1.2.04 / 6:22 AM / LINK
God on our side

Oh my name it is nothin' My age it means less The country I come from Is called the Midwest I's taught and brought up there The laws to abide And that land that I live in Has God on its side. "With God on Our Side" -Bob Dylan

"America’s preachers have a task more difficult, perhaps, than those faced by us under South Africa’s apartheid or by Christians under Communism. We had obvious evils to engage; you have to unwrap your culture from years of red, white and blue myth. You have to expose and confront the great disconnect between the kindness, compassion and caring of most American people and the ruthless way American power is experienced, directly and indirectly, by the poor of the earth. You have to help good people see how they have let their institutions do their sinning for them.

Good fodder for New Year resolutions here at TomPaine.com.

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More on Slimeballs:

Recuuuuuuse me!

Stepping out of character, Ashcroft recuses himself. But, why? And why now? Josh Marshall (TalkingPoints Memo) has some ideas about that.

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FRIDAY 12.26.03 / 3:05 PM / LINK
On being trickled down upon


Paraphrasing Jesus Christ a while back, the President said, "Either you're with us or you're against us." Though we thought he was referring specifically to the "War on Terror" he was really laying out the political dynamic of his world vision --the one in which a few call the shots and collect mortgages, while the rest suffer being trickled down upon and pay them. And though this has more or less been the case since the dawn of time, George Bush is probably the first U.S. executive in modern times to put it so bluntly before the world and the American people.

Today in the United States we are living an Us vs.Them reality which is not being orchestrated by Us. The remarkable problem is, the "Us" is pissing away the farm to "Them" in a spectacular display of masochistic misapprehension.

A website I recommend, www.kellysite.net, never quotes left-leaning sources like The Nation magazine because some fence-sitters and still-redeemable right-wing types simply wouldn't consider them credible. Mr. Kelly would rather fuel his liberal arguments from conservative sources. That way he can hoist them on their own petard. And Paul Krugman must agree.

In a piece headlined "The Death of Horatio Alger", the NY Times commentator says, "The other day I found myself reading a leftist rag that...said that we are becoming a society in which the poor tend to stay poor (and)...sons are much more likely to inherit the socioeconomic status of their father than they were a generation ago.

"The name of the leftist rag? Business Week, which published an article titled "Waking Up From the American Dream."

Now, appropos of the cliche about the pot calling the kettle black, George Bush's Republican Army of the Elite tries to dictate the terms of the argument about class in America. Republicans say that the left is fomenting class warfare by simply pointing out that with every policy emanating from the right, the right is actually prosecuting a class war.

The BW article Krugman cites "summarizes recent research showing that social mobility in the United States has declined considerably over the past few decades. If you put that research together with other research that shows a drastic increase in income and wealth inequality, you reach an uncomfortable conclusion: America looks more and more like a class-ridden society."

Reporting on statistics of the Congressional Budget Office Krugman notes that, "...between 1973 and 2000 the average real income of the bottom 90 percent of American taxpayers actually fell by 7 percent. Meanwhile, the income of the top 1 percent rose by 148 percent, the income of the top 0.1 percent rose by 343 percent and the income of the top 0.01 percent rose 599 percent. (Those numbers exclude capital gains, so they're not an artifact of the stock-market bubble.) The distribution of income in the United States has gone right back to Gilded Age levels of inequality."

What the Bush administration and its backers are doing is returning us to those days of yesteryear when the American dream was only meant to be an unattainable aspiration useful for peppering political speeches and designed to appeal to gullible low-class gerbils on treadmills.

Conservatives like to debunk the idea of American class by citing "income mobility". BS, says Krugman, who then goes on to show how those who'd like to actualize a class society might pull it off. How?

Get rid of the estate tax, is one thing. Get rid of taxes on corporate profit, on unearned income, and capital gains. Create tax shelters that accommodate the rich. Reduce tax rates on high incomes and transfer it to payroll taxes and others the people who actually labor have to pay. Then cut back on healthcare for the poor, and on public education. Break the backs of labor unions, and privatize government institutions who would naturally pay the lowest possible wage to employees.

As Krugman asks, "It all sounds sort of familiar, doesn't it?"

Are you with with him or against him? If we can believe polls, apparently you're with him. But far be it from me to call anyone "fool".

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SUNDAY 12.21.03 / 12:34 PM / LINK

Where birds don't fly, ideas don't either ...& mutual understanding never takes off

Thomas Friedman, with whom I sometimes agree, points out an interesting post 9/11 situation in his NY Times column today. He gives a fresh insight into the idea of "fortress America".

Are we becoming a coast-to-coast gated community?

The thing about gated communities is they're kind of like stagnant ponds --after a while there's no viable life in them. I don't know about you, but I don't want to be sucking stagnant pond water. And I don't think my kids will exactly thrive in a dead zone.

I do hope we'll drop our national wimp stance soon and get rid of these guys to want to "protect" us to the point of maximum security and total control. Life worth living is never maximally secure and is always impossible to completely control.

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12.21.03 / 9:56 AM / LINK
And you thought the nuclear threat was bad

For those of us who grew up in what now seems like a safe and secure age, the age of the cold war with its immanent nuclear threat, sometimes it's hard to adjust to what we've wrought. In this case I'm talking about an insidious new dark aspect of technological advancement: RFIDs.

RFID's are the widespread version of those ankle bracelets that are becoming more popular with law enforcement as a means of keeping track of outlaws. In an attempt to avoid charges of discrimination, techno-heads have developed this more democratic method of keeping tabs on the populace.

Andrew Kantor, who writes the Cyberspeak column for USA Today, says, "Say hello to RFID: radio-frequency identification. If you don't know about it already, you're going to."

Here's a picture of a quarter and an RFID tag:

As you can see this little bugger could be inserted just about anywhere and no one would be the wiser.

According to Kantor, "RFID technology involves 'tags' and 'readers.' An RFID tag can be as small as a postage stamp or a grain of rice, and it's placed on or in something—a pallet being shipped, a box on the UPS truck, or a consumer good like a razor or a can of soup. (Tags are cheap: less than 25 cents for some, and that price is going to drop.)

How it works: "An RFID reader might be in the entrance to a warehouse, in a handheld computer, or at a cashier's station. When an RFID tag gets in range of a reader, it sends the reader information about itself—whatever's programmed into its memory. "Pallet 5819155 from Flushing," or "Gillette Mach 3 razor from batch 16449905" or what have you. The tags don't need batteries; they get their power from the signal sent by the readers.

"Think of RFID tags as high-tech bar codes, but with two very important differences. First, bar codes need to be held a few inches from a scanner, and need to be visible—picture a supermarket cashier swiping a loaf a bread over his scanner. But RFID tags only need to come within about 10 to 30 feet of a reader, and don't have to be pointing a certain way. Walking past an RFID reader with something carrying a tag is enough."

This means that if you have an RFID tag lodged in your Nikes and there are RFID readers installed here and there across the urban landscape, not only could the shoe company track your mileage over the life of the shoe and notify you when you needed a new pair, but your life trajectory could be plotted on one of those big terrorist-war-room boards in John Ashcroft's office: there's that sonovabitchin' liberal heading into a Howard Dean campaign office.

And if just knowing your location wasn't bad enough those tags could be loaded with info about you ...and not just your shoe size.

Neocons doling out RFID tags? ...what an ugly thought.

Related story:

NY Times, today

Driven by worries about safety, the need for accountability, and perhaps a certain "I Spy" impulse, families and employers are adopting surveillance technology once used mostly to track soldiers and prisoners. New electronic services with names like uLocate and Wherify Wireless make a very personal piece of information for cellphone users — physical location — harder to mask.

"We are moving into a world where your location is going to be known at all times by some electronic device," said Larry Smarr, director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology. "It's inevitable. So we should be talking about its consequences before it's too late."

Implications:

Will federal investigators be allowed to retrieve information on your recent whereabouts from a private service like uLocate, or your cellular carrier?

Can the local Starbucks store send advertisements to your phone when it knows you are nearby, without your explicit permission?


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SATURDAY 12.20.03 / 2:03 / LINK
Kucinich clobbers Koppel

Setting aside for a second questions of his electability, it was great to hear about Democratic candidate, Dennis Kucinich's response to Ted Koppel's question during the last debate.

Simply put, Koppel asked Kucinich whether the three candidates bringing up the tail end of the democratic candidate contingent, Carol Mosely Braun, Al Sharpton, and himself, shouldn't drop out (thereby making it less expensive for the media to cover the campaign), because they were "vanity" candidates.

Clearly annoyed Kucinich responded, "I want the American people to see where media takes politics in this country," the Ohio congressman said. "We start talking about endorsements, now we're talking about polls and then talking about money. When you do that you don't have to talk about what's important to the American people."

But a centralized, corporate media doesn't want to talk about issues, Dennis. These people sold their souls several decades ago.

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12.20.03 / 2:03 / LINK
King George, reprise...
(An election's coming up ...so this is just a reminder of how conservatives think)

To those of you who think the constitution does not permit congress from challenging presidential authority, join Judge John Bates and become a monarchist.

As reported in The Nation, "On December 30 (2002), Bates rejected a lawsuit brought by Ohio Democrat Dennis Kucinich and 31 other members of Congress who argued the president should have asked Congress for permission before tearing up an arms control treaty. The Kucinich team's logic was simple: The Constitution says treaties, once approved by the Senate and White House, are federal law; and the president does not enjoy the power to repeal laws."

But Bates says congress can't sue the president --there's apparently no remedy in the courts for abuses of presidential power. Unfortunately, that leaves only revolution.

That legal assesment follows another one with the same end, "...last month (Bates rejected) the General Accounting Office's attempt to subpoena the records of Vice President Dick Cheney's energy task force. Bates surprised many with a sweeping ruling dismissing the entire GAO -- the investigative arm of Congress - as having no right to legally challenge the White House."

As I said, that leaves only revolution.
Hmmm, maybe the NRA has a point...

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12.20.03 / 1:12 PM / LINK
Where are we in Iraq?

Pretend it's the 1950's and we're the French in Algeria --
(I know it's as hard for some of you to pretend to be French as it is to imagine you might ever be on the business end of John Ashcroft's interpretation of the constitution; but try for the sake of illumination).
--thanks TPM

12.20.03 / 7:27 AM / LINK
What if your name was Padilla?

The two most hopeful signs that American Democracy is not in full decline are the recent rulings of, not just one, but two courts against the Bush Administration's ideas of it's own authority.

That men in power assume they have a right to define the way things should be is an historical certainty, but we have the gift of the Constitution to protect us against them. Now two federal appeals courts have ruled that the Bush administration is acting unconstitutionally in two separate, but similar cases.

As reported in the Washington Post, "In ordering the Bush administration to charge al Qaeda suspect Jose Padilla, declare him a material witness or set him free within 30 days, a New York federal appeals court has directly challenged the administration's legal approach to the war on terrorism..."

Is Padilla guilty? Who knows, the government has him under wraps and incommunicado. The government says he's guilty --and even if it turns out he's not-- they have the right to hold him because they claim he's dangerous. But how do we know? The administrations say we have to trust them. Are the charges trumped up? Your guess is as good as mine, we have no means of finding out. The Bush administration won't let us.

What if George Bush one day decides you're dangerous? In George Bush's American you'd have no right to defend yourself. You could be held indefinitely while cut off from friends and family without legal means to extricate yourself. But now the 2 to 1 decision by a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit attacked that presumption at its roots.
An interesting aspect of the ruling is that all three presiding judges agreed on one aspect of the case: that the president has no authority to detain anyone without access to counsel.

"In an opinion that encapsulated the misgivings about the administration's assertions of executive power that many judges and lawyers have expressed almost since the war began, Judges Rosemary S. Pooler and Barrington D. Parker rejected President Bush's view that the Constitution gives him the authority as commander in chief to decide on his own who is an enemy of the United States in wartime -- or even to decide where the battlefield begins and ends.

"Even the dissenting judge on the 2nd Circuit court, Richard C. Wesley -- while agreeing that the president does have the authority to detain Padilla as an enemy combatant -- rejected the administration's claim that he should have no right to counsel."

The Other Shoe:

In a related ruling, another 2-1 decision, this time by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals issued a favorable ruling on behalf of about 660 prisoners who are held at the Guantanamo Naval base --again without recourse to legal self defense.

As the LA Times reports, "Many of the prisoners have been held at Guantanamo for nearly two years. The Bush administration contends that because the prisoners are 'enemy combatants' being held on foreign soil, they have no right to talk with a lawyer or raise claims in any court."

In the case of the Gitmo detainees, "the Justice Department said the captives, some of whom allegedly are affiliated with Al Qaeda or the Taliban, can be held without access to lawyers or family members until U.S. officials are satisfied that they have revealed everything they may know about potential terrorist activities." That is, they can be jailed for eternity or until George Bush is satisfied, whichever comes first.

Imagine being jailed in Cuba until George Bush is satisfied.

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THURSDAY 12.18.03 / 5:22 AM / LINK

Hear that thud, people?

If Iraq had been an immanent threat to the U.S. as George Bush claimed before the war,

and if there had been an actual connection between Saddam and Al Qaeda as George Bush claimed before the war,

and if Saddam had stockpiles of ready-to-launch WMDs as George Bush claimed before the war,

and if Iraq had really been on the front lines of international terrorism as George Bush claimed before the war;

then the capture of Saddam might significantly change our circumstances as we slog around in the tar pit of Iraq. But the domestic impact of the capture of Saddam will probably be to serve George Bush in the form of commercial footage for his re-election campaign.

Insofar as images of a pathetic Saddam lead to another four years of right wing assault on the American middle class and poor, the capture of Saddam Hussein is good only for the Iraqi people.


But, do I feel any safer now that Saddam's been got? Isn't George Bush still president? I should I feel safer?


Morley Safer, maybe.
But more safer? ...Na.

If you wanna know the truth, right now, I feel under threat. Seriously. But maybe that's just coincidence, or some other mystical political happening, like the intimate and sacred union of Lie and Truth...

segue...

These neoconservative men are the Shakespeares of deceit. They're Maestros.They're in the process of writing the book on it right now. You're in it.

But I digress...

The poll question to ask these past few days has been, "Do you feel safer now that Saddam's been captured?" The president's popularity is now rising on that question. Bobbing on the Sea of Misinformation.

So I'm thinking, maybe the pod people have taken over already.

But it's no picnic thinking like this. Sometimes I wish I was a conservative. They're so comfortable with their demons.

But as to this "feel safer" question --wonders never cease-- I'm actually in distinguished company! Spaceman & ex-senator, John Glenn, doesn't feel safer either.


What Glenn says about Saddam is, "I'm glad we have him. He was a bad man, there's no doubt about that...But as far as, do I feel safer because he's been captured? Well, I'm glad he was captured. But do I feel safer? No, I guess I don't feel that much safer."



(Morley Safer maybe...
But more safer? ...Na.)


Which is almost exactly what Howard Dean said: "The capture of Saddam is a good thing which I hope very much will keep our soldiers in Iraq and around the world safer," Dr. Dean said. "But the capture of Saddam has not made America safer."

But Dean will excoriated for this by Republicans and flayed by rival Democrats while Glenn will be ignored.

But this is just American politics hitting rock bottom.
Listen to the thud people.

Do you hear that thud?

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