Category: Politics

You know, one of the more disturbing aspects of W.’s War in Iraq and War on Terror (all the same to him, of course) is in an effort to fight terrorism and oppression (like torture), the government has been engaging in numerous practices that could easily enough be characterized as, well, terrorism and oppression (like torture). I mean, the stuff in the prisons in Iraq is old news; Darth Vader er, Dick “the dick” Chenney has been lobbying to exclude the CIA from a ban on torture, an amendment that’s been attached to a budget bill by that crazy liberal John McCain.

But I think this story, if true, takes the cake.

Via the Daily KOS comes a story that was published in the UK Independent Online Edition, “US forces ‘used chemical weapons’ during assault on city of Fallujah.” Here’s the opening paragraph from that article:

Powerful new evidence emerged yesterday that the United States dropped massive quantities of white phosphorus on the Iraqi city of Fallujah during the attack on the city in November 2004, killing insurgents and civilians with the appalling burns that are the signature of this weapon.

Ever since the assault, which went unreported by any Western journalists, rumours have swirled that the Americans used chemical weapons on the city.

Not exactly the “justified” war that W. argues for, is it?

So, Bush has nominated a woman named Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court, someone whose “major” legal experience (besides being a lawyer, of course) has been to be in charge of the Texas Lottery and W.’s attorney (which is a position she stepped into after Alberto Gonzales stepped into the Attorney General’s spot), and who has been a friend of W.’s for 30 or so years.

First off, this is just such obvious cronyism that I cannot believe anyone could possibly think otherwise.

Second, I think it’s pretty clear that W. is essentially lying when he suggests he doesn’t know his good friend’s feelings about issues like abortion. He may have never had the conversation with her, much in the way that I haven’t had that conversation with a lot of my friends and colleagues, but I am sure he has a pretty good idea where she stands.

And to make matters worse, this article from the LA Times suggests that Harriet might be a pretty scary-assed nominee. Here’s a quote:

Nathan L. Hecht, a Texas Supreme Court justice, has been a close companion of Miers since they first worked together for a Dallas law firm 30 years ago. His comments are the clearest indication to date of Miers’ view on abortion — which, as with other issues she would be likely to face on the high court, is unknown.

Hecht is known as the most conservative member of the conservative Texas Supreme Court. “He’s sort of the [Antonin] Scalia of that court: smart, aggressive and very conservative,” said University of Texas law professor Douglas Laycock.

Hecht, a vocal opponent of the abortion right, said in an interview Tuesday that Miers shared his views. The two attend the evangelical Valley View Christian Church near Dallas.

“Harriet goes to a church that is pro-life. She has for 25 years,” he said. “She gives them a lot of money. Her personal views lie in that direction.”

But when asked if her personal opposition to abortion would give her sufficient cause to overturn the Supreme Court’s abortion precedent, Hecht said, “I think she’ll say they won’t.”

I’d best not comment on this too much, so I’ll just post the link:

Societies worse off ‘when they have God on their side’ from the UK’s Times Online

I’m not convinced that the study proves a particularly clear cause/effect relationship, but it’s interesting reading. And it sure as hell isn’t going to be published in the mainstream US press.

Oops, I mean sure as heck.

Here’s a cup of morning intollerance by some religious nuts for ya:

Via Dr. B’s Blog, I came across this article about how Baylor University has stopped selling coffee in cups with little sayings on them. Maybe you’ve seen these before: printed on the cup holding your latte is some inspirational/pithy quote. Here’s a quote from the “Gay News” article:

The Seattle-based coffee company launched its “The Way I See It” promotion earlier this year, and one of the phrases being used is from Armistead Maupin.

Maupin, whose “Tales of the City” chronicled gay life in San Francisco’s homosexual in the 1970s and 1980s, is quoted on the cups as saying “I surrendered my youth to the people I feared when I could have been out there loving someone. Don’t make that mistake yourself. Life’s too damn short.”

This week Baylor University ordered the campus Starbucks outlet to pull the cup campaign, even though the Maupin quote was just one of about 100.

Frankly, I think Baylor should order Starbucks to stop selling coffee because it just isn’t that good, but that’s another issue entirely.

More or less what I’ve said before here about W. and his reaction to Katrina and NOLA, in the form of a rap song. Warning: explicit lyrics and such.

I’ve spent most of this past Labor Day weekend around the house (most of the last week, actually), getting ready for the coming school year, but also following the Hurricane Katrina story via NPR, the web, CNN, network news, etc. Here’s kind of a summary of a few things I’ve come across lately:

• Kevin “Political Animal” Drum gives a telling chronology of W. et al and FEMA. Actually, there are a ton of entries about all this on Drum’s blog, stories about how FEMA’s funding has gone down every year since it became part of the Department of Homeland Security, how the guy who is running FEMA used to be in charge of a group having to do with horses and had little experience in disasters, etc.
• Here’s one entry that aired on that ultra-liberal Tim Russert. Let me quote from the site, which is really a transcript from last week’s show:
  

  MR. RUSSERT: Hold on. Hold on, sir. Shouldn’t the mayor of New Orleans and the governor of New Orleans bear some responsibility? Couldn’t they have been much more forceful, much more effective and much more organized in evacuating the area?

  MR. BROUSSARD (that is, Aaron Broussard, president of Jefferson Parish): Sir, they were told like me, every single day, “The cavalry’s coming,” on a federal level, “The cavalry’s coming, the cavalry’s coming, the cavalry’s coming.” I have just begun to hear the hoofs of the cavalry. The cavalry’s still not here yet, but I’ve begun to hear the hoofs, and we’re almost a week out.

  Let me give you just three quick examples. We had Wal-Mart deliver three trucks of water, trailer trucks of water. FEMA turned them back. They said we didn’t need them. This was a week ago. FEMA–we had 1,000 gallons of diesel fuel on a Coast Guard vessel docked in my parish. The Coast Guard said, “Come get the fuel right away.” When we got there with our trucks, they got a word. “FEMA says don’t give you the fuel.” Yesterday–yesterday–FEMA comes in and cuts all of our emergency communication lines. They cut them without notice. Our sheriff, Harry Lee, goes back in, he reconnects the line. He posts armed guards on our line and says, “No one is getting near these lines.” Sheriff Harry Lee said that if America–American government would have responded like Wal-Mart has responded, we wouldn’t be in this crisis.

  But I want to thank Governor Blanco for all she’s done and all her leadership. She sent in the National Guard. I just repaired a breach on my side of the 17th Street canal that the secretary didn’t foresee, a 300-foot breach. I just completed it yesterday with convoys of National Guard and local parish workers and levee board people. It took us two and a half days working 24/7. I just closed it.

  Oh, and just to be clear: these sorts of national (beyond state borders) disasters is what FEMA is supposed to do.

• Michael Moore has weighed in, too. Okay, okay, maybe he is a bit biased, but I think he’s right, too.
• Cuba wants to help, but W. et al won’t take it. Here’s a pretty interesting quote from this piece:
  

  Last September, a Category 5 hurricane battered the small island of Cuba with 160-mile-per-hour winds. More than 1.5 million Cubans were evacuated to higher ground ahead of the storm. Although the hurricane destroyed 20,000 houses, no one died.

  What is Cuban President Fidel Castro’s secret? According to Dr. Nelson Valdes, a sociology professor at the University of New Mexico, and specialist in Latin America, “the whole civil defense is embedded in the community to begin with. People know ahead of time where they are to go.”

  “Cuba’s leaders go on TV and take charge,” said Valdes. Contrast this with George W. Bush’s reaction to Hurricane Katrina. The day after Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, Bush was playing golf. He waited three days to make a TV appearance and five days before visiting the disaster site. In a scathing editorial on Thursday, the New York Times said, “nothing about the president’s demeanor yesterday – which seemed casual to the point of carelessness – suggested that he understood the depth of the current crisis.”

  “Merely sticking people in a stadium is unthinkable” in Cuba, Valdes said. “Shelters all have medical personnel, from the neighborhood. They have family doctors in Cuba, who evacuate together with the neighborhood, and already know, for example, who needs insulin.”

• W. et al nominated Roberts to be chief justice before Rehnquist’s body was even cold. Oh yeah, and what about Katrina? The “duck and cover” political strategy has been intiated. Here are two quotes of note from today’s New York Times article:
  

  It (meaning the White House) orchestrated visits by cabinet members to the region, leading up to an extraordinary return visit by Mr. Bush planned for Monday, directed administration officials not to respond to attacks from Democrats on the relief efforts, and sought to move the blame for the slow response to Louisiana state officials, according to Republicans familiar with the White House plan.

  and…

  In a reflection of what has long been a hallmark of Mr. Rove’s tough political style, the administration is also working to shift the blame away from the White House and toward officials of New Orleans and Louisiana who, as it happens, are Democrats.

  “The way that emergency operations act under the law is the responsibility and the power, the authority, to order an evacuation rests with state and local officials,” Mr. Chertoff said in his television interview. “The federal government comes in and supports those officials.”

  That line of argument was echoed throughout the day, in harsher language, by Republicans reflecting the White House line.

• New Orleans newspaper, The Times-Picayune, wrote an open letter to W. that I think kind of sums things up pretty well. I’m guessing that W. won’t be writing back.
• Finally, I’ll say this, and I don’t offer it as a critique of the Bush administration per se because I’m not sure the Democrats are a whole lot better on this score. Like everyone else, I’ve been watching the news footage of rescues, of the Super Dome, of the NOLA convention center, of angry people in the streets, etc., and I cannot get by the fact that damn near all of these people are black. Why? Well, because most of these people are poor and they had no way out– see this Washington Post article about that— and because I think it’s pretty clear that our government (local, state, federal) doesn’t care a whole lot about poor black people (or poor people of other colors, either), I’m not so sure that it ever did, and I’m fairly convinced that it never will.

  I guess I have known for a long time that the United States– which is my country, and which is a country that I do love– is simply not “the best in the world,” despite the myths we tell ourselves. It just isn’t, and you can’t look at what’s happening on the Gulf Coast and still think that it is. And I guess this is what saddens me most about the whole thing.

Update/Addition:

Barbara “Babs” Bush said that things are working out “very well” for the poor. Afterall, they are getting out of that shithole of New Orleans to live in the great state of Texas– and even Houston! Jeesh….

• Yes, New Orleans is built in a pretty hurricane-prone region of the world, but Andre, c’mon, dude! Most of the people stuck in NOLA couldn’t get out: the homeless or the close to it, the sick/old/infirmed/imprisoned, people without cars or family or place to go to, etc. See this post on boing-boing to see what I mean. And I don’t know where you’re going with that WTC stuff. That’s the talk that got Ward Churchill in the trouble he got into.
• Shit happens and shit can happen in small, large, or super-jumbo-sized portions. So least anyone reading this say to themselves or others “those dumb people in New Orleans deserved it,” just remember that NOLA has endured all kinds of crazy disasters for over 200 years, and every region in this country has its potential for crazy disaster. Out west, they get forest fires; California has earthquakes; we get floods, tornadoes, hail storms, ice storms, blizzards.

  So contrary to Andre, one of the things that’s kinda scary to me is that this is the sort of thing that could happen just about anywhere, at least in one form or another. Sure, we’re not going to get a hurricane in Detroit, but I have lived through plenty of “mini-disasters” in recent years. A few years ago, we had a bad enough ice storm around here to have trees come down in our backyard, taking out electricity, cable, and phone. We had to go live in a hotel for a few days. No fun. We had a hailstorm here about five years ago that was so bad that most of the roofs in our neighborhood (including ours), and dealing with the insurance company and the contractor was a six or so month ordeal. When we lived in Ashland, OR, there was a flood that took out the water system. We had to buy these five gallon jugs for holding water and had to go to these water trucks supplied by the National Guard for a week or so. That was probably the worse.

• Where’s W during all this? Why, he’s promoting his war and doing a fly-by on his way home after a month-long vacation. And apparently worried about his dog. Obviously W can’t prevent a natural disaster, but you’d think he’d at least land the plane somewhere around there and get out and talk to some people or something. But our government has its priorities, too. After all, even though this disaster is going to cost more than $25 billion when all is said and done, we’ve already spent close to eight times that much money on this folly in Iraq, and all we’ve gotten for our money there is more disaster. How are we paying for that mess, you ask? Well, among other things, the Bush administration apparently cut funds to NOLA to prevent hurricanes. Oops.

  I’m not trying to say that somehow cutting the budget to deal with real protection of the homeland is directly related to our bloated expenses in Iraq, I’m not saying that spending the money on the flood walls would have prevented the disaster, etc. Believe me, I know hindsight is 20/20. But it sure as hell don’t look good.

• I’m getting a little steamed about all this Katrina stuff and the price of gasoline. (Oh, BTW, isn’t it a bit strange that one of the first things that W et al did is release the federal petroleum reserves?) I realize that there is a significant amount of refining capacity and such along the gulf coast, but come on! I filled up the car this morning about 10 am and it cost me $2.99 a gallon. I went by this same gas station at about 4:30 pm and it was $3.17. $3.17! And there’s talk of it hitting $4.00 by this time next week! I mean, Jesus H. Christ! When there’s a hard freeze in Florida that kills all the oranges on the trees, the price of orange juice on the shelves in the grocery store that day!

  Well, at least I was able to buy gasoline today, and thank God I have a fuel-efficient car and I don’t drive much anyway.

• Slight addition
• I meant to mention this when I was posting this last night: Annette and I took a whirlwind trip to New Orleans a couple of years ago and had a great time. We were only there for about two days and three nights (maybe even less– I can’t quite remember) right after Christmas. Officially, we were there as part of a convention for work, but we really spent our time wondering around the French Quarter (which was really the only part of of NOLA we saw, too). As far as I can tell, there is no other place like it in this country: great food, great drinks, a constant party, beautiful old buildings, nice people, etc. It’s a great place– well, was a great place….

My father sent me this conservative/right leaning flash show about Hillary Clinton running for president. It’s kinda funny, though I am on the other side of the Hillary in 2008 argument.

It got me thinking though….

I would have no problem supporting Hillary for president in 2008, but it seems to me that the most vocal “supporters” of Hillary running for president are actually Republicans since I think they think that she’d be easy to beat.

Along those lines, I’d like to throw my, er, “support” behind a possible Republican candidate for president: Rick Santorum.

That’s right, you heard me: Rick “It Takes a Family” (as long as it is a hetro/one-man/one-woman/no birth control/Christian kinda family) Santorum, the senator from Pennsylvania. I’ve seen (on The Daily Show last week or so) or heard (on The Diane Rehm Show this morning) him a couple times already pitching his book, and I gotta tell ya, this guy would be great! He makes W. look like a completely reasonable, well-read, thoughtful, articulate, and liberal-to-moderate kinda guy.

Please, Republican party, please please… appeal to the crazy right wing base…. please…

It probably won’t happen though. For one thing, Santorum probably needs to actually get re-elected to the Senate first, and that might be a trick. Second, I’m just not sure that Clinton is going to get the nomination from the Democrats since the Dems still keep wanting to fight the fight for the middle.

And besides all that, I think that the extremely crude definition of the term “santorum” might hold him back a bit. (I warned you before you clicked on that…)