Centerline

Right wing radio host apology

2006-06-29T11:02:00.000-04:00

Honestly I had to confirm this was legit when I first read it. Look HERE in case you think this is a spoof or the product of the so called "liberal" media. It's a bit of a read but it neatly sums up where I and many of my friends have been for quite a while.

Welcome to our world Mr. McIntyre.

AN APOLOGY FROM A BUSH VOTER

By Doug McIntyre
Host, McIntyre in the Morning
Talk Radio 790 KABC

"There’s nothing harder in public life than admitting you’re wrong. By the way, admitting you’re wrong can be even tougher in private life. If you don’t believe me, just ask Bill Clinton or Charlie Sheen. But when you go out on the limb in public, it’s out there where everyone can see it, or in my case, hear it.

So, I’m saying today, I was wrong to have voted for George W. Bush. In historic terms, I believe George W. Bush is the worst two-term President in the history of the country. Worse than Grant. I also believe a case can be made that he’s the worst President, period.

In 2000, I was a McCain guy. I wasn’t sure about the Texas Governor. He had name recognition and a lot of money behind him, but other than that? What? Still, I was sick of all the Clinton shenanigans and the thought of President Gore was… unthinkable. So, GWB became my guy.

For the first few months he was just flubbing along like most new Presidents, no great shakes, but no disasters either. He cut taxes and I like tax cuts.

Then September 11th happened. September 11th changed everything for me, like it did for so many of you. After September 11th, all the intramural idiocy of American politics stopped being funny. We had been attacked by a vicious and determined enemy and it was time for all of us to row in the same direction.

And we did for the blink of an eye. I believed the President when he said we were going to hunt down Bin Laden and all those responsible for the 9-11 murders. I believed President Bush when he said we would go after the terrorists and the nations that harbored them.

I supported the President when he sent our troops into Afghanistan, after all, that’s where the Taliban was, that’s where al-Qaida trained the killers, that’s where Bin Laden was.

And I cheered when we quickly toppled the Taliban government, but winced when we let Bin Laden escape from Tora-Bora.

Then, the talk turned to Iraq and I winced again.

I thought the connection to 9-11 was sketchy at best. But Colin Powell impressed me at the UN, and Tony Blair was in, and after all, he was a Clinton guy, not a Bush guy, so I thought the case had to be strong. I was worried though, because I had read the Wolfowitz paper, “The Project for the New American Century.” It’s been around since ‘92, and it raised alarm bells because it was based on a theory, “Democratizing the Middle East” and I prefer pragmatism over theory. I was worried because Iraq was being justified on a radical new basis, “pre-emptive war.” Any time we do something without historical precedent I get nervous.

But the President shifted the argument to WMDs and the urgent threat of Iraq getting atomic weapons. The debate turned to Saddam passing nukes on to terror groups. After 9-11, the risk was too great. As the President said, “The next smoking gun might be a mushroom cloud.” At least that’s what I thought at the time.

I grew up in New York and watched them build the World Trade Center. I worked with a guy, Frank O’Brien, who put the elevators in both towers. I lost a very close friend on September 11th. 103 floor, tower one, Cantor Fitzgerald. Tim Coughlin was his name. If we had to take out Iraq to make sure something like that, or worse, never happened again, so be it. I knew the consequences. We have a soldier in our house. None of this was theoretical in my house.

But in the months and years since shock and awe I have been shocked repeatedly by a consistent litany of excuses, alibis, double-talk, inaccuracies, bogus predictions, and flat out lies. I have watched as the President and his administration changed the goals, redefined the reasons for going into Iraq, and fumbled the good will of the world and the focus necessary to catch the real killers of September 11th.

I have watched the President say the commanders on the ground will make the battlefield decisions, and the war won’t be run from Washington. Yet, politics has consistently determined what the troops can and can’t do on the ground and any commander who did not go along with the administration was sacked, and in some cases, maligned.

I watched and tried to justify the looting in Iraq after the fall of Saddam. I watched and tried to justify the dismantling of the entire Iraqi army. I tired to explain the complexities of building a functional new Iraqi army. I urged patience when no WMDs were found. Then the Vice President told us we were in the “waning days of the insurgency.” And I started wincing again. The President says we have to stay the course but what if it’s the wrong course?

It was the wrong course. All of it was wrong. We are not on the road to victory. We’re about to slink home with our tail between our legs, leaving civil war in Iraq and a nuclear armed Iran in our wake. Bali was bombed. Madrid was bombed. London was bombed. And Bin Laden is still making tapes. It’s unspeakable. The liberal media didn’t create this reality, bad policy did.

Most historians believe it takes 30-50 years before we get a reasonably accurate take on a President’s place in history. So, maybe 50 years from now Iraq will be a peaceful member of the brotherhood of nations and George W. Bush will be celebrated as a visionary genius.

But we don’t live fifty years in the future. We live now. We have to make public policy decisions now. We have to live with the consequences of the votes we cast and the leaders we chose now.

After five years of carefully watching George W. Bush I’ve reached the conclusion he’s either grossly incompetent, or a hand puppet for a gaggle of detached theorists with their own private view of how the world works. Or both.

Presidential failures. James Buchanan, Franklin Pierce, Jimmy Carter, Warren Harding-— the competition is fierce for the worst of the worst. Still, the damage this President has done is enormous. It will take decades to undo, and that’s assuming we do everything right from now on. His mistakes have global implications, while the other failed Presidents mostly authored domestic embarrassments.

And speaking of domestic embarrassments, let’s talk for a minute about President Bush’s domestic record. Yes, he cut taxes. But tax cuts combined with reckless spending and borrowing is criminal mismanagement of the public’s money. We’re drunk at the mall with our great grandchildren’s credit cards. Whatever happened to the party of fiscal responsibility?

Bush created a giant new entitlement, the prescription drug plan. He lied to his own party to get it passed. He lied to the country about its true cost. It was written by and for the pharmaceutical industry. It helps nobody except the multinationals that lobbied for it. So much for smaller government. In fact, virtually every tentacle of government has grown exponentially under Bush. Unless, of course, it was an agency to look after the public interest, or environmental protection, and/or worker’s rights.

I’ve talked so often about the border issue, I won’t bore you with a rehash. It’s enough to say this President has been a catastrophe for the wages of working people; he’s debased the work ethic itself. “Jobs Americans won’t do!” He doesn’t believe in the sovereign borders of the country he’s sworn to protect and defend. And his devotion to cheap labor for his corporate benefactors, along with his worship of multinational trade deals, makes an utter mockery of homeland security in a post 9-11 world. The President’s January 7th, 2004 speech on immigration, his first trial balloon on his guest worker scheme, was a deal breaker for me. I couldn’t and didn’t vote for him in 2004. And I’m glad I didn’t.

Katrina, Harriet Myers, The Dubai Port Deal, skyrocketing gas prices, shrinking wages for working people, staggering debt, astronomical foreign debt, outsourcing, open borders, contempt for the opinion of the American people, the war on science, media manipulation, faith based initives, a cavalier attitude toward fundamental freedoms-- this President has run the most arrogant and out-of-touch administration in my lifetime, perhaps, in any American’s lifetime.

You can make a case that Abraham Lincoln did what he had to do, the public be damned. If you roll the dice on your gut and you’re right, history remembers you well. But, when your gut led you from one business failure to another, when your gut told you to trade Sammy Sosa to the White Sox, and you use the same gut to send our sons and daughters to fight and die in a distraction from the real war on terror, then history will and should be unapologetic in its condemnation.

None of this, by the way, should be interpreted as an endorsement of the opposition party. The Democrats are equally bankrupt. This is the second crime of our age. Again, historically speaking, its times like these when America needs a vibrant opposition to check the power of a run-amuck majority party. It requires it. It doesn’t work without one. Like the high and low tides keep the oceans alive, a healthy, positive opposition offers a path back to the center where all healthy societies live.

Tragically, the Democrats have allowed crackpots, leftists and demagogic cowards to snipe from the sidelines while taking no responsibility for anything. In fairness, I don’t believe a Democrat president would have gone into Iraq. Unfortunately, I don’t know if President Gore would have gone into Afghanistan. And that’s one of the many problems with the Democrats.

The two party system has always been clumsy and imperfect, but it has only collapsed once, in the 1850s, and the result was civil war.

I believe, as I have said countless times, the two party system is on the brink of a second collapse. It’s currently running on spin, anger, revenge, and pots and pots and pots of money.

We’re being governed by paper-mache patriots; brightly painted red, white and blue, but hollow to the core. Both parties have mastered the cynical arts of media manipulation and fund raising. They’ve learned the lessons of Watergate and burn the tapes. They have learned to divide the nation for their own gain. They have demonstrated the willingness to exploit any tragedy for personal advantage. The contempt they have for the American people is without parallel.

This is painful to say, and I’m sure for many of you, painful to read. But it’s impossible to heal the country until we’re willing to acknowledge the truth no matter how painful. We have to wean ourselves off sugar coated partisan lies.

With a belated tip of the cap to Ralph Nader, the system is broken, so broken, it’s almost inevitable it pukes up the Al Gores and George W. Bushes. Where are the Trumans and the Eisenhowers? Where are the men and women of vision and accomplishment? Why do we have to settle for recycled hacks and malleable ciphers? Greatness is always rare, but is basic competence and simple honesty too much to ask?

It may be decades before we have the full picture of how paranoid and contemptuous this administration has been. And I am open to the possibility that I’m all wet about everything I’ve just said. But I’m putting it out there, because I have to call it as I see it, and this is how I see it today. I don’t say any of this lightly. I’ve thought about this for months and months. But eventually, the weight of evidence takes on a gravitational force of its own.

I believe that George W. Bush has taken us down a terrible road. I don’t believe the Democrats are offering an alternative. That means we’re on our own to save this magnificent country. The United States of America is a gift to the world, but it has been badly abused and it’s rightful owners, We the People, had better step up to the plate and reclaim it before the damage becomes irreparable.

So, accept my apology for allowing partisanship to blind me to an obvious truth; our President is incapable of the tasks he is charged with. I almost feel sorry for him. He is clearly in over his head. Yet, he doesn’t generate the sympathy Warren Harding earned. Harding, a spectacular mediocrity, had the self-knowledge to tell any and all he shouldn’t be President. George W. Bush continues to act the part, but at this point whose buying the act?

Does this make me a waffler? A flip-flopper? Maybe, although I prefer to call it realism. And, for those of you who never supported Bush, its also fair to accuse me of kicking Bush while he’s down. After all, you were kicking him while he was up.

You were right, I was wrong."

Separation of Church and State

2006-06-23T22:50:00.000-04:00

I recently received a note from a conservative friend stating:

"the term 'separation of church and state' actually came from a personal letter from Thomas Jefferson (who had nothing to do with writing the constitution or the Bill of Rights). In 1947 a Supreme Court justice came across the letter and used it in another writing. In 1958 another justice warned that if talk about separation of church and state continued the American people would begin to believe it was part of the constitution. The actual constitution was set up to keep the state out of the church - not the church out of the state."

Now you just know I couldn't let that slow pitch go by unanswered. I sent this as my first reply. Let me know if I missed any salient points or was way off anywhere.

"Just because the “wall separating church and state” metaphor came from a personal note from one of the founding fathers does not deny its accurate representation as legal short hand for a broader constitutional concept that is found in the Constitution and Bill of Rights. This separation is evidenced as much by what is included in these documents as by what is explicitly omitted, especially when one contextualizes these facts with the religious piety of many of the authors and those who influenced them (i.e. Jefferson)

When Jefferson penned The Declaration of Independence he invoked “Creator”. The Articles of Confederation gave credit to the “Great Governor of the World”. The Massachusetts constitution of 1780 even stated in Article 2 that “It is the duty of all men … to worship the Supreme Being, the great Creator and Preserver of the universe”. Other early state constitutions had similar language. (They have all been quite revised since then.)

By these examples I assert that it was no minor oversight that “God”, “Great Governor”, “Creator”, “Supreme Being”, any mention of the social value of Christian belief, nor any reference to the importance of religion for a moral public life was included anywhere in the US Constitution. Not once. In fact many anti-federalists of the day fought against the adoption of the federal constitution because, among many other things, they considered the document to be completely irreligious. To make matters worse the Constitution’s sole reference to religion added insult to injury by declaring in Article 6 that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.”

Add to that the very first Amendment of the Bill of Rights states “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”. These were the serious documents the founding fathers created to forge the core tenants and laws this country was founded on…and neither God nor Christianity had mention in them.

The founding fathers didn’t hate religion; they simply, strongly, and with great precision intended that it would have no indoctrinated role in our government. Through this they intended to protect religion from becoming state sponsored and systematically exploited, and in turn allowed the government to do the singular job of protecting its free citizens without being concerned with their thoughts or beliefs."

Too many war heroes dying for political zeroes

2006-06-22T21:00:00.000-04:00

Hat tip to Robert E. Gladd, Las Vegas

To presidential press secretary Tony Snow, 2,500 is clearly "just" a casual number, the number of American soldiers killed in Iraq thus far, as of the other day.

Zero is also a number.

Zero is the total number of days the extended offspring of George Herbert Walker Bush have fought for this country in uniform.

Zero is the total number of days of military service of Dick "I Had Other Priorities" Cheney.

Zero is also the total number of days of military service of Karl Rove, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Paul Wolfowitz, Ken "Cakewalk" Adelman, Newt Gingrich, Tom DeLay, Dennis Hastert, Trent Lott, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Michael Savage, William Bennett, Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly.

And so on. There's a long list of pro-war zeroes. They add up to a personal courage quotient of zero.

Two-thousand, five-hundred (and counting) comprises the number of Americans who have paid the ultimate price to keep these vile cowards clean and comfy.

Reply to a Christian

2006-05-25T23:59:00.000-04:00

Council for Secular Humanism Sam Harris replys to a Christian.

"Since the publication of my first book, The End of Faith, I have received thousands of letters and e-mails from religious believers insisting that I am wrong not to believe in God. Invariably, the most unpleasant of these communications have come from Christians. This is ironic, as Christians generally believe that no faith imparts the virtues of love and forgiveness more effectively than their own. Please accept this for what it is: the testimony of a man who is in a position to observe how people behave when their faith is challenged. Many who claim to have been transformed by Christ's love are deeply, even murderously, intolerant of criticism. While you may ascribe this to human nature, it is clear that the hatred these people feel comes directly from the Bible. How do I know this? Because the most deranged of my correspondents always cite chapter and verse.

Before I present some of my reasons for rejecting your faith-which are also my reasons for believing that you, too, should reject it-I want to acknowledge that there are a few things that you and I agree about. We agree that, if one of us is right, then the other is wrong. The Bible either is the word of God, or it isn't. Either Jesus offers humanity the one, true path to salvation (John 14:6), or he does not. We agree that to be a real Christian is to believe that all other faiths are in error and profoundly so. If Christianity is correct, and I persist in my unbelief, I should expect to suffer the torments of hell. Worse still, I have persuaded others, many close to me, to persist in a state of unbelief. They, too, will languish in "everlasting fire" (Matthew 25:41). If the claims of Christianity are true, I will have realized the worst possible outcome of a human life. The fact that my continuous and public rejection of Christianity does not worry me should suggest to you just how unsatisfactory I think your reasons for being a Christian are.

You believe that the Bible is the literal (or inspired) word of God and that Jesus is the Son of God-and you believe these propositions because you think they are true, not merely because they make you feel good. You may wonder how it is possible for a person like myself to find these sorts of assertions ridiculous. While it is famously difficult for atheists and believers to communicate about these matters, I am confident that I can give you a very clear sense of what it feels like to be an atheist.Consider: every devout Muslim has the same reasons for being a Muslim that you now have for being a Christian. And yet, you know exactly what it is like not to find these reasons compelling. On virtually every page, the Qur'an declares that it is the perfect word of the Creator of the universe. Muslims believe this as fully as you believe the Bible's account of itself. There is a vast literature describing the life of Muhammad that, from the Muslim point of view, proves his unique status as the Prophet of God. While Muhammad did not claim to be divine, he claimed to offer the most perfect revelation of God's will. He also assured his followers that Jesus was not divine (Qur'an 5:71-75; 19:30-38) and that anyone who believed otherwise would spend eternity in hell. Muslims are convinced that Muhammad's pronouncements on these subjects, as on all others, are infallible.

Why don't you find these claims convincing? Why don't you lose any sleep over whether or not you should convert to Islam? Please take a moment to reflect on this. You know exactly what it is like to be an atheist with respect to Islam. Isn't it obvious that Muslims are not being honest in their evaluation of the evidence? Isn't it obvious that anyone who thinks that the Qur'an is the perfect word of the Creator of the universe has not read the book very critically? Isn't it obvious that Muslims have developed a mode of discourse that seeks to preserve dogma, generation after generation, rather than question it? Yes, these things are obvious. Understand that the way you view Islam is precisely the way every Muslim views Christianity. And it is the way I view all religions.

Christians regularly assert that the Bible predicts future historical events. For instance, Deuteronomy 28:64 says, "The Lord will scatter you among the nations from one end of the earth to the other." Jesus says, in Luke 19:43-44, "The days will come upon you when your enemies will build an embankment against you and encircle you in on every side. They will dash you to the ground, you and the children within your walls. They will not leave one stone on another, because you did not recognize the time of God's coming to you." We are meant to believe that these utterances predict the subsequent history of the Jews with such uncanny specificity so as to admit of only a supernatural explanation. It is on the basis of such reasoning that 44 percent of the American population now believes that Jesus will return to earth to judge the living and the dead sometime in the next fifty years.

But just imagine how breathtakingly specific a work of prophecy could be if it were actually the product of omniscience. If the Bible were such a book, it would make specific, falsifiable predictions about human events. You would expect it to contain a passage like, "In the latter half of the twentieth century, humankind will develop a globally linked system of computers-the principles of which I set forth in Leviticus-and this system shall be called the Internet." The Bible contains nothing remotely like this. In fact, it does not contain a single sentence that could not have been written by a man or woman living in the first century.

Take a moment to imagine how good a book could be if it were written by the Creator of the universe. Such a book could contain a chapter on mathematics that, after two thousand years of continuous use, would still be the richest source of mathematical insight the earth has ever seen. Instead, the Bible contains some very obvious mathematical errors. In two places, for instance, the Good Book gives the ratio of a circumference of a circle to its diameter as simply 3 (1 Kings 7: 23-26 and 2 Chronicles 4: 2-5). We now refer to this constant relation with the Greek letter p. While the decimal expansion of p runs to infinity-3.1415926535 . . .-we can calculate it to any degree of accuracy we like. Centuries before the oldest books of the Bible were written, both the Egyptians and Babylonians approximated p to a few decimal places. And yet the Bible-whether inerrant or divinely inspired-offers us an approximation that is terrible even by the standards of the ancient world. Needless to say, many religious people have found ingenious ways of rationalizing this. And yet, these rationalizations cannot conceal the obvious deficiency of the Bible as a source of mathematical insight. It is absolutely true to say that, if Archimedes had written a chapter of the Bible, the text would bear much greater evidence of the author's "omniscience."

Why doesn't the Bible say anything about electricity, about DNA, or about the actual age and size of the universe? What about a cure for cancer? Millions of people are dying horribly from cancer at this very moment, many of them children. When we fully understand the biology of cancer, this understanding will surely be reducible to a few pages of text. Why aren't these pages, or anything remotely like them, found in the Bible? The Bible is a very big book. There was room for God to instruct us on how to keep slaves and sacrifice a wide variety of animals. Please appreciate how this looks to one who stands outside the Christian faith. It is genuinely amazing how ordinary a book can be and still be thought the product of omniscience.

Of course, your reasons for believing in God may be more personal than those I have discussed above. I have no doubt that your acceptance of Christ coincided with some very positive changes in your life. Perhaps you regularly feel rapture or bliss while in prayer. I do not wish to denigrate any of these experiences. I would point out, however, that billions of other human beings, in every time and place, have had similar experiences-but they had them while thinking about Krishna, or Allah, or the Buddha, while making art or music, or while contemplating the sheer beauty of nature. There is no question that it is possible for us to have profoundly transformative experiences. And there is no question that it is possible for us to misinterpret these experiences and to further delude ourselves about the nature of the universe.

If you have read my letter this far, one of two things has happened. Either you have perceived some error that is genuinely fatal to my argument, or you have ceased to be a Christian. Please don't hesitate to contact me with any errors you may have found. You could yet save me the torments of hell."

99.9% Screened for your protection, Mr. President

2006-04-06T20:05:00.000-04:00

Harry Taylor managed to get past screeners at the North Carolina event today and managed to tell the president that he's never felt more ashamed of the leadership of his country.

Harry Taylor Video

Taylor: "Okay, I don't have a question. What I wanted to say to you is that in my lifetime, I have never felt more ashamed of, nor more frightened by my leadership in Washington, including the presidency, by the Senate...And I would hope -- I feel like despite your rhetoric, that compassion and common sense have been left far behind during your administration, and I would hope from time to time that you have the humility and the grace to be ashamed of yourself inside yourself..."

Tremendous balls and composure on the part of Mr. Taylor given the purified audience he was challenging as much as the President himself. Every other screened person in that place was seething that some traitor like this had gotten into their party and dared challenge the emperor and his tailor.

Outstanding, I raise my glass to you sir.

Oversight and the 10 Commandments - a ramble

2006-04-06T12:12:00.000-04:00

Since the conservative right typically enjoys citing the Bible I think it's worth reviewing the priority the 10 commandments are listed in. I believe the King James version puts “Thou shalt not kill” at a lowly #6 just ahead of "Adultry" (more commonly known to Bill Clinton as the “Thou shalt not get head from interns” clause) comimg in at #7.

Surprisingly neither one of those seemingly important items even made it to tablet one. I like to think that George and Barbara Bush are frequently pretty embarassed by their lesser son which brings me to #5 with “Honor you Mother and Father”. Funny how that rates higher than killing someone or screwing someone other than your wife. God damn that just doesn’t make any sense to me! And speaking of God damn, that particular “shalt not” comes in at #3 so technically speaking I’m in more trouble than Bill Clinton or George Bush combined apparently.

Now even though it was almost always a republican controlled entity the one thing I genuinely liked about Congress during the Clinton administration was that they were at least up for doing their job of oversight. Sure they didn’t have much to oversee other than the errant hand job, but at least they were doing it. The list of lies, crimes, deaths, incompetent acts, cover-ups, fiscal neglect, and scandals attributable to this administration is only made more unbelievable when one notices that Congress has allowed nearly all of it happen without even feigning an inquiry. Even if everything Bush and his administration has done was above board the American public will never believe it because Congress has failed to ask when questions arose.

This is why this mid-term election coming up is so crucial. Sure George is lame ducking a bit, but if the power flips in Congress you might see more than a few challenges to the administration's actions initiated. One can only hope...and vote.

The General who wouldn't cry wolf

2006-04-02T23:40:00.000-04:00

Here’s a clip from Meet the Press with one of the Generals involved leading up to the war in Iraq. I share this because I’m thoroughly tired of the now revised reasons for going to war or apologists claiming that the Bush administration simply had bad intelligence. That's just bullshit. They lied, they knew they were lying, and their incompetence included disregarding 10 years of strategic reconstruction planning.

General Zinni:

"I heard the case being built to go to war right away- I was hearing a depiction of the intelligence that didn't fit what I knew. There was no solid proof that I ever saw that Saddam had WMD.

...I saw on the ground a sort of walking away from 10 years’ worth of planning. You know, ever since the end of the first Gulf War, there’s been planning by serious officers and planners and others, and policies put in place - 10 years' worth of planning were thrown away. Troop levels dismissed out of hand. Gen. Shinseki basically insulted for speaking the truth and giving an honest opinion.

The lack of cohesive approach to how we deal with the aftermath, the political, economic, social reconstruction of a nation, which is no small task. A belief in these exiles that anyone in the region, anyone that had any knowledge, would tell you were not credible on the ground. And on and on and on, decisions to disband the army that were not in the initial plans. There’s a series of disastrous mistakes. We just heard the Secretary of State say these were tactical mistakes. These were not tactical mistakes. These were strategic mistakes, mistakes of policies made back here. Don’t blame the troops. They’ve been magnificent. If anything saves us, it will be them."

No kidding. Please check out the video.

C&L Video Here

Ancient Greek Fortune Cookie

2006-03-22T12:56:00.000-05:00

What utter nonsense. What could a Greek philosopher from 384 BC possibly say that would have any relevance to a modern political conversation?

"A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider god-fearing and pious. On the other hand, they do less easily move against him, believing that he has the gods on his side." - Aristotle

Oh.

I'm sure many will dismiss the passage, but then again some might find that oddly relevant.

Heisenberg Terrorist Principle (Revisited)

2006-03-22T11:56:00.000-05:00

Nothing. Not a thing. I would scan the form letter for you but to save you a nondescript read I give you the one salient sentence:

“A search of the automated indices to our central records system files at the FBI Headquarters located no records responsive to your FOIPA request.”

Given the recent rulings and behavior of this administration some could reasonably point out that I have no way of knowing if the FBI is in fact providing any information they have. Perhaps, but I naively want to believe that the government in general isn’t completely without law especially when it comes to something as benign as a law abiding, tax paying citizen checking to see if he’s being watched. Okay, reading that last bit back I guess it falls short of benign to make a written request of the security arm of a borderline fascist theocracy to determine if they consider you to be a threat…I suppose I just want somewhere to hang my tinfoil hat sometimes.

That said I think given that I’m in no way a threat it’s hardly a shock they claim to have no file on me. And yet now I find myself strangely disappointed. Certainly they have no real reason to be wasting their time watching me or my actions. But given the tone and conduct of this government I almost feel embarrassed at my lack of impact, as though I should really make more of an effort to protest and be heard. I think we all should.

On second thought, I think “protest” is the wrong word to use here because it still connotates shouting at the walls from the outside, upset with what is happening but not fully contributing to fixing the problem by finding a good alternative. “Participation” seems more productive. I’m not yet sure how best to accomplish this but I’m open to suggestions. I just want some integrity brought back to the leadership of our government. Sadly the system seems to chew up and spit out people like me (or even Paul Hackett) onto the alter of idealism. I just don’t know, but doing something from within the system seems like it would be so much more effectual than carrying a protest placard outside of it.

No answers today, I’m just venting.

Pollyanna pundits

2006-03-16T22:02:00.000-05:00

Check out "The Final Word Is Hooray!" from FAIR. Remembering some of the chastizing that came from the Right when they were certain the hard part of the Iraq war was done. Great stuff.

"The war was the hard part. The hard part was putting together a coalition, getting 300,000 troops over there and all their equipment and winning. And it gets easier. I mean, setting up a democracy is hard, but it is not as hard as winning a war."

(Fox News Channel's Fred Barnes, 4/10/03)

Of course they've all recanted on their premature bloviations...right?

Heisenberg Terrorist Principle

2006-03-06T11:15:00.000-05:00

I haven’t posted to this space in a while. Part because I was just so unbelievably despondent at the state of things but also because I also feel I’m just talking to myself. Even though I would get the same number of readers if I sent this rant directly to my friend Chris in an email I somehow think that documenting this experiment is somehow valuable to anyone who might one day stumble across these humble posts.

Now just in case there’s any doubt I want to be clear from the start, I’m not a terrorist. I have no plans to hurt anyone, to damage any property or to steal any secrets. Give me another few days of procrastination and I’ll even pay my taxes. However, like so many other Americans I think that the Bush administration is completely out of control and a real threat to the Constitutional values that have made this country truly great.

Unfortunately the repressive, borderline fascist theocracy this administration has installed has given me pause. It used to be that you had a good clear idea what the government would consider a threat, such contaminating our water with some lethal pathogen or blowing up a building full of people. These used to be the obvious benchmarks, but these days you just don’t know. Every action taken by this administration has been so obfuscated that their true motives are constantly in question. We just can’t believe any explanation or answer they provide anymore. The intense secrecy behind their intelligence gathering, wiretaps and every other kind of privacy violation including the detainment of people without proper charges…we’re talking about the stuff formerly relegated to paranoid science fiction here. Now, instead of knowing the short list of activities the government considers to be a threat, the real question now is exactly what activities aren’t seen as a threat?

I wanted to know if I had unwittingly done anything that would cause concern to the government. Was I being watched too? The only way I might find out was to make a request for my own FBI file through the Freedom Of Information Act. So I went to http://www.foiarequest.org, and a minute later I had printed my very own FOIA request. I have to admit that it was with some trepidation that I dropped it in the mail on 3/6/06.

As far as subversive groups go I must confess that I am a proud member of the ACLU, a paid in full member of the liberal bastion that is my local public radio station, and I have even performed volunteer work for the Kerry/Edwards campaign. Given the rhetoric and actions of this administration I wondered if my mere association with these groups or some of my past (largely unread) rants here would merit my very own FBI file? Am I being monitored along with hundreds or thousands of others who are affiliated with these groups? The very likely answer is of course NO, but here is where my variant of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle comes into play. Will the very act of requesting my own presumably nonexistent file give cause for the FBI to create one? Will they decide to start monitoring me just because I made an inquiry?

The funny thing is, a few of the people I mentioned this experiment to sounded decidedly uncomfortable talking about it or contemplating the idea of it. “Good luck with that” was the standard tone of their response. In this regard my experiment has proven revealing already. The aggressive and repressive nature of our government has already successfully silenced even mild public dissent and caused caution among many who would perhaps be more inclined to speak out in protest. This alone is profoundly disturbing.

The point of all this is that it seems obvious to me that the “war” on terror is not really a war per-se but rather a misrepresented pursuit of security that, of course, should be an ongoing objective. Even without the false pretense of “war” the powers claimed by the President and this administration under the war powers act are suspect at best.

Security itself has no intrinsic value if the rights and liberties it presumes to protect are compromised in the course of that pursuit.

I’ll post more here when I have more to report.
Jim

Cheney should put his money where his mouth is.

2005-11-13T10:08:00.000-05:00

Here's an idea, and I can't believe I'm the first to come up with this modest proposal, but why doesn't the U.S. government just go ahead and torture Lewis "Scooter" Libby? And not just for that ridiculous name.

Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald has laid five charges against Libby related to the investigation into how an undercover CIA operative's identity was leaked to the press. One can only imagine how long it's going to take for Fitzgerald to lay out the evidence, to put witnesses on the stand, to build a case against Libby, and find out whether he lied to cover up for his actions or those of others at the White House.

Who knows how many other CIA agents may be outed while this case works its way through the courts?

Now, couldn't the whole process be expedited if Fitzgerald could attach a few electrodes to Libby's chest and then crank up the volts?

Some of you might find this position a bit extreme, but unless I'm reading the situation all wrong, this is exactly the sort of thing that Libby's boss, vice-president Dick Cheney, could get behind.

Just last week, Cheney met privately with Republican senators to make the case that the CIA should be exempted from any laws that would ban the use of torture on terror suspects.

Now don't get me wrong. I'm not saying ol' Scooter is a terrorist. I don't see him strapping dynamite to his waist and getting on a bus. I mean, look at the nice suits he wears. Who'd want to ruin one of those? But it's not much of a leap to suggest that the leaking of a CIA agent's name is a matter of national security. And if just one U.S. official thinks it's okay to blab the names of undercover operatives, or at the very least, cover up for those who think it's okay to blab the names of undercover operatives, isn't everyone going to start thinking it's okay?

If Dick Cheney is pushing for the authority to torture terror suspects to find out what they know and what threats they pose to national security, why would he be opposed to using the same methods on his former chief of staff? Even if Libby turns out to be completely innocent? It's certainly a great shortcut to the truth.

Of course, there are some Republicans who might be worried that, under torture, Libby might say anything, or implicate anyone, to make the pain go away. Maybe even make stuff up, confess to crimes he didn't commit, just to please the folks putting in the bamboo shoots or flicking the power on or off. But surely Dick Cheney wouldn't be worried about that.

If Cheney were worried that torture can be an unreliable method for extracting the truth, he'd hardly be seeking an exemption from any laws that would ban "cruel, inhuman or degrading" treatment of criminal suspects. So he'd be hard pressed to argue that torturing Libby might unfairly incriminate other White House officials. In fact, the very suggestion that Libby would offer up lies while under torture borders on un-American. Surely he's made of better stuff than that.

The only real question remains, who should do it?

If Fitzgerald feels uncomfortable performing the torture himself, there are any number of foreign countries where Libby could be sent to have it done. He could check with the White House for a complete list.

Like I say, it's just a thought. Maybe Cheney should issue a statement: "I'm so committed to torture for extracting information, I'm willing, as a gesture of goodwill, to have it used on my former chief of staff first."

He'd make a believer out of me.

-Credit to the Toronto Star

You didn't get that from Cheney too did you? WHEW!

2005-11-10T23:34:00.000-05:00

I find it more than a little ironic that Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist is more upset about the leaking of information about secret CIA detention centers than about what abuses may be going on in them.

"My concern is with leaks of information that jeopardize your safety and security -- period," Frist said. "That is a legitimate concern."

He was then asked if that meant he was not concerned about investigating what goes on in detention centers.

"I am not concerned about what goes on and I'm not going to comment about the nature of that," Frist replied.

Hey, that reminds me, I have to think he would be equally outraged about Rove, Libby and even the VP Cheney leaking the secret identity of a covert CIA agent too, right? I mean, that kind of information would jeopardize our safety and security, right? I bet he's demanding an in depth investigation into those security breaches too...Right?!

Hello? Anyone?

It's not just me

2005-11-10T20:02:00.000-05:00

So to some of my friends who would label me strictly as a Liberal, what does it mean when I find myself generally agreeing with a Pat Buchanan assessment of the situation?

"Indeed, since 9/11, the party has indulged in a willful self-delusion that it has become America’s Party."

"Under Bush II, social spending has exploded to levels LBJ might envy, foreign aid has been doubled, pork-at-every-meal has become the GOP diet of choice, surpluses have vanished, and the deficit is soaring back toward 5% of GDP. Bill Clinton is starting to look like Barry Goldwater."

"(I)n March, 2003, Bush, in perhaps the greatest strategic blunder in U.S. history, invaded an Arab nation that had not attacked us, did not want war with us, and did not threaten us—to strip it of weapons we now know it did not have. Result: Shia and Kurds have been liberated from Saddam, but Iran has a new ally in southern Iraq, Osama has a new base camp in the Sunni Triangle, the Arab and Islamic world have been radicalized against the United States"

Where have these guys been? Oh sure, he's an anti-Semitic isolationist fascist but somehow I still feel like we could have all been sitting around a campfire burning little GWB effigies and singing kumbyah...of course only on the weekends mind you.

New evidence emboldened dems to shut down the senate

2005-11-06T12:18:00.000-05:00

The move by the democrats to temporarily close the senate a few days back was apparently emboldened by some new evidence coming to light.

The Left Coaster states in this article that the New York Times has been provided with a previously-classified intelligence document that shows the US intelligence community knew as early as February 2002 that the Al Qaeda operative Al-Libi was providing complete fabrications to the administration. Additionally Al-Libi, who was the primary source for the Bush Administration claims that Saddam was training Al Qaeda members in bomb-making and chemical weapons, may well have been making these claims under interrogation techniques akin to torture.

Add to this to the other things the Bush Administration knew:

It was known in Jan 2003 that the Niger uranium claim was based on forgeries, and that the aluminum tubes story was completely bogus.
It was known as far back as February 2002 that the claim that Saddam was assisting Al Qaeda was a lie.
We know that the IAEA was still on the ground in Iraq and had not confirmed any of Bush’s claims that Saddam had definitively stockpiled WMDs in violation of the two UN resolutions that Bush based his war upon.

All this takes on a certain gravitas when you look at the certification that Bush sent to Congress to start the war, and see that he knowingly lied to Congress to start the war.

Noting too that 53% of the American public says that if it is clear that Bush lied, they would support Congress considering impeachment proceedings against the president. If it weren't for the stronghold the Republicans have on the House and Seante Bush might acually have to answer to these charges.

Vote early and vote often this election folks.

This kinda sums it up I think

2005-11-05T18:27:00.000-05:00

George Bush has started an ill-timed and disastrous war under false pretenses by lying to the American people and to the Congress; he has run a budget surplus into a severe deficit; he has consistently and unconscionably favored the wealthy and corporations over the rights and needs of the population; he has destroyed trust and confidence in, and good will toward, the United States around the globe; he has ignored global warming, to the world's detriment; he has wantonly broken our treaty obligations; he has condoned torture of prisoners; he has attempted to create a theocracy in the United States; he has appointed incompetent cronies to positions of vital national importance.

Would someone please give this man a blow job so we can impeach him already?

-Source unknown

Libby Is The Firewall Protecting Vice President Cheney

2005-11-04T14:12:00.000-05:00

John Dean of FindLaw makes an interesting assesment of Libby's role as the firewall protecting Cheney. A very interesting read if you have the interest. Sadly I suspect that unless the Senate changes leadership and start exercising some oversight of this administration they will be able to stall beyond the elections and the president will issue pardons for all those involved on the way out.

http://writ.news.findlaw.com/dean/20051104.html

Libby's story was that when Libby "passed the information on to reporters Cooper and Miller late in the week, he passed it on thinking it was just information he received from reporters; that he told reporters that, in fact, he didn't even know if it were true. He was just passing gossip from one reporter to another at the long end of a chain of phone calls."

This story is, of course, a lie, but it was a clever one on Libby's part.

It protects Cheney because it suggests that Cheney's disclosure to Libby was causally separate from Libby's later, potentially Espionage-Act-violating disclosure to the press. Thus, it also denies any possible conspiracy between Cheney and Libby.

And it protects Libby himself - by suggesting that since he believed he was getting information from reporters, not indirectly from the CIA, he may not have had have the state of mind necessary to violate the Espionage Act.

'Intelligent Falling' Theory big in Kansas

2005-11-03T23:36:00.000-05:00

Evangelical Scientists Refute Gravity With New ‘Intelligent Falling’ Theory

October 2, 2005

KANSAS CITY, KS As the debate over the teaching of evolution in public schools continues, a new controversy over the science curriculum arose Monday in this embattled midwestern state. Scientists from the Evangelical Center For Faith-Based Reasoning are now asserting that the long-held "theory of gravity" is flawed, and they have responded to it with a new theory of Intelligent Falling.

Rev. Gabriel Burdett (left) explains Intelligent Falling. "Things fall not because they are acted upon by some gravitational force, but because a higher intelligence, 'God' if you will, is pushing them down," said Gabriel Burdett, who holds degrees in education, applied Scripture, and physics from Oral Roberts University.

Burdett added: "Gravity, which is taught to our children as a law, is founded on great gaps in understanding. The laws predict the mutual force between all bodies of mass, but they cannot explain that force. Isaac Newton himself said, 'I suspect that my theories may all depend upon a force for which philosophers have searched all of nature in vain.' Of course, he is alluding to a higher power."

Founded in 1987, the ECFR is the world's leading institution of evangelical physics, a branch of physics based on literal interpretation of the Bible. According to the ECFR paper published simultaneously this week in the International Journal Of Science and the adolescent magazine God's Word For Teens!, there are many phenomena that cannot be explained by secular gravity alone, including such mysteries as how angels fly, how Jesus ascended into Heaven, and how Satan fell when cast out of Paradise.

The ECFR, in conjunction with the Christian Coalition and other Christian conservative action groups, is calling for public-school curriculums to give equal time to the Intelligent Falling theory. They insist they are not asking that the theory of gravity be banned from schools, but only that students be offered both sides of the issue "so they can make an informed decision."

"We just want the best possible education for Kansas' kids," Burdett said. Proponents of Intelligent Falling assert that the different theories used by secular physicists to explain gravity are not internally consistent. Even critics of Intelligent Falling admit that Einstein's ideas about gravity are mathematically irreconcilable with quantum mechanics. This fact, Intelligent Falling proponents say, proves that gravity is a theory in crisis.

"Let's take a look at the evidence," said ECFR senior fellow Gregory Lunsden. "In Matthew 15:14, Jesus says, 'And if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch.' He says nothing about some gravity making them fall; just that they will fall. Then, in Job 5:7, we read, 'But mankind is born to trouble, as surely as sparks fly upwards.' If gravity is pulling everything down, why do the sparks fly upwards with great surety? This clearly indicates that a conscious intelligence governs all falling."

Critics of Intelligent Falling point out that gravity is a provable law based on empirical observations of natural phenomena. Evangelical physicists, however, insist that there is no conflict between Newton's mathematics and Holy Scripture.

"Closed-minded gravitists cannot find a way to make Einstein's general relativity match up with the subatomic quantum world," said Dr. Ellen Carson, a leading Intelligent Falling expert known for her work with the Kansan Youth Ministry. "They've been trying to do it for the better part of a century now, and despite all their empirical observation and carefully compiled data, they still don't know how."

"Traditional scientists admit that they cannot explain how gravitation is supposed to work," Carson said. "What the gravity-agenda scientists need to realize is that 'gravity waves' and 'gravitons' are just secular words for 'God can do whatever He wants.'"

Some evangelical physicists propose that Intelligent Falling provides an elegant solution to the central problem of modern physics. “Anti-falling physicists have been theorizing for decades about the 'electromagnetic force,' the 'weak nuclear force,' the 'strong nuclear force,' and so-called 'force of gravity,'" Burdett said. "And they tilt their findings toward trying to unite them into one force. But readers of the Bible have already known for millennia what this one, unified force is: His name is Jesus."

-Credit to The Onion
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/39512

Truth be told

2005-11-03T16:30:00.000-05:00

I want some apologies.

I want one addressed to our military families for the thousands of unnecessary troop deaths and tens of thousands of injuries our solders have endured during this unnecessary and unjust war. I want an apology given to the American public for the billions of dollars squandered destroying the infrastructure of Iraq and the no-bid contracts given to Haliburton and other companies without any proper oversight. I want an apology given to the people of Iraq for the needless deaths of 30,000 of their citizens, for destroying what little was functioning in their country and for bringing the best of the worst terrorists to their homeland to practice their trade. Our allies and the international community that rightfully questioned our motivations deserve a big apology too for the way our President's immense hubris and incompetence lead to our largely unilateral attack on Iraq. If these apologies do not come from our President directly, as I strongly doubt they will, then they should come as a unified and unequivocal voice from our House and Senate.

Yeah, I know…fat chance.

While this is all completely unlikely just what could such an apology accomplish? How could these things possibly matter or make any material difference to our situation in this conflict? Believe it or not, it might actually make things a whole lot better.

We are there, it’s a huge mess and there is no turning back now. We can’t just abandon the country as it is, obviously the right thing to do is to repair it as best we can first. I would submit that we do not have enough troops and support staff there to accomplish all we need to do in a timely manner. We need many more solders and trained workers to get the job done but our military recruiting drives at home are dramatically failing to meet their goals. Simply put, we need help.

If confessions and apologies were made it would help bring some credibility back to our government in the eyes of the world. Many of the countries that chided us for going to Iraq under false pretenses might eventually be persuaded to join us in the common goal of repairing the country’s infrastructure and rescue Iraq from remaining a volatile terrorist breeding ground. We cannot complete this task alone but with the combined and unified front from the countries of the world we might be able to salvage our once honorable reputation and save Iraq from the arrogance of a short sighted administration. Perhaps given such apologies where we humbly acknowledge our mistakes we can once again be proud to be recognized on the international stage as Americans.

Of course none of this will happen under the current administration, and even though the current Republican Party might do well to challenge the actions of their leadership it is obviously unlikely. One can only hope for the future.

A question of defensibility

2005-11-02T15:26:00.000-05:00

Some Bush administration apologists like to repeat the distributed talking point that Valerie Plame was not a covert CIA agent. If she wasn’t then I would have to confess that I have no idea what all the fuss is about, but there is substantial evidence to the contrary. A succinct summary of her status and the damage done by this revelation was broadcast on 60 Minutes, that story and transcripts can be found at http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/10/28/60minutes/main994753.shtml

Ed Bradley spoke with her husband, friends and with fellow agents who knew her work. Not only was Valerie Plame covert she was also exposed as a “NOC,” an agent working under non-official cover. That means she wasn’t attached to a U.S. Embassy or any other government agency when she worked overseas, which would have provided her protection if she was caught spying. In other words, she had no diplomatic immunity.

Unlike a diplomat caught spying if she was caught overseas she wouldn’t have been kicked out of the country, she would have likely just disappeared.

Being able to charge Libby outed a CIA agent has the ominous challenge of proving that not only did he do it but that he knowingly intended on doing it. Unless Scooter is keeping a personal diary or blog where he journals his every thought and motivation it is an unlikely anyone will be able to meet that burden of proof.

President and former CIA director George Bush thought that the outing of a CIA agent was treason. Regardless of ones political disposition I cannot see this behavior as dismissible and we should all be united in the demand to get to the bottom of this scandalous action, regardless who is involved.

Open letter to my Senators

2005-11-02T11:59:00.000-05:00

Dear Senators DeWine and Voinovich,

I strongly urge you to support and encourage all investigations regarding the circumstances surrounding the Lewis Libby indictment and the deceptive manipulation of intelligence perpetrated by the white house leading up to the war in Iraq. The outing of a CIA agent is a traitorous act by itself but is further scandalous considering it was done as an act of retaliation against Joe Wilson, someone who was providing factually accurate information that simply did not support the lies being given by this administration leading us to this unjustified and unnecessary conflict.

Secondly, I must insist that you protect the senate’s right to filibuster judicial nominees. This option has not been exercised frivolously in the past and should be preserved so that extreme judicial nominees of either party can be prevented from being pushed through the senate against the absolute objections of the minority. The preservation of this action-of-last-resort forces any sitting president to nominate more moderate judges who will be more even handed in their jurisprudence and not disregard past decisions in the interest of furthering their own legal or social agenda.

I sincerely appreciate your service and thoughtful representation.

Regards,
Jim Wilson

Somewhere to say something

2005-10-26T15:43:00.000-04:00

(No Parking)

Per some prodding and encouragement of friends I'll be putting a few thoughts to keyboard and LCD and posting them here. I dare say I'm not entirely sure to what effect but it should help to get some of this stuff off my chest.

With bold intent into the ether I will shout.