Weekend Update - April 26th

• Well, apparently they're lining up the heads to be rolled. "The military agency that provided advice on harsh interrogation techniques for use against terrorism suspects referred to the application of extreme duress as "torture" in a July 2002 document sent to the Pentagon's chief lawyer and warned that it would produce "unreliable information."' 2002? Oh, that can't be good.


• "Listen up Republicans: It's been almost 100 days, and your country is not coming back to you. She's found somebody new." Bill Maher on a delightful rant.


• Don't really want to get into this "gun thing" with any of you loyal readers. Hell, being true Americans, we own several badass weapons ourselves, though we'd be hard pressed to remember where they are, not to mention the ammo for them. But here's a great column by Bob Herbert concerning our culture soaked in blood.


• Oh Shit! Swine Flu? We're doomed!


• “Jesus kill Mohammed!” Another head, another shot. Boom. “Jesus kill Mohammed!” Boom. In the distance, Humphrey heard the static of AK fire and the thud of RPGs. He saw a rolling rattle of light that looked like a firefight on wheels. “Each time I go into combat I get closer to God,” DeGiulio would later say. A bizarre and frightening little story about the crusade for a Christian military. Click HERE.


• And speaking of swine, less than two weeks after raising the prospect of seceding from the union, Texas Gov. Rick (Good Hair) Perry is calling on the federal government to come to his state's aid in the midst of the swine flu outbreak. God, we wish Molly Ivins was still alive.


• Mia Farrow is going to go on a 21 day hunger strike for Darfur. I'd have a punch line for this, but I'm not that funny. Good luck Mia.


• We went to our local Credit Union and borrowed enough to pay off all our credit cards. Then we ripped them up. Haven't felt this good since Nixon resigned. It's time to fight back.

Frank Rich's Best Column Ever

Rich is a curious personality, formerly the NY Times drama critic, of all things. One could argue that he learned something about drama from all of those years watching them. What he is seeing in the Bush/ Torture/Lies nexus was a desperate effort to force people to give the Bush administration something, anything in order to justify them doing what Bush and Cheney appear to have been obsessed with doing. (Click HERE for the column.)

Both men would appear to have destroyed their reputations forever and taken with them the reputations and careers of those who were complicit in their efforts. At some point we need to ask, what was it about Iraq that drove the two men to risk all, to risk their nation, in order to conquer and control it? Was it the oil? or was it a personal issue, that they found Saddam Hussein such an irritating tin- pot dictator that they'd just had it with him?

The entire last eight years have something of the quality of a Greek tragedy. Good intentions gone wrong, men corrupted by power, the terrible consequences of bad decisions they were warned against. The only thing needed was a Greek Chorus in the background singing a song of doleful warning at each turn of the plot:

Oh Bush, young Bush do not take this step!
Your father's shame, your family's name.
All will be swept away as sand before a storm,
Do not take these steps, no! no! Omigod!

All is ruined, all is spoiled, all is finished, all is war.
War not for cause, war not for purpose, but
war as a terrible global video game, awash in hubris,
blood, depleted uranium and depleted reputations.

Weep for what could have been, weep for the election
that was not an election, for the Supreme Court,
all tainted, all soiled, all disgraced and shamed.
The end of promise, the demise of a political party.

Arthur

Weekend Update - April 19th

• "Skimming the ocean of news effluvia, trying to make sense of the beauty and the pain, the sacred and the profane, whipsawing between the agony and the ecstasy like a bipolar ferret in God's own meth lab of love." Who else but Mark Morford?


• Texans are beginning to talk of seceding from the Union. Personally I'm all for it. That would mean no one from Texas could ever be President again. And that would be a plus for all of us, wouldn't it? Twitters From Texas.


• One of those damning Bush memos on torture says “The close monitoring of each detainee for any signs that he is at risk of experiencing severe physical pain reinforces the conclusion that the combined use of interrogation techniques is not intended to inflict such pain.” In other words, if a doctor is present while it's going on, it's not torture. Bushit.


• Frank Rich comments on that sickening anti-gay YouTube film with his column entitled "The Bigots' Last Hurrah."


• We see Fox News got it's "tea party." The signs at the April 15 rallies: "Obamanation." "Hang Em High!" "Show us your real birth certificate." The creepiest declared: "The American Tax Payers are the the Jews for Obama's ovens." These are some scary weirdos.

Visual Impact

(We've been on vacation here for a bit, so we have a bit of catching up to do. This essay from Arthur is from the week of April 3rd.)

A lot has happened this week that has me enormously proud of my country, the country that I guess many of us took for granted, we feared that we had lost the essential core of, but that this week we seem to be recovering. Recovering very nicely, thanks.

Attorney General Eric Holder made a decision this week that all Americans should applaud long and loudly. Eric Holder is the "anti-24", the "anti-Fox-News" antidote that our legal system has been so badly needing. What did he do? He released a corrupt Alaska Senator, "Uncle" Ted Stevens, an aging bag-man in the long tradition of American politics where benefits are awarded not according to fairness, but because "back-handers" have or will be paid to someone in government who has the clout to steer a contract, or earmark, or massive public funds to an individual who is almost certainly not the best recipient of our government's money. And worse than that, the amounts paid are tiny compared to the huge amounts of public money pissed down a rathole in such deals. Randy "Duke" Cunningham was selling bogus government defense contracts (often for little or no actual work being done) in return for kickbacks of less than one percent. Sometimes far, far less. What does that mean? It means five million dollars would be wasted, in return for $30,000. Nice.

So there is not a lot to like about Ted Stevens. He clearly was a sleaze. But being a sleaze ought not to permit the government to put into the public record testimony they know to be perjured, in order to make it "easier" to prosecute a bad guy. Why is that so important? Because sometimes government is simply wrong, and it is not up to them to decide. It is up to a court, to a judge, to a jury. That's our system of justice, and it cannot work properly unless the court is given the actual facts of a case. Not fake testimony.

So Eric Holder, when he discovered the extent of "prosecutorial misconduct" decided to do something about it. In the Bush administration it might have called for (a) promoting the prosecution team (b) awarding them the Medal of Freedom (c) helping them run for Congress, or (d) introducing them to your daughters. Things are different now. Holder tossed out the case and will not file it again. He could have asked for a new trial, but stated that the scope of the prosecutorial misconduct was so great that a miscarriage of justice had occurred. Ted Stevens had lost his Senate seat, been dragged through the mud and is 85 years old. Holder felt, and I agree, that he had received sufficient a penalty for his crimes. The question now is, what happens to the prosecutors? This can't be a gold star on their resume, to say the least. And one option is disbarrment. That means losing their license to practice law in this country. That will make other prosecutors think twice before deciding that they "have to break laws to catch lawbreakers" without ever stopping to consider the irony of that statement.

So what does this do to the popularity of the television show "24" and Jack Bauer, who is such a genius that he KNOWS when people are lying and have information, so what he does is always justified. Always. Except we now learn that the government has always known that the overwhelming majority of those imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay were never guilty of anything. Most of them were sold to our government in return for $10,000 and $30,000 bonuses that were offered as rewards for turning in really bad Taliban/alQaeda terrorists. And since our government couldn't tell a goat herd from a terrorist kingpin and since goat herds were easier to catch... well you can fill in the rest of the story. Could people really be as heartless and corrupt as to snatch a young man at random off the street and sell it to the crazed American invaders for a pile of money? Oh yes, there really are evil people in the world, trust me.

So that's the bad stuff we are coming to terms with and moving beyond. But at the same time there are wonderfully good things happening that make me just as proud. As they jockeyed for position to take a photo at the end of the G-20 Summit in London I could see Hu Jintao catch President Obama by the arm and help him up the podium in a friendly and familiar way. Three weeks ago Chinese sailors had stripped down to their underwear and were making obscene gestures at an American ship in the China Sea and the Chinese were suggesting that a new International Monetary system be created to replace the Dollar standard. Then Obama mediated in a dispute between France and China and all that stuff has just been forgotten.

And Michelle Obama? A huge hit in London. The Queen put her arm around her! apparently Queens are no very touchy-feely, but somehow, this was different. One strong woman recognizing another? who can say? And then Michelle went to an all-girls school. Nice speech, nice emotion, but watch this video and right toward the end there is a clip that will resonate all across the Middle East. Michelle gave a big hug to a school girl wearing an Islamic scarf/hood thingie. The hug heard round the world.

A big thing? Mmm, in more sane times, no. Right now? a very helpful thing. Not contrived, just something that happened, like other things that will happen in the future. Nicer and smarter people than we've had in the White House for a while. I'm feeling pretty good about things. Sure, there is that threat of a global recession/depression thing, but is it real? our entire economic system is interlinked. The French and Chinese and the Saudis are all part of the same global economy. No one can sneeze without the rest of us getting their cold. That's bad, and it's good. Everyone has a vested interest in trying to sort out this stuff and get things back on an even keel again. Everyone. That's good. And when we've made sense of this bullshit, maybe we can take the momentum on to tackle some other of the "global" things that everyone has been trying to blame on others or ignore. Me, I've always wanted an electric car or motorcycle. I'm ready. It's going to be okay.

Arthur