a more accurate profile picture

Taken next to Brueghel's Tower of Babel at the Boijmans van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam, The Netherlands.

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Wanna See Something Really Scary?

Just in time for Halloween, the Bush Administration and their rubber stamp Congress have promogulated a law which would chill all of the gun-toting, black helicopter-watching militia members which were convinced Hillary Clinton was the head of the One World Conspiracy. Of course, you'll hear nary a peep out of anyone on the right-wing about the stealth law revealed in this indymedia report. Instead all Americans of every stripe should realize that Bush hates us for our freedoms.

Public Law 109-364 or the "John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007" (HR5122)(2) was signed into law by George W. Bush on October 17th of this year in a private Oval Office ceremony. It gives the President the authority to declare a 'public emergency' and station troops anywhere in America while taking control of state-based National Guard units without the consent of that state's governor or other local authorities, so as to 'suppress public disorder'. With a single stroke of his poison pen, Bush undid centuries-old prohibitions on the use of military force in domestic law enforcement, namely the Insurrection Act and the Posse Comitatus Act. This comes in Section 1076 of the above-mentioned bill, entitled "Use of the Armed Forces in Major Public Emergencies", which allows the president to deploy troops within US borders in the event of a natural disaster, epidemic, public health emergency, or terrorist incident. And who gets the open-ended no-bid contract to build detention centers in just such an emergency? Why a division of Halliburton of course, the neginering and construction subsidiary Kellogg Brown and Root (KBR).

It seems that in the entire body of Congress the only person to notice this violation was Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont who noted his grace reservations about this rider slipped into a standard bill to fund the eternal war, saying "we certainly do not need to make it easier for Presidents to declare martial law. Invoking the Insurrection Act and using the military for law enforcement activities goes against some of the central tenets of our democracy. One can easily envision governors and mayors in charge of an emergency having to constantly look over their shoulders while someone who has never visited their communities gives the orders."

This law also facilitates the transfer of the latest in 'crowd control' technology and other dissent-suppressing weaponry from the military to local militarized police units, such as the Long-Range Acoustic Device (LRAD). With the growing political unrest cresting in the upcoming midterm elections and the Bush Adminstration about to go into a defensive phase as the Democratic Party is poised to retake the halls of Congress, no one has noticed that our president has seen fit to usurp our democracy in the most egregious and authoritarian move yet.

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Angling For The Corner Office

Four hundred years ago, my ancestor became the second governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony and helped his band of religious fundamentalists survive a harsh winter in this new land. I'm sure politics were nasty then, but in no way could he have foreseen the depths to which the battle to govern would descend. This year's gubernatorial race in Massachusetts has been the most vicious in memory.

Republican Lieutenant Governor Kerry Healey has spent the better part of this past month slinging mud at her Democratic opponent, former Clinton Administration civil rights lawyer Deval Patrick. She ignored for the longest time any talk about her own agenda in order to push one issue to death, Patrick's professional advocacy for a convicted rapist, Benjamin LaGuer, who was convicted by a racist jury of a crime he DID actually commit, the proof determined years later after DNA testing became available. In a series of misleading attack ads, Healey harped on Patrick for having fallen for LaGuer's convincing protestations of innocence, claims which suckered a variety of other Bay State politicians and opinionmakers until the DNA evidence made things a lock. Healey's ads began with a simple format which took advantage of Patrick being caught flat-footed on this issue when it first arose, ending with the linguistically misleading tag: "even brutal rapists are entitled to a lawyer, but do we really want one as our governor". The final end featured a white woman walking alone in a deserted parking lot, conjuring images of thugs waiting underneath a car to slash her Achilles tendon or something, as the ad talks about how a woman (governor) would never praise a convicted rapist and ending with "Deval Patrick should be ashamed, not governor."

But Healey was fighting against a nationwide Democratic tide among other things. Patrick kept pure to his positive message, attacking Healey on substantive issues linked to her role as chief lackey of the outgoing Republican chief executive, Willard Mitt Romney. Seeing the rise in unfavorables go to Healey is one of the few times I have spent observing politics that made me feel good about my fellow voters. Most black politicians, even in our oh so educated and enlightened state, suffer from what is known as the Bradley Effect. This refers to the 1982 California gubernatorial campaign of African-American Tom Bradley, whom pollsters said was over 5 points in the lead and lost the race. People were believed to have told the pollsters that they would or had voted for Bradley, when inside the booth, they couldn't go through with it. Right now, Patrick is around 25 points ahead of Healey, a margin which, the Bradley effect aside, poses an insurmountable barrier to future Republican rule in the Bay State.

This leaves Republicans with one argument left, mirroring national GOP talking points. That is that more gridlock is necessary to prevent the Democratic legislature from uncontrolled spending, the threat of phantom taxes. So while Kerry Healey makes a big show out of signing a no new taxes pledge, she supports a massive fee increase to ride the T, which would wipe out whatever gains might go into the pocket of millions of commuters, a tax by any other name.

After 16 years of GOP rule, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is in trouble: we have the third-worst economy in the country; a crumbling transportation infrastructure; and a property tax that has gone up 42 percent in the past 5 years. Housing has become totally unaffordable, making Massachusetts the only state in the country that has lost population two years in a row. One unspoken factor in this campaign has been Romney's barnstorming around the country in support of his nascent presidential bid. It's pretty hard to govern Massachusetts from Iowa or even New Hampshire. Sure he may look good in a hard hat, but ultimately he gave an $8 million contract extension to the same firm he earlier called unreliable on safety, after the tunnel they shoddily built crushed a women to death. Even Romney's biggest triumph, the universal health care mandate, was enacted with little thought about how it would actually be funded except for the 'no new taxes' smokescreen, and seems pushed purely for the Romney campaign literature. Many people have gotten upset at how he uses 'Governor of Massachusetts' as a punchline to red-state crowds. But the voters have seen where his party's politics and specifically the tactics of personal vilification and dismissal of opposing viewpoints have lead our nation, and Patrick's lead is a sign they are beginning to lose their dreadful sway.

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wedding bells ringing in new jersey

This week, the Supreme Court of the State of New Jersey ruled that, while same-sex partners were not entitled to marry, the equal protection clause in their state constitution required an offering of the same benefits available to straight couples. This was a middle-of-the-road ruling in the style of that of the Vermont Supremes seven years ago.

Predictably, this caused a spectrum of reactions, such as the reflexive 'judicial activism' of the President, despite this being a conservative decision which puts the ball in the legislative court as to how to actualize gay couples' rights and despite the fact that the President himself has supported the idea of civil unions in the past. Then again, this football gets tossed back and forth between legislatures and courts even as the goalposts are frantically moved: legislatures in Connecticut and Vermont approved civil unions, while courts in New York and Washington State denied gay marriage. Of course, none of that hair-splitting matters when his party is so down in the polls during an election year and they are desperate for anything to motivate evangelicals to the polls. Really, now that dozens of states have banned gay marriage or anything like it in a series of endless amendments and poll questions, how will they get people out to the polls without fear of the gays? While Bush is talking about gay marriage, gay Republicans were protecting Mark Foley, a child sex predator for the past few years.

Of course, some people look at Massachusetts and think well it should be all or nothing, but it misses the point that the gay marriage movement is winning the argument. Absolutism, while ideologically consistent, causes unnecessary harm to gay couples who stand to gain so much in the short term for a little bit of patience with people squeamish about semantics. Even if a federal court opinion were to overrule the various anti-gay state amendments, this would just pitch gay marriage into the same perpetual battlefield as abortion following Roe vs. Wade.

Meanwhile conservative law bloggers like Glenn Reynolds and Eugene Volokh place a higher substantive value on the rights of property owners as in the Kelo decision than on the rights of gay people, hiding behind specious claims about the horror of outing by obscure lefty bloggers and hominems about judicial restraint. Not that they can be botherred to provide any evidence that this is some kind of tyrannical activism, they just know, deep in their souls, that it is. Others are arguing that it would simply be "better" if courts stayed away from gay marriage rulings and left it to legislatures to decide. But this is not what the law requires, that decisions are based on the judge's personal opinions of policy ooutcomes but instead that outcomes should be based on what the New Jersey Constitution says. Courts doon't have the ability to stay out of debates over laws if said laws violate constitutional guarantees. Whether you like a ruling or not does not determine whether it is judicially sound or not. Constitutional guarantees are the only way to limit majority will in some circumstances, even if it would be 'better' in some ill-defined political way to leave it for the majority rule.

This decision does exactly what almost everyone opposed to gay marriage seems to argue for: leave the term 'marriage' meaning the union between a man and a woman while provided comitted gay couples the protection of law. Of course, that's not really what the conservatives want, merely a cudgel to beat up liberals as destroyers of society and drive evangelicals to the voting booth. Marriage is ultimately something best left to religious institutions, but the rights of 'marriage' are the only place where government has a need to intervene. Perhaps the solution is to offer civil unions for everybody -- heteros, homos, transpeople, what have you -- and let the religious institutions determine who gets the blessing of their sacred word magic.

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IMTF...not just another clever acronym

Impeachment...there, I said it. After being convinced for the longest time that this was a dirty word in American politics, I have come around to the view that this may just be the only way to save the American democracy. "BDS!" the neocons and their sympathizers will harumph at this point, "That's not how the American presidential system works!" Actually, folks, that's exactly how the American system works and the one remedy I think that the great and quasi-mystical Founders would have recommended as the remedy, their 'original intent' for stopping corruption in the executive branch.

Recently I was talking with a friend of mine who is a public school teacher and one of the few people my age living around here that has purchased his own home, even had a book of his published in the time I've been gone. He argued forcefully that should the Democrats regain control of both houses of government that impeachment proceedings would definitely be next up on the drawing board. I opened my mouth to make an argument against it when I realized, well why shouldn't they be? Why should that be beyond the pale to consider for them. If for such a stunning rebuke of the entire Republican enterprise to be delivered, it could be considered a far clearer mandate from the American people across the multiplicity of Congressional races than a one-time razor-thin victory due to voter supression and faulty machines in Ohio, nevermind the most partisan Supreme Court decision in history.

We can argue all about the myth of bipartisanship, but it should be clear to anyone who argues that the vast majority of the population is centrist and wants everyone to cuddle and get along, that this latest Republican Congress has already held the funeral for that concept and while there sold the country away over its rotting corpse. Logical and reasoned arguements, like how we should not have, in no uncertain terms, have made the strategic mistake of going to war in Iraq, can no longer compete with the shitstorm of emotional appeals resorted to by the unitary and ever-campaigning executive branch.

Iraq, as you can see from Bush's delusionary defense of 'just wait for history's verdict', was about Bush's vindication after a lifetime of failure rather than America's security. He never wanted advice or consensus, just a confirmation of the superiority of his own narrow worldview. Please don't tell me that 'democracy is God's gift to the world', not only is that Biblically inaccurate, it also misunderstands the nature of representative government in that it is not always aligned to American interests. Bush is stubbornly pushing his party and this country to the brink so as not to admit to his latest and greatest failure, hiding it with talk of Jesus, just as he once hid from failure with alcohol and cocaine. When you have lost the support of an American family like the Tillmans, appeals to rationality and bipartisanship are not worth the keystrokes. And you have to think that the Saddam was worse argument is growing thinner by each body count. As bad as the Butcher of Bagdhad was, you didn't have to worry about your daughter being raped on her way to school or your sons kidnapped for walking in the wrong neighborhood and a power drill put to their heads.

All of this is going to come to a head here if the Democrats can pull off a double-house sweep of Congress. People might at this point wonder what kind of charges could be brought to justify impeachment, but it is pretty obvious that any amount of digging will produce revelations far more serious than illicit blowjobs. Also it will be more than necessary to impeach Cheney first to avoid him oiling his way into the presidency by default, in which case this would remove him from trying his own case as the President of the Senate and allow the President Pro Tempore to preside. Of course, this requires a two-thirs majority of Senators, but only a simple majority in the House so it remains to be seen just how large a change will be electorally accomplished. The House is all but in Democratic hands, barring something truly miracluous by the Republicans to offset the pileup of corruption crowned by Mark 'Stickyfingers' Foley. But the Senate is 6 seats away from a simple majority by the Democrats, while the Republicans are concentrating their financial resources in only a few states to create a 'firewall' preventing their total immolation. Whether by giving up Montana, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island they can hang on to Missouri, Tennessee and Virginia is still to be decided, but there is a palpable feeling of hatred towards the chickenhawk party, especially from a legion of newly Democat veterans.

In short, we don't need to look far to find reasons to impeach George W. bush or any member of his administration. Just this past week, Bush signed a law effectively destroying the Bill of Rights: the Military Commissions Act of 2006, our generation's version of the Alien and Sedition Acts. This law allows for Article One, Section Eight of the US Constitution and nine of the ten Bill of Rights to be effectively nullified. This law allows the President to define torture as he wishes while denying Habeas Corpus to detainees and other foreign-born legal residents, though that can also be expanded to Americans as well. In addition, the law allows the complete destruction of our freedom of speech, freedom to use guns in self-defense, freedom of due process, freedom of a right to a speedy trial, freedom of a right to a trial by jury, and freedom of property rights. In short, the only right now a given under the constitution is the freedom to not offer board to a member of the US Military.

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unacceptability

My apologies to any of my regular readers (all two of you) or any casual readers brought here by a recent posting of this website to my ancient livejournal . I thought that time home would allow for a more frequent posting here, but it has proved to have had quite the opposite effect. Nevertheless, i shall strive for more than a weekly posting in this forum. I have had various topics to blog about (the Massachusetts governor's race, the secret contingency plan for the US gov't, the census rolling over to 300 million) but I feel like I am lacking in an original thought or take in on the subject. One article I have read recently which I do feel particularly suited to talk about is this WaPo piece on the linguistic repetitions of the president.

Bush's verbal style has been much remarked upon for its almost willful malpropisms, but if he inherited his inarticulateness from dear old dad, then he inherited his belligerent tone from mean old mom. This article makes much of his declaring events or outcomes to be either 'unacceptable'' or 'not acceptable' on a frequency far outpacing that of Clinton or prior presidents. Among the problems found unacceptable by W: rising health costs, illegal immigrants, genocide in Darfur, Iran's nuclear program, the Social Security system, his administration's response to Hurricane Katrina, the law making degrading treatment of prisoners a war crime, various events in Iraq and North Korea's nuclear test. He even used it in a lecture to elementary school children in Glen Burnie, Maryland on January 9th of this year in reference to their recent scores on math and reading proficiency tests.

Buddhism's first noble truth, "Life is suffering", invites people to accept that suffering is a natural part of life. The best and underreported part from this article was Bush's other favorite verbal construction, instructing audiences to 'listen!' before giving them some exhortation, as in 'America is respected!' or 'this economy is good!' More and more these cringeworthy verbal parlor tricks serve as evidence of petulant frustration of a man finally being denied when he has had everything handed on a silver platter to him for most of his life. People can't be trained to accept things which they themselves find unbelievable through repetitious and irritated hectoring.

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breaking up is hard to do

The Iraq Study group is a 'blue-ribbon' commission co-chaired by former SecState James Baker, one of the man most responsible for 9/11 through his years of coddling Middle Eastern dictators. Word on the street is that they are going to recommend, as an alternative to 'cut & run' and 'stay the course', a policy of de facto partition: "that will devolve power and security to the regions, leaving a skeletal national government in Baghdad in charge of foreign affairs, border protection and the distribution of oil revenue."

Far from 'cut & run' (still the Presidential aphorism of choice for withdrawal) this is in fact preparation for a post-election withdrawal of troops as Kurd and Shiite states would assume security for their respective sections. Even though there are all these caveats that it is not a partition, if it is as suggested, it is partition, which is something it is not clear that the Iraqis themselves want and thus that it will solve anything. Quite the opposite, if the partitions of Yugoslavia or India or Vietnam or Korea or Cyprus are any indication. Baker won't be able to say 'we don't have a dog in this fight' as he did with Yugoslavia in the 1990s. This outc ome would be unacceptable to regional neighbors of the Iraqis such as Turkey and Saudi Arabia, leading to wider conflict.

There is no telling how the Iraqis will take this, although it's safe to say it won't be with parades and rose petals. The Sunnis, the Dawa Party and the Sadrists are all against this and together account for almost half the legislature. Thus the US would have to try to impose this by fiat. This would likely set the Sunnis against the Shiites, as one would control water while the other would control all the oil. Most likely, it will be viewed as a Zionist attempt to create several weakened states which do not threaten Israel.

Of course, none of these changes will be examined before the election. That would be tantamount to an admission of failure. But yet Bush still can't admit he was wrong, once again putting his political infallibilty ahead of the good of the nation.

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once you track sand in

Wow...just read the most brutally honest missive of the year. It is hard to get objective news and views out of Iraq, but this letter from a soldier over there published this week in Time is crushingly frank. The anonymous author himself doesn't both to construct a narrative with ledes and color (indeed he can't due to secrecy restrictions) but rather provides a 'greatest hits' list of poignant moments and thoughts. My personal top ten highlights from his list include:

Most Profound Man in Iraq — an unidentified farmer in a fairly remote area who, after being asked by Reconnaissance Marines if he had seen any foreign fighters in the area replied "Yes, you."
Biggest Surprise — Iraqi Police. All local guys. I never figured that we'd get a police force established in the cities in al-Anbar. I estimated that insurgents would kill the first few, scaring off the rest. Well, insurgents did kill the first few, but the cops kept on coming. The insurgents continue to target the police, killing them in their homes and on the streets, but the cops won't give up. Absolutely incredible tenacity. The insurgents know that the police are far better at finding them than we are — and they are finding them. Now, if we could just get them out of the habit of beating prisoners to a pulp . . .
Greatest Vindication — Stocking up on outrageous quantities of Diet Coke from the chow hall in spite of the derision from my men on such hoarding, then having a 122mm rocket blast apart the giant shipping container that held all of the soda for the chow hall. Yep, you can't buy experience.
Second Biggest Mystery — if there's no atheists in foxholes, then why aren't there more people at Mass every Sunday?
Favorite Iraqi TV Show — Oprah. I have no idea. They all have satellite TV.
Coolest Insurgent Act — Stealing almost $7 million from the main bank in Ramadi in broad daylight, then, upon exiting, waving to the Marines in the combat outpost right next to the bank, who had no clue of what was going on. The Marines waved back. Too cool.
Biggest Hassle — High-ranking visitors. More disruptive to work than a rocket attack. VIPs demand briefs and "battlefield" tours (we take them to quiet sections of Fallujah, which is plenty scary for them). Our briefs and commentary seem to have no affect on their preconceived notions of what's going on in Iraq. Their trips allow them to say that they've been to Fallujah, which gives them an unfortunate degree of credibility in perpetuating their fantasies about the insurgency here.
Biggest Outrage — Practically anything said by talking heads on TV about the war in Iraq, not that I get to watch much TV. Their thoughts are consistently both grossly simplistic and politically slanted. Biggest Offender: Bill O'Reilly.
Best Chuck Norris Moment — 13 May. Bad Guys arrived at the government center in a small town to kidnap the mayor, since they have a problem with any form of government that does not include regular beheadings and women wearing burqahs. There were seven of them. As they brought the mayor out to put him in a pick-up truck to take him off to be beheaded (on video, as usual), one of the Bad Guys put down his machinegun so that he could tie the mayor's hands. The mayor took the opportunity to pick up the machinegun and drill five of the Bad Guys. The other two ran away. One of the dead Bad Guys was on our top twenty wanted list. Like they say, you can't fight City Hall.
Only Thing Better in Iraq Than in the U.S. — Sunsets. Spectacular. It's from all the dust in the air.

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Turning the page

Mark Foley, Republican congressman from Florida, resigned last week after ABC News published sexually inappropriate emails and instant messenger chats between him and underaged congressional pages. In a bitterly ironic twist, he may be subject to the online predator act he sponsored earlier this year, since it is not illegal to have consensual sex with a 16yo but due to his law it is illegal to solicit sex with a 16yo over the Internet. Regardless of the legal technicalities, this stands as a gross abuse of his office.

Even though it now comes out that Foley's indiscretions were an open secret inside the Beltway, the GOP tried to pass this off initially as a MSM-Democrat dirty trick. The story neither begins nor ends there. Apparently there is significant reason to believe that the Republican leadership have known about these emails for months, enough to be grounds for a criminal conspiracy charge. One congressman who knew, Tom Reynolds of New York, was also head of the committee to re-elect Republicans to the house, received $100,000 from Foley after he had seen the emails but before he told anyone else about them.

The Republican congressman in charge of the page program, John Shimkus of Illinois, claims he saw the emails last fall, whereas the Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert, also of Illinois, claims Shimkus never saw the emails. Strangely, Shimkus's own spokesman also claims Shimkus didn't see the emails. Shimkus, when discussing Foley's activities with other board members, deliberately excluded the sole Democratic member (Dale Kildee (D-MI)) of that board from learning about Foley's misdeeds. They also claimed the reason they didn't investigate further was because the family didn't want them to, remarkably specious deference. Shimkus also didn't blink when FOley told a tale about taking one of the pages out alone to Morton's Steakhouse, a pricey restaurant, 'cruising' down in Foley's BMW (no buying American for him, I say from my Ford Mustang). The head of the page alumni association, Matthew Loraditch, told ABC News that the Republican pages (and not the Democrat-sponsored pages) were warned about Foley in 2001. He said that they were told: "don't get too wrapped up in him being too nice to you and all that kind of stuff."

This is typical of a party which puts oil company executives in charge of energy policy, putting a known (at least to them) sexual predator in charge of the child abuse committee. The speed of Foley's resignation indicates that perhaps they are waiting for the other shoe to drop. There are also rumors of servicemen in Foley's distrcit being similair targets of his attentions. Both Congressional pages and servicemen are in a very sensitive position and capable of being ruined by Foley shoudl they try to expose him.

This morning, Foley's attorney announced that the embattled Congressman checked himself into an alcohol rehab facility over the weekend and released a statement. Said Foley: "I strongly believe that I am an alcoholic and have accepted the need for immediate treatment for alcoholism and other behavioral problems. I deeply regret and accept full responsibility for the harm I have caused." Too little and far too late.

Meanwhile House Republicans can't keep their stories straight about Foley. They have made an effort to launch an investigation by the Justice Department, but one which exempts the GOP leadership and focuses on outside parties such as non-profits like CREW, journalists, bloggers, even potential victims and their relatives who knew of the communications but didn't not contact the authorities. In other words, the people who broke the story and got the GOP in trouble. They claim that while they were aware of the 'over-friendly' emails months ago, they only became aware of the more sexually explicit IM chats because of the ABC News story. If this is so, it is only because they chose to ignore several glaring warning signs regarding his inappropriate attention to pages. Why Hastert, a central figure in this coverup, should be allowed to define the parameters of the investigation is not apparent. This would be their excuse not to come clean, as they 'can't comment on an ongoing investigation'. White House Press Secretary Tony Snow has tried to downplay a 52 year old member of Congress asking 16 and 17 year old kids to measure their penis and describe how they masturbate as 'simply naughty emails'. They can't keep a bunch of teenagers safe, so why should we trust them to keep America safe?

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