Florida (CNN) — A federal judge in Miami on Monday dismissed a terror count against Jose Padilla, the U.S. citizen once identified as a "dirty bomb" suspect and detained as an "enemy combatant."

U.S. District Judge Marcia Cooke said in a written opinion that the charge — conspiracy to "murder, kidnap and maim persons in a foreign country" — duplicated other counts in a federal grand jury indictment handed down last year.

"An indictment is multiplicitous when it charges a single offense multiple times, in separate counts," Cooke wrote. As charged, she added, the indictment exposes Padilla and his co-defendants to multiple punishments for a single crime.

The indictment, Cooke noted, "alleges one and only one conspiracy" and that the same facts are "re-alleged in each of the consecutive counts."

Cooke also ruled that a second count against Padilla and his co-defendants was "duplicitous" — charging them with the same offense under two sections of federal law. She ordered the government to choose between the two counts, which provide for different penalties, by Friday.

The counts in question are conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists, and providing material support to terrorists.

The main terror charge against him was thrown out.  Not just …one out of three.  And…in case you haven’t been following this…remember that the accusation the Bush gang had been throwing around, that he was plotting to detonate a dirty bomb in the U.S., was never even part of the indictment.  So now it’s just two charges of conspiracy to support terrorists abroad, and get this, the charges are that he was involved in a plot for five years, and the other charge is that he was involved in Exactly The Same Plot, for 15 years. 

What the fuck?  I’m shocked that the Bush gang didn’t manage to find fifteen squared charges in that fifteen years of plotting to…er…support terrorists abroad.  Count one:  Padilla was involved in conspiracy ‘a’ for one year.  Count two:  Padilla was involved in conspiracy ‘a’ for two years. Count three: Padilla was involved in conspiracy ‘a’ for one year, and then again for one year more.  And so on until you get fifteen times fifteen counts against him that you can wave around as proof that the president needs more power then the constitution gives him, because these are very dangerous times.  What the judge said was, no…that’s all just one conspiracy.

I discovered what the implications of the ruling were not from CBS News, but via Americablog, which had a link to a Miami Herald article that gave me the details CBS News didn’t feel like I needed to have, and once again I hit the roof.  I hate those bastards.  I really hate them.  I used to watch the evening network news avidly.  I grew up watching Walter Cronkite, and Huntley and Brinkley.  Maybe it was just living in the Washington D.C. suburbs.  Maybe it was just the hungry curious about the world mind I always had.  But I had to have my news fix every day after dinner, even when I was an elementary school kid, and anxious to watch Astro Boy too when the news was over.  And now I can’t really bear to watch TV news anymore.  Why even bother, when I have to double check everything I hear them tell me anyway?

Finally…a little accountability…

Prosecutor looking into petition fraud

 

Allegations arise after failed gay rights referendum attempt

 

The Hamilton County Prosecutor’s Office is investigating alleged election fraud in the failed attempt of a group called Equal Rights Not Special Rights to force a ballot referendum on whether over gay people should be protected by Cincinnati’s anti-discrimination law.

Equal Rights Not Special Rights officially withdrew its petitions Thursday, saying it discovered one paid signature gatherer had fraudulently signed 18 names in the more than 7,600 signatures that were validated by the Hamilton County Board of Elections last June.

Thousands of those validated signatures were to be challenged Thursday by a pro-ordinance group called Citizens To Restore Fairness, which said the referendum sponsor was systematic in its use of fraud and tampering of petitions to push the issue onto ballots this fall. A protest hearing at the Board of Elections, scheduled for Thursday, was canceled when Prosecutor Joe Deters started his investigation.

It’s come to this in the Bush economy…

Northwest advised workers to see treasure in trash

NEW YORK, Aug 15 (Reuters) – Bankrupt Northwest Airlines Corp. advised workers to fish in the trash for things they like or take their dates for a walk in the woods in a move to help workers facing the ax to save money.

The No. 5 U.S. carrier, which has slashed most employees’ pay and is looking to cut jobs as it prepares to exit bankruptcy, put the tips in a booklet handed out to about 50 workers and posted for a time on its employee Web site.

The section, entitled "101 ways to save money", does not feature in new versions of the booklet or the Web site.

Northwest spokesman Roman Blahoski said some employees who received the handbook had taken issue with a couple of the items. "We agree that some of these suggestions and tips … were a bit insensitive," Blahoski told Reuters.

The four-page booklet, "Preparing for a Financial Setback" contained suggestions such as shopping in thrift stores, taking "a date for a walk along the beach or in the woods" and not being "shy about pulling something you like out of the trash."

The booklet was part of a 150-page packet to ground workers, such as baggage handlers, whose jobs will likely be cut after their union agreed to allow the airline to outsource some of their work, Blahoski said.

I have a proposal:  From now on the board of directors of Northwest Airlines and their families will have to fly to all their destinations on board airplanes that are being maintained and operated by people who need to dumpster dive in order to make ends meet.

It’s been a long six years of George Bush…but it looks like all those folks who thought the old politics-as-usual were still preferable to "partisanship" and "divisiveness" are finally starting to get what they’re dealing with now.  This from Oliver Willis:

I can completely identify with Josh Marshall here and his portrayal of the bare-knuckle style of our politics nowadays.

With all those caveats though, there is a difference. And I think at some level or another, it’s one almost everyone in the center-left can relate to, at least at some level. For my part, I don’t feel my politics have changed much over the past half dozen years, if by that we mean my basic political orientation, policies I believe in and don’t, basic understanding of how the world works and so forth. Many people who read my site are much more to the left politically than I am. And occasionally, some issue will come up where that fact suddenly becomes evident, often to people’s surprise and sometimes anger.

I was going to start by saying that what’s changed for me is that the country I know and value is under attack. But that’s not quite it.

I live in Manhattan and have a certain perspective on the country. Folks in Oklahoma or evangelicals in South Carolina have a different one. And that’s fine. It’s their country too. What I think is that a certain political movement has taken over the country — call it movement conservatism in its late, degraded form — and wants to govern it by all or nothing rules.

I’ve not really moved an inch on my positions on the important issues, but the insanity of the Bush presidency makes my center-left proclivities appear to be on the far, far, left (which, in a Democratic presidency will probably be the second biggest pain in my butt).

I dislike the two-dimensional political spectrum.  I seem liberal on some issues (censorship, victimless crime, minority rights, war, immigration, church-state separation, education) conservative on others (gun control, free trade, national defense) and moderate on still others (regulation of the economy, taxation, state’s rights, science and research).  I don’t see myself so much as liberal or conservative, as a social engineer.  A rule of law is social engineering.  A constitution is social engineering.  Societies either engineer themselves to work or they don’t.  Ask the children of Marx and Lenin, ask the shades that walk the fields of Gettysburg what happens to a society when its understanding of the human identity and society is profoundly wrong.  I am of the party of Whatever Actually Works.

But in these times anyone who isn’t with Bush is a liberal, so I reckon that’s what I am now too.  And it’s not because we’ve all actually become liberals. It’s because the Bush gang has deliberately, cynically, and with malice, sought to up-end politics-as-usual in America, destroy the American political consensus and, quite literally, destroy the democratic political process.  And they did it so they could seize power for themselves and hold onto it indefinitely.  Pat Buchanan saw it back when he was working for Nixon, and called it "positive polarization": divide the country, and they’d have the bigger half.  But the Bush gang has gone beyond that, into the destruction of the democratic process itself.  They are radicals, in the mold of the 1930s brownshirts, who reject not just social liberalism, but democracy itself, as decadent.

In an interview with  the London Guardian back in September 19, 2003, Paul Krugman spoke of when he saw it himself…ironically through the words of Henry Kissinger…

Even more confusing for those who like their politics to consist of nicely pigeonholed leftwingers criticising rightwingers, and vice versa, will be the incendiary essay that introduces Krugman’s new collection of columns, The Great Unravelling, published in the UK next week. In it, Krugman describes how, just as he was about to send his manuscript to the publishers, he chanced upon a passage in an old history book from the 1950s, about 19th-century diplomacy, that seemed to pinpoint, with eerie accuracy, what is happening in the US now. Eerie, but also perhaps a little embarrassing, really, given the identity of the author. Because it’s Henry Kissinger.

"The first three pages of Kissinger’s book sent chills down my spine," Krugman writes of A World Restored, the 1957 tome by the man who would later become the unacceptable face of cynical realpolitik. Kissinger, using Napoleon as a case study – but also, Krugman believes, implicitly addressing the rise of fascism in the 1930s – describes what happens when a stable political system is confronted with a "revolutionary power": a radical group that rejects the legitimacy of the system itself.

This, Krugman believes, is precisely the situation in the US today (though he is at pains to point out that he isn’t comparing Bush to Hitler in moral terms). The "revolutionary power", in Kissinger’s theory, rejects fundamental elements of the system it seeks to control, arguing that they are wrong in principle. For the Bush administration, according to Krugman, that includes social security; the idea of pursuing foreign policy through international institutions; and perhaps even the basic notion that political legitimacy comes from democratic elections – as opposed to, say, from God.

But worse still, Kissinger continued, nobody can quite bring themselves to believe that the revolutionary power really means to do what it claims. "Lulled by a period of stability which had seemed permanent," he wrote, "they find it nearly impossible to take at face value the assertion of the revolutionary power that it means to smash the existing framework." Exactly, says Krugman, who recallss the response to his column about Tom DeLay, the anti-evolutionist Republican leader of the House of Representatives, who claimed, bafflingly, that "nothing is more important in the face of a war than cutting taxes".

"My liberal friends said, ‘I’m not interested in what some crazy guy in Congress has to say’," Krugman recalls. "But this is not some crazy guy! This guy runs Congress! There’s this fundamental unwillingness to acknowledge the radicalism of the threat we’re facing." But those who point out what is happening, Kissinger had already noted long ago, "are considered alarmists; those who counsel adaptation to circumstance are considered balanced and sane." ("Those who take the hard-line rightists now in power at their word are usually accused of being ‘shrill’, of going over the top," Krugman writes, and he has become well used to such accusations.)

Which is how, as Krugman sees it, the Bush administration managed to sell tax cuts as a benefit to the poor when the result will really be to benefit the rich, and why they managed to rally support for war in Iraq with arguments for which they didn’t have the evidence. Journalists "find it very hard to deal with blatantly false arguments," he argues. "By inclination and training, they always try to see two sides to an issue, and find it hard even to conceive that a major political figure is simply lying."

Why anyone would be surprised to see all this in that open sewer that is the Bush base after the election of 2000 is beyond me, other then, as Krugman says, people just find it nearly impossible to take at face value what they’re seeing, when it comes to dealing with a group of anti democratic radicals who are actually in power.  Somehow, power is supposed to moderate the radical impulse.  But sometimes it just feeds it.

I came of political age during Nixon, Vietnam, and Watergate.  Back then Nixon’s attorney general, John Mitchell, in response to a reporter’s question about desegregation, said something that I have thought ever since should be engraved on every ballot presented to every voter in every election, in every polling place in America: "Watch what we do, not what we say."  I never thought I would see a president tell a bigger lie to the American people then Nixon’s "I am not a crook."  But George Bush has looked us all in the eye and said "I’m a uniter, not a divider", and now America is more divided then ever, and that was deliberate.  They knew they couldn’t govern from a majority consensus, but they figured they could have the biggest piece of a factionalized America.  So they waved the flag in our faces, while they were busy ripping the America it stood for apart, and now there is no more politics-as-usual. 

Remember this name if you haven’t already heard it: George Allen.  Son of legendary Redskins coach George Allen, one time governor of the state of Virgina, now senator, and all around racist prick.  This is from his Wikipedia entry:

Allen has a long history of interest in the Confederacy although he never lived in the South until he transferred from UCLA to the University of Virginia as a sophomore in college.

The May 8, 2006 [16] and the May 15, 2006 [17]issues of The New Republic reported extensively on Allen’s long association with the Confederate flag. The magazine reported that "[a]ccording to his colleagues, classmates, and published reports, Allen has either displayed the [Confederate] flag–on himself, his car, inside his home–or expressed his enthusiastic approval of the emblem from approximately 1967 to 2000." Allen wore a Confederate flag pin for his high school senior class photo. In high school, college, and law school, Allen adorned his vehicle with a Confederate flag. In college he displayed a Confederate flag in his room. He displayed a Confederate flag in his family’s living room until 1992. In 1993, Allen’s first statewide TV campaign ad for governor included a Confederate flag. In 2000, when a voter told Allen, "Long live the Confederate flag!" Allen replied, "You got it!"

Allen has confirmed that the pin in his high school yearbook was a Confederate flag. Allen has said "it is possible" that he had a Confederate flag on his car in high school. He has not responded to the allegations that he displayed the flag on his pickup truck and in his room in college and law school. In 1993, he confirmed that he had long displayed the Confederate flag in his living room. Greg Stevens, the political consultant who made the 1993 TV ad, confirmed that the ad included a Confederate flag.

I say remember this guy’s name, because from the chattering on the Right I’m hearing, this is the guy the Bush power base Really Likes…the one they’re going to anoint as the next republican candidate for president of the United States.  And here’s what they’ll be sending to the White House if they succeed:

Democrat James Webb’s Senate campaign accused Sen. George Allen (R) of making demeaning comments Friday to a 20-year-old Webb volunteer of Indian descent.

S.R. Sidarth, a senior at the University of Virginia, had been trailing Allen with a video camera to document his travels and speeches for the Webb campaign. During a campaign speech Friday in Breaks, Virginia, near the Kentucky border, Allen singled out Sidarth and called him a word that sounded like "Macaca."

"This fellow here over here with the yellow shirt, Macaca, or whatever his name is. He’s with my opponent. He’s following us around everywhere. And it’s just great. We’re going to places all over Virginia, and he’s having it on film and its great to have you here and you show it to your opponent because he’s never been there and probably will never come."

After telling the crowd that Webb was raising money in California with a "bunch of Hollywood movie moguls," Allen again referenced Sidarth, who was born and raised in Fairfax County.

"Lets give a welcome to Macaca, here. Welcome to America and the real world of Virginia," said Allen, who then began talking about the "war on terror."

The Webb staffer in question…

Macaca…I hear you asking (assuming you’re as naive about these things as I am)?   Well…Atrios was wondering too…

I was thinking that the assumption that George Felix Allen had been invoking a species of monkey was a bit of a stretch and that he was probably just speaking gibberish for "furrin name." But it is actually an established racial/slur, specifically directed at North Africans. If you search the nastier corners of the internet you’ll find it’s in surprisingly common usage.

Here…from the List Of Ethnic Slurs…

^{Macaque  (Belgium & France) a Negro (originally) or a person of North-African origin (more recently); derived from macaque monkeys}

What you need to notice about this, more then the slur itself, is the arcane nature of the slur.  I’ve heard racist slurs tossed around, sometimes casually and thoughtlessly, and sometimes with bitter venom, probably no more or less then any other average white America male has (and I’m sure a good deal less then the average black American has…).  I was a school kid during the worst of the late 20th century race riots, the great civil rights march on Washington, the killing of Martin Luther King Jr., Malcom X, the rise and fall of the Black Panthers.  I’ve heard plenty of racist catcalls in my lifetime.  This one was new to me.  But apparently fairly common among the hard core racist set.  That’s what you need to notice.

If you think this will hurt Allen in Virginia, you are sadly mistaken.  If you thought Bush was the bottom of the barrel, think again.  There is no bottom.

Ah yes…  The old raving lunatic in a wheelchair gimmick…

Lay aside, for the purposes of this argument, the destruction this war has delivered to Lebanon. Krauthammer has never in his career expressed a word of sympathy for an Arab, anywhere. He hates them all. For him, the only good part of this war is the damage done to Lebanon.

But here’s the beauty part. Krauthammer doesn’t care about the Jews either. He wants a ground war and if it kills 500 Israeli soldier boys, so be it. Can you imagine. Usually, you can count on Krauthammer to weigh in about Jewish losses at every opportunity. In fact, the mean-spirited Krauthammer only cares about Jews. Or so I thought.

Actually I should have known better. About three years ago, I saw Krauthammer flip out in synagogue on Yom Kippur. The rabbi had offered some timid endorsement of peace — peace essentially on Israel’s terms — but peace anyway. Krauthammer went nuts. He actually started bellowing at the rabbi, from his wheel chair in the aisle. People tried to "shush" him. It was, after all, the holiest day of the year. But Krauthammer kept howling until the rabbi apologized. The man is as arrogant as he is thuggish. Who screams at the rabbi at services? For advocating peace?

So I was wrong about Krauthammer. He doesn’t give a damn about Israel…

I would not rule out the chance to preserve a nucleus of human specimens…

Things aren’t so bad in the Middle East.  Really.  In fact, they’re going swimmingly.  If you believe the world is going to end soon anyway that is…

President Bush often complains about lack of transparency in places like North Korea or, more recently, Cuba — and contrasts that with the United States.

Here he is in Vienna in June: "We’re a transparent democracy. People know exactly what’s on our mind. We debate things in the open. We’ve got a legislative process that’s active."

But the reality is that, particularly when it comes to Bush’s foreign policy, the minimal press access to the intensely secret inner workings of the White House and the almost complete lack of effective Congressional oversight have left Bush’s decision-making process largely a mystery.

Case in point: What is really motivating our policy in the Middle East? And who’s really making the decisions? We don’t know.

…

Today, Ron Hutcheson of McClatchy Newspapers writes: "If there’s a starting point for George W. Bush’s attachment to Israel, it’s the day in late 1998 when he stood on the hilltop where Jesus delivered the Sermon on the Mount, and, eyes brimming with tears, read aloud from his favorite hymn, ‘Amazing Grace.’

" ‘He was very emotional. It was a tear-filled experience,’ said Matthew Brooks, a prominent Jewish Republican who escorted Bush, then governor of Texas, and three other GOP governors on the Middle East visit. ‘He brought Israel back home with him in his heart. I think he came away profoundly moved.’

"Eight years later, Bush is living up to his reputation as the most pro-Israel president ever. As Israel’s military action in Lebanon heads into its fourth week, the president is standing firm against growing international pressure for an immediate cease-fire."

Yesterday, I noted former Newsday and Knight Ridder White House correspondent Saul Friedman ‘s essay on NiemanWatchdog.org: "I believe this to be the first time in modern American history that a president’s religion, in this case his Christian fundamentalism, has become a decisive factor in his foreign and domestic policies. It’s a factor that has been under-reported, to say the least, and that begs for press attention."

Former Clinton official Sidney Blumenthal sees another, related form of evangelism at work: The neoconservative variety. He writes in Salon: "By secretly providing NSA intelligence to Israel and undermining the hapless Condi Rice, hardliners in the Bush administration are trying to widen the Middle East conflict to Iran and Syria, not stop it. . . .

"The neoconservatives are described as enthusiastic about the possibility of using NSA intelligence as a lever to widen the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah and Israel and Hamas into a four-front war."

…

And here’s another data point: Joel C. Rosenberg, who writes Christian apocalyptic fiction, told me in an interview this week that he was invited to a White House Bible study group last year to talk about current events and biblical prophecy.

Rosenberg said that on February 10, 2005, he came to speak to a "couple dozen" White House aides in the Old Executive Office Building — and has stayed in touch with several of them since.

Rosenberg wouldn’t say exactly what was discussed. "The meeting itself was off the record, as you could imagine," he said. He declined to name the staffer he said invited him or describe the attendees in any way other than to say that the president was not among them. "I can’t imagine they’d want to talk about it," he said.

"I can’t tell you that the people that I spoke with agree with me, or believe that prophecy can really help you understand what will happen next in the Middle East, but I’m not surprised that they’re intrigued."

The White House press office wasn’t able to confirm the visit for me, but there have been previous reports about White House Bible study groups inviting Christian authors to come speak.

Rosenberg — like Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, the authors of the phenomenally popular "Left Behind" series — writes fiction inspired by biblical prophecy about the apocalypse. The consistent theme is that certain current events presage the end times, the Rapture, and the return of Jesus Christ. Rosenberg’s particular pitch to journalists is that his books come true.

Here he is in a recent interview with Christian talk-show host Pat Robertson , talking about what he thinks is going to happen next: "Now I have to say, Pat, I believe that Ezekiel 38 and 39 — the prophecies that we’re talking about — I think this is about the end of radical Islam as we know it. God says He’s going to supernaturally judge Iran, Sudan, Lebanon, Syria, these other countries. We’re talking about fire from heaven, a massive earthquake. It’s going to be devastating and tragic. But I believe that afterwards there’s going to be a great spiritual awakening. We’re seeing more Muslims coming to Christ right now than at any other time in history. But I think that’s just the beginning. We’ve got dark days ahead of us. But I believe there’s a light at the end of that tunnel."

Rosenberg says he got a call last year from a White House staffer. "He said ‘A lot of people over here are reading your novels, and they’re intrigued that these things keep on happening. . . . Your novels keep foreshadowing actual coming events. . . . And so we’re curious, how are you doing it? What’s the secret? Why don’t you come over and walk us through the story behind these novels?’ So I did."

Judy Keen first wrote back in October 2002, in USA Today, that "some White House staffers have been meeting weekly at hour-long prayer and Bible study sessions."

Elisabeth Bumiller wrote in the New York Times last year that "intelligent design was the subject of a weekly Bible study class several years ago when Charles W. Colson, the founder and chairman of Prison Fellowship Ministries, spoke to the group."

All this talk about family values, and preserving the institution of marriage as the best way to raise children, and nurture the next generation, and underneath it all the fervent hope that the end of the world will happen in their lifetimes.

Here is what it sounds like in D.C., when the rats begin abandoning a sinking ship:

LOSING DAVID BRODER….What’s the modern day equivalent of "losing Walter Cronkite"? Perhaps losing David Broder?

In today’s column he doesn’t quite come right out and say that we need to withdraw from Iraq, but he sure wiggles up to within kissing distance of it. Will the rest of centrist Washington follow?

This is painful for someone who grew up watching Walter Cronkite to read.  You just see in it so horribly the decline of the American spirit since the Reagan years. I doubt Drum was thinking in those terms when he wrote that…he’s probably thinking in terms of the environment of the inside the beltway kool kids.  And he’s probably right.  For the D.C. kool kids, loosing Broder may well be, in a sense, like loosing Walter Cronkite.  And this very nicely sums up what’s wrong with the mainstream news media today, and in particular, the shitfaced pundocracy.  Comparing David "they came in and trashed the place" Broder to Walter Cronkite is like comparing the Matterhorn to Walt Disney’s recreation of it.  One’s a real goddamned mountain and the other is a hollow fake created purely for entertainment.  And that’s Broder.  And that’s why he’s thought well of by the D.C. cocktail party crowd.  He entertains them.  If, as Broder said, Bill Clinton came in with his trailer trash crowd and "trashed the place", Broder was the man to tell them all their cheapshit Georgetown conceits were insightful and high principled pearls of wisdom.  As Atrios points out:

The country doesn’t care what David Broder thinks. He reflects the conventional wisdom of his clique back at them. That’s his audience.

Just so.  Broder’s audience is his own Washington inside the beltway clique.  The same mindless soulless lapdogs who have been breathlessly kissing the feet of anti democratic republican thugs ever since Kenneth Starr started sniffing Bill Clinton’s underwear.  What we’re seeing in the beltway pundocracy now, is that Deer In The Headlights expression of a person watching a catastrophe rushing at them like an out of control semi, bearing their own words on its bumperstickers. 

In the months and years to come remember: these people mindlessly, witlessly, cheered President Junior on his way to war, when anyone with half a brain and a functional conscience could tell it was bullshit.  These people mindlessly, witlessly, roused American passions for war.  Saddam was a threat to our national security they said.  And defended Bush and the republicans when they began shredding our consitution.  The war would be over in days they said.  They’ve been making excuses for why it’s been relentlessly killing people for going on four years now.  The Iraqis would shower our troops with flowers they said.   They’re killing and maiming more and more every day now.  The tyrannies of the middle east would all fall like dominos they said.  Now an anti-human religious fanatisism sweeps the entire Arab world, taking its moral authority from everything Bush has done to destroy democracy in America and ignore treaties on the conduct of war, and the practice of torture.  And now it’s become too much, even for the likes of David Broder.  Second thoughts?  No.  He’s looking for a way to deflect his share of the blame.  They all are.

They’ll say they were all bamboozled by a bunch of terrible, wicked men.  But…no.  They were willing to be fooled.  They held the Clintons in the same contempt Imelda Marco held her shoe shine girl, worshipped the republicans for the same arrogance of power that brought us war, corruption, and an America divided against itself like it hasn’t been since the civil war.  They roused the mob, not because they believed in Dubya, but because they loathed the democrats, and their prissy preoccupation with the rights of common people, and that bleeding heart liberal crap about liberty and justice for all.  Their support for President Junior was more a gesture of contempt for liberalism then a hurrah for republican oligarchy, but it did its work. 

Now president Smirk is egging the Israelis to make war on Syria, and rumbling that maybe we should start another one with Iran.  With what troops and with what money who knows…but the republicans don’t care about details like that.  They’re Big Picture folks.  Broder and the entire inside the beltway kool kids crowd hated liberals and democrats too much to notice or care who they were sanctifying, but it wasn’t their father’s republican party.  It is the party of Pat Robertson and James Dobson, men who think the end of the world will begin in the holy lands.  Now that they have the power they’ve always wanted, it’s too late to politely suggest to them that they’re making a mistake.  They think they’re doing God’s work.  They’re ushering in the Second Coming. 

Broder and his audience could have used their position to make this country a better place.  Instead they pissed on it, and blamed the democrats.  They didn’t think it mattered who governed America, as long as it wasn’t common trash who didn’t know how to throw a proper Georgetown party.  And now a terrible wind is blowing at the foundations of everything America ever stood for, everything America was, everything America could ever have become, and worst of all, it is bearing their own words back to them.

Ah…Freedom Fries…   We hardly knew ye…

 The fries on Capitol Hill are French again.

So is the breakfast toast in the congressional cafeterias, with both fries and toast having been liberated from the appellation "freedom."

Three years after House Republicans trumpeted the new names to get back at the French for snubbing the coalition of the willing in Iraq, congressmen don’t even want to talk about french fries, which are actually native to Belgium, and toast.

Neither Reps. Bob Ney of Ohio nor Walter B. Jones of North Carolina, the authors of the culinary rebuke, were willing this week to say who led the retreat, as it were, from the frying pan. But retreat there has been, as a casual observer can see for himself in the House’s basement cafeterias.

"We don’t have a comment for your story," said a spokeswoman for Mr. Ney.

Welcome back to planet earth, jackass.  Remember when they were saying the war would be over in a matter of days?  Flowers, they were going to shower our troops with.  And…and…the oil we got out of Iraq would make the war pay for itself.  Well…no.  Here’s how you pay for war…

A soldier maimed by war now questions the mission

By Brian MacQuarrie
The Boston Globe
August 2, 2006

WASHINGTON — President Bush came and sat by the side of Sergeant Brian Fountaine, a 24-year-old tank commander from Dorchester, a gung-ho soldier who had lobbied to be deployed a second time. Now Fountaine was among the wounded at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, his legs amputated below the knees after an explosion June 8 ripped apart the Humvee in which he was riding.

The president chatted about the sergeant’s beloved Red Sox, but made no reference to the war, the soldier said.

If the topic had come up, the president might not have liked what Fountaine had on his mind. In a dramatic change of heart, Fountaine now considers the war a military quagmire in which American soldiers are caught in a deadly vise between irreconcilable enemies.

In his view, troop morale has plummeted, suicide has increased, and the sacrifices being made in American blood and treasure suddenly seem questionable.

The war began with the justifiable goal of toppling a reckless, dangerous dictator in Saddam Hussein, the soldier said. But as the country slides toward civil war, Fountaine added, the goal of a democratic Iraq seems more distant by the day.

"You have to wonder, what exactly are we doing?" Fountaine said. "In my opinion, [Iraq] is a country that has been at war with itself and with other enemies for thousands of years. And we’re supposed to make them happy? I don’t think so. I don’t see it happening."

When asked if history will justify the life-altering sacrifice he has made, Fountaine paused for several seconds, lowered his head, and slowly replied: "If in 10 or 20 years, if Iraq is in the same spot and America is still losing boys over there, then, no, I think my sacrifice will be as futile as anyone else’s."

That sacrifice has been profound, excruciatingly exacted from Fountaine’s body by two large bombs on a dusty road a dozen miles north of Baghdad.

The pain has been both physical and psychic. On June 30, while visiting the Marine Corps War Memorial in a wheelchair he was still learning to use, Fountaine lost control and fell over. Nothing he experienced in the explosion outside Taji — not the searing burn, not the loss of blood, not the experience of binding his own mangled legs with tourniquets — equaled the humiliation of that moment.

…

"When you swing your legs over the side of the bed, you wonder why your feet don’t hit the floor," Fountaine said. "And then you remember: It’s because you don’t have feet, stupid."

 

When historians question how the United States of America managed to get itself dragged by a smirking spoiled silver spoon jackass brat into a useless pointless war that eventually turned the entire middle east into a raging conflagration, these four words will explain it all:  Freedom Fries…Freedom Toast… 

Dan Savage got a chance to give Washington state supreme court Justice Gerry Alexander a little grief over his role in that court’s grotesque decision against the rights of same sex couples.  The occasion was a previously scheduled interview with reporters from The Stranger for the upcoming election (supreme court judges in Washington state have to answer to the voters).  The Stranger website has audio excerpts of the confrontation.  There is a moment in these recordings that has to rank among the most telling of the gay civil rights struggle, and it isn’t even anything anyone actually says.  It is a sound.

Posted by Unpaid Intern at 02:59 PM

Weeks ago, we—meaning I—scheduled interviews with the state’s Supreme Court candidates in preparation for our annual endorsement issue. Then, one day before the interview, the justices announced they were upholding the gay marriage ban. Coincidence? Entirely. Fortuitous? Very.

Imagine a justice who voted to uphold DOMA trapped in a room with Dan Savage (wielding a framed picture of his son, DJ) and the rest of the Stranger Election Control Board, for an entire hour Well, you don’t have to just imagine the showdown! Here is Justice Gerry Alexander starring in “An Inquisition”:

The first half of the interview.

It’s nine minutes long, so here are some highlights: use of the phrase “child-rearing” (0:34), the sound of Dan placing a picture of his son on the table (0:50), discussion of “suspect class” (5:19), eight-second pause as Alexander ponders response to “Is homosexuality an immutable characteristic?”(5:55-6:03)

…the sound of Dan placing a picture of his son on the table… This would be in front of a justice who signed on to a decision writing same sex couples into second class citizenship because they cannot make babies when they fuck. By that logic every heterosexual couple who use contraception, or whose children were adopted, or who have no children of their own, or cannot have children of their own, shouldn’t be legally married either.  But of course, we make exceptions for our fellow heterosexuals… 

This has been a month in which the courts have simply walked away from their responsibility to uphold justice and protect the rights of minorities.  One court after another has just thrown up its hands and announced that the basic civil rights of homosexual Americans exist only at the pleasure of the heterosexual majority.  Justice is a concept that only applies to heterosexuals.  What homosexuals get is forbearance. 

But we are human beings too.  We fall in love.  We take our mates.  We make our households, grow families, build lives together.  Just like real people.  And the silence of the courts to the injustices inflicted upon us, upon our homes, is shattered by the sound of a picture frame being placed on a table, before a man whose job it was to protect that family too.

I’ve shown you this one before…right…?

It’s the flagpole at one of those churches that look nothing like churches, just down the road from Love In Action in Memphis.  The church it’s in front of has no steeple, nothing at all in it’s style or structure to suggest that it’s even a church at all.  It looks from the road, like your basic office building.  Seems the god of the white upper class, at least in the bible belt these days, likes its sanctuaries to look like either office buildings, or shopping malls.  A look perhaps befitting fundamentalism’s new emphasis on worldly things. 

I can’t say much about the rest of the bible belt because I haven’t wandered there much, but Memphis seems to have more megachurches that look like shopping malls per capita then the rest of America has shopping malls. There’s Germantown Baptist, which I visited the last time I was down there.  Nestled in the midst of a very well-to-do suburb of Memphis, it has it’s own tennis courts, day care, and big screen TV’s inside the sanctuary, so the folks in the back rows can see what’s happening on the stage.  Then there is the place the locals call Six Flags Over Jesus…Bellevue Baptist Church.  I’ve not been there yet, but the locals say it not only has the big screen TVs mounted on either side of the stage like Germantown, but TV cameras mounted on cranes that can pan around and capture all the action for the TV audience.  It’s got a bookstore, A GRACE Family Life Center, a JOY Christian Recreation Complex, a Love building, a Praise building, a really nice website where you can find a link to their Live Sermon Webcast, and a User Agreement with this wee notice:

Hypertext Link: You may provide a hypertext link to this web site on another web site only upon the receipt of written consent from Bellevue. To receive such consent, fill out a request form. Upon receipt of written consent, you may provide a link in the following manner: (a) the link points to the URL http://www.bellevue.org and not to the pages within the site; (b) the appearance, position or other aspects of the link do not create a false impression that Bellevue is associated with, or endorses, another web site, church or product; (c) the link does not dilute or damage Bellevue’s trademarks, service marks or goodwill; (d) the link does not display Bellevue’s web site with frames. Bellevue may revoke its consent to the link at any time in its sole discretion.

We all have to protect our brand I guess. 

Okay…so much so obvious.  You’ve all heard me going on about megachurches before.  But last night I was surfing my bookmarks and via The Flypaper Theory I discovered World Overcomers Outreach Ministries Church, and I think they’ve done them all better. World Overcomers Outreach Ministries has a grand Walk Of Nations entranceway, a bookstore, a gym, an Olympic sized swimming pool, a bowling alley, a video arcade, and a pool hall.  I’m a bit surprised they don’t have a bar somewhere in there too.  The next step, is for someone to put a floating megachruch on the river somewhere, with a casino inside.  But to make sure they leave their competition in the dust, World Overcomers Outreach Ministries Church are even building their own Statue Of Liberty. 

Well…kind of…

Our Lady Of Manifest Destiny, as PeskyFly puts it.  I had to stare at it for about five minutes before I could convince my brain of what my eyes were seeing.  The torch is gone, replaced by a cross.  The tablet that once read July 4th, 1776, has been replaced by the ten commandments.  And yes, they will unveil the thing tomorrow, on the fourth of July, 2006.  According to this article in the Memphis Commerical Appeal, the seven spikes on her crown that represent the seven seas of the world has been changed to signify the seven redemptive names of Christ. The crown itself has been inscribed with the name "Jehovah".   An old colossus, to replace the new one given this nation as a token of esteem once upon a time…

The New Colossus
by Emma Lazarus

The lamp of course, had to go, because the golden door has to go.  Yearning to breath free are you?  Don’t you know that freedom is only possible if you believe what we tell you to believe, live how we tell you to live, and worship how we tell you to worship?  Democracy is a lie straight from Satan, because only the devil would think up a system of government that gives heathens the same rights as the righteous.  Think about it.  True freedom means doing what we tell you to do and thinking what we tell you to think because we’re righteous and  if you’re not one of us then obviously you aren’t.  Give your conscience to us and you’ll be free.  We’ve got a really swell video arcade and pool hall you can while away the hours between sermons in.  And the TV reception inside the church is great.  Have you visited our gift shop yet?

…or Dick Cheney’s America to read Ron Suskind’s new book, The One Percent Doctrine.  Via Brad DeLong, comes this snippet of Barton Gellman’s review .  Fair warning, it will either make you heartsick or sick to your stomach, or both…

The Shadow War, In a Surprising New Light: By Barton Gellman: THE ONE PERCENT DOCTRINE: Deep Inside America’s Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11 By Ron Suskind: This is an important book, filled with the surest sign of great reporting: the unexpected. It enriches our understanding of even familiar episodes from the Bush administration’s war on terror and tells some jaw-dropping stories we haven’t heard before.

One example out of many comes in Ron Suskind’s gripping narrative of what the White House has celebrated as one of the war’s major victories: the capture of Abu Zubaydah…. Described as al-Qaeda’s chief of operations… shipped to a secret prison abroad. Suskind shatters the official story line here. Abu Zubaydah, his captors discovered, turned out to be mentally ill… nothing like the pivotal figure they supposed him to be… appeared to know nothing about terrorist operations; rather, he was al-Qaeda’s go-to guy for minor logistics — travel for wives and children and the like.

That judgment was "echoed at the top of CIA and was, of course, briefed to the President and Vice President," Suskind writes. And yet somehow, in a speech delivered two weeks later, President Bush portrayed Abu Zubaydah as "one of the top operatives plotting and planning death and destruction on the United States." And over the months to come, under White House and Justice Department direction, the CIA would make him its first test subject for harsh interrogation techniques.

How could this have happened? Why are we learning about it only now? Those questions form the spine of Suskind’s impressively reported book….

[T]he intelligence and counterterrorism professionals whose point of view dominates this book… came to believe, Suskind reports, that "their jobs were not to help shape policy, but to affirm it." (Some of them nicknamed Cheney "Edgar," as in Edgar Bergen — casting the president as the ventriloquist’s dummy.)…

Tenet and his loyalists also settle a few scores with the White House here. The book’s opening anecdote tells of an unnamed CIA briefer who flew to Bush’s Texas ranch during the scary summer of 2001, amid a flurry of reports of a pending al-Qaeda attack, to call the president’s attention personally to the now-famous Aug. 6, 2001, memo titled "Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US." Bush reportedly heard the briefer out and replied: "All right. You’ve covered your ass, now."…

Tora Bora… Henry A. Crumpton… was blunt: The surrogate forces were "definitely not" up to the job, and "we’re going to lose our prey if we’re not careful."…

Which brings us back to the unbalanced Abu Zubaydah. "I said he was important," Bush reportedly told Tenet at one of their daily meetings. "You’re not going to let me lose face on this, are you?" "No sir, Mr. President," Tenet replied. Bush "was fixated on how to get Zubaydah to tell us the truth," Suskind writes, and he asked one briefer, "Do some of these harsh methods really work?" Interrogators did their best to find out, Suskind reports. They strapped Abu Zubaydah to a water-board, which reproduces the agony of drowning. They threatened him with certain death. They withheld medication. They bombarded him with deafening noise and harsh lights, depriving him of sleep. Under that duress, he began to speak of plots of every variety — against shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, water systems, nuclear plants, apartment buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty. With each new tale, "thousands of uniformed men and women raced in a panic to each… target." And so, Suskind writes, "the United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered."

So…to recap…   We tortured a man we knew to be mentally ill and of low importance, and then sent our police forces scrambling to quell every delusional plot this mentally ill man raved under torture about to his captors…so that President smirking richboy jackass wouldn’t loose face.  Or as Matthew Yglesias bullets it over at TPM Cafe…

• Al-Qaedist Abu Zubaydah was captured in March 2002.
• Zubaydah’s captors discovered he was mentally ill and charged with minor logistical matters, such as arranging travel for wives and children.
• The President was informed of that judgment by the CIA.
• Two weeks later, the President described Zubaydah as "one of the top operatives plotting and planning death and destruction on the United States."
• Later, Bush told George Tenet, "I said he was important. You’re not going to let me lose face on this, are you?" and asked Tenet if "some of these harsh methods really work?"
• The methods — torture — were applied.
• Then, according to Gellman, "Under that duress, he began to speak of plots of every variety — against shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, water systems, nuclear plants, apartment buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty."
• At which point, according to Suskind, "thousands of uniformed men and women raced in a panic to each . . . target."

All together now…My country ’tis, of thee…

Via Pam’s House Blend, via Muskrat Hunt…  Here’s what unleashing religious passions against a minority accomplishes, in case you missed hearing about the Holocaust, and were wondering…

Note the death threat side by side with the statement of religious belief.  And we have an election coming up…don’t we?  Time for another round of…this perhaps…?

Who on the republican side of the isle, wants to step up to the plate and take responsibility for the dead homosexuals later this year?  Nobody, of course.

The beltway kool kids are starting to stand up for same sex marriage rights.  Well… Speak Up…

As we approach our own 40th anniversary, we believe in marriage more than ever. It might not be right for all people all of the time, but it’s right for most people most of the time, whatever their sexual orientation, and friends like Kevin and Grant have convinced us to alter our views and support gay marriage.

We’ve always supported civil unions, which give same-sex couples certain legal rights. But we shared the concerns of our good friend, Rep. Barney Frank, an outspoken gay leader, who worried that America was not ready for gay marriage.

His fears are still justified in many parts of the country. And we don’t think religious institutions should be forced to perform or recognize same-sex ceremonies.

But the trend line is clear. According to the Gallup poll, 39 percent of Americans now approve of gay marriage, an increase of 12 points over the last decade. Despite all the over-heated rhetoric about gays “undermining” marriage, real-world experience tells a very different story.

Same-sex unions have been legal in parts of Canada for three years and that country has hardly collapsed into social anarchy. Even the Royal Canadian Mounted Police has adapted, assigning gay couples near each other. Jason Tree, a Mountie who is marrying his partner this summer, told the Washington Post: “Just look at the last 10 years to see how far we have come in Canada. I’m hoping some day soon this will all die down.”

So are we. Virtually every American has gay friends (sometimes without knowing it). Vice President Cheney has a gay daughter, who says the Republican Party should “wake up” and recognize the growing tolerance for same-sex relationships. Like Kevin and Grant, she deserves to marry her own partner and create her own family. And be boring.

And that’s really swell, except that the party you folks have been carrying water for these past couple decades cannot win elections without the bigot vote.  So what happens when the next election cycle rolls around and Karl Rove is once again demonizing homosexuals and darkly warning the swing state voters that if they vote democratic their bibles will be banned and same sex marriage allowed?  If you’re going to keep helping them fan fear and hatred toward gay Americans like Kevin and Grant for votes, then just what is your support for their marriage actually worth?  It’s weight in gold?