Uppity Wisconsin

Slightly dated news, but still interesting. As always: no original reporting here. --RKing

Michelle Obama Speaks You listen… Download (2434) | Play (3095) Download (1126) | Play (1864)

“The Daily Show with Jon Stewart,” whose phony news coverage has long included phony “remotes” from war-torn Iraq, will be reporting from Iraq for real next week. Giving its green screen a temporary rest, the Comedy Central series will air “Operation Silent Thunder: ‘The Daily Show’ in Iraq,” several onsite dispatches filed by Senior War Correspondent Rob Riggle. Riggle will provide what the network calls “in-depth coverage and insights from the front lines.” Scheduled to be back in New York this weekend, he begins his reports as soon as Monday.

Riggle, who joined the cast in 2006, is a major in the U.S. Marine Corps Reserve who served in Liberia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan.

Pluck this Chickenhawk The whole business of calling people chickenhawks has fallen into disrepute but I, for one, enjoy it greatly. What's more, it's precisely things like this Hitchens passage that Julian and Ross are discussing that leads to anti-chickenhawk dogmatism. Check it out, but this time with my emphasis added:

In order to get my own emotions out of the way, I should say briefly that on that day I shared the general register of feeling, from disgust to rage, but was also aware of something that would not quite disclose itself. It only became fully evident quite late that evening. And to my surprise (and pleasure), it was exhilaration. I am not particularly a war lover, and on the occasions when I have seen warfare as a traveling writer, I have tended to shudder. But here was a direct, unmistakable confrontation between everything I loved and everything I hated. On one side, the ethics of the multicultural, the secular, the skeptical, and the cosmopolitan. (Those are the ones I love, by the way.) On the other, the arid monochrome of dull and vicious theocratic fascism. I am prepared for this war to go on for a very long time. I will never become tired of waging it, because it is a fight over essentials. And because it is so interesting.

Now say it with me: which war, exactly, was Hitchens waging? He's not waging a war at all, he's sitting at a desk writing magazine articles and Slate columns and drinking just like the rest of us. He isn't waging war, he's advocating that other people wage war. Which is fine, as far as it goes, but he's saying that part of the reason he's advocating that other people wage war is that he enjoys imagining himself as a warrior.

Walking while buff A new offense in Sweden, apparently, where a body-builder was forced by a cop to take a test for illegal steroids.

Lying sacks of you-know-what. Remember when Rudy Giuliani said he was working at Ground Zero "as often, if not more, than most of the workers" digging through the rubble of the World Trade Center? The New York Times did some digging of their own and found that, between September 17 and December 16, 2001, he spent less than two-and-a-half hours per week there. They've obviously forgotten how the Herculean mayor used his massive bucket-scoop hands to clear ten times the debris as the other workers while flexing his tree-trunk thighs to lift two-ton sections of the fallen structures and snuffing out lingering fires with his amazing Arctic ice breath. But nice try, liberal media!

"The argument is not that I'm pristine, because I'm swimming in the same muddy water. The argument is that I know it's muddy and I want to clean it up." -- Barack Obama, explaining why it's not contradictory for him to be advocating for lobbying reform despite having committed the "original sin" of fundraising.

John Donne On Torture Scott Horton digs up a revelatory sermon from 1625.

Official army sites riskier to security than milbogs. Contradicting previous claims by the military that soldier’s personal blogs (milbogs) “needlessly place lives at risk,” a series of audits by the Army Web Risk Assessment Cell between January 2006 and January 2007 “suggests that official Defense Department websites post material far more potentially harmful than anything found on a individual’s blog.” The audits found “found at least 1,813 violations of operational security policy on 878 official military websites” compared to “28 breaches, at most, on 594 individual blogs during the same period.”

If It’s Sunday, It’s Karl Rove Karl Rove will be a guest this Sunday on Face the Nation, Meet the Press, and Fox News Sunday (ABC’s This Week is hosting a Democratic presidential debate). Thus far, Rove’s farewell media blitz has simply provided him a platform to offer partisan attacks. The media will be tempted to pick “Bush’s brain” for his views on the political horserace, on everything from the Democratic presidential candidates to Iraq to Bush’s veto threats. But they shouldn’t forget that Rove has yet to personally account for much of his sordid record in the White House. Here are a few of the issues that Rove needs to be asked about:

– Promoting the war as a member of the White House Iraq Group
– Leaking Valerie Plame’s identity
– Compiling the list of fired U.S. attorneys
– Politicizing government agencies
– Dealing with Jack Abramoff
– Violating White House email record-keeping rules

And there are a variety of other misdeeds. Let us know in the comments section what you’d like to see Rove get grilled on. We’ll be watching this Sunday to see if Rove is tossed some softballs or zinged with hardballs.

When Fred Thompson finally announces his candidacy next month, it will be the closest thing to a successful draft of a presidential candidate in more than a half-century.

There are two big problems here:

1) The Thompson draft, with the image of a reluctant candidate being drawn in, was pretty much fake. And Thompson admitted as much to USA Today a few months ago:

"I can't remember exactly the point that I said, 'I'm going to do this,'" Thompson says, his 6-foot, 6-inch frame sprawled comfortably across a couch in a hotel suite. "But when I did, the thing that occurred to me: 'I'm going to tell people that I am thinking about it and see what kind of reaction I get to it.'"

2) It's not the first successful draft since Eisenhower — and we don't have to go far back to find another. Are our attention spans and long-term recall so short that nobody remembers the Draft Clark movement? It was only four years ago.

Ver ah your pay-puhs...? CNN.com: Federal ID plan raises privacy concerns.

The cards would be mandatory for all “federal purposes,” which include boarding an airplane or walking into a federal building, nuclear facility or national park, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told the National Conference of State Legislatures last week. Citizens in states that don’t comply with the new rules will have to use passports for federal purposes.

Fixing the Internets Finally the gang at Sadly, No! gets back to doing what they do best. It's a very big job, but someone has to do it.

Kudlow gets hit crying over Wingnut Welfare for Wall Street Download (3704) | Play (5316) Download (1381) | Play (2721)

One way or another, Rudy cashes in Just this afternoon we were on Rudy Giuliani's case for suggesting that his flipflop on the endability of illegal immigration was not a flipflop but merely a response to the breakthrough technologies that have been developed over the last decade. But is it possible Rudy's cronyism may be a mightier sword than his bamboozlement.

It turns out that not only does Rudy have a 'technology' in mind but he's been cut in on some equity in the company that makes it and by an odd coincidence he thinks the federal government should buy a whole lot of it.

TPM Reader JN pointed me to this nugget in Peter Boyer's profile of Rudy in the current issue of The New Yorker ...

As for securing the border, Giuliani proposes the construction of what he calls “a technological fence,” which he insists would be much more effective than a simple physical barrier. Giuliani’s security division is a part owner of a company that is developing such technology with the defense contractor Raytheon. The innovation is a sensor-based platform that can be launched aloft and will “see” a twenty-kilometre area, in a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree panorama. “It will be able to conduct a surveillance, actually,” a person familiar with the project told me. “It can follow an individual, or follow a car, at very far distances.” Giuliani emphasized to me, “It doesn’t have to be that technology. We have no desire to have Raytheon benefit or whatever. There are a hundred other technologies similar to that, with the ability to process data and communicate.”

So to review, in 1994, Giuliani believed that with America's ethnic diversity and long borders it simply wasn't possible to end illegal immigration without turning the country into a police state. But now thanks to the onward march of technology that's no longer a problem because Rudy's company can install this ultra fence which appears to constantly spawn mini-Predator drones which will keep the illegals under active surveillance until they show up for work at your local restaurant before vaporizing them with a missile or something.

"Black is white"; no, it’s black.

I love this:

The White House maintained Monday that the surveillance measure signed into law by President Bush over the weekend did not give the government any sweeping new powers to eavesdrop on Americans without court warrants.... The new measure, signed into law by the president on Sunday, allows intelligence officials to eavesdrop without a warrant...

I don’t know if it’s the Times or the White House, but somebody’s got a black sense of humor.

The ghastly and undernourished specter of Fred Thompson haunted the Iowa State Fair last week, a tradition usually honored by presidential candidates in corporeal form. Here's Fred demonstrating his virility by being trucked around the fairgrounds in a golf cart -- something no other candidate has so far resorted to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Oni7nd0SJI So, was he lazy? Tired? Winded? Or just trying not to let the little people dirty his pricey shoes? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cD4Bo1pJfSw Fancy Freddy Thompson. He really "gets it!"

We interrupt this blog to bring you a few moments of straight talk from His Straightness, Sen. Fred Thomspon (R-TN) ...

“We are going to be getting in if we get in, and of course, we are in the testing the waters phase. We’re going to be making a statement shortly that will cure all of that. But yeah, we’ll be in traditionally when people get in this race."

Got that?

Bad Astronomy: Whether the Bush Administration’s war on science or war on Iraq, be clear that Orwell is spinning right about now.

You know Alberto Gonzales the liar. But do you know the lies? Here's our rundown of the top six untruths (or grossly misleading half-truths) that have fallen from our attorney general's mouth.

Worlds's worst O’Really gets a long overdue twofer: “Is it the truth you hate, Bill, or just the math?” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vt5E2CkBi1w

Patrick Syring, Diplomat Last night we brought you the news of Patrick Syring, the 20-year career Foreign Service officer, who has been indicted for harassing the staff of the Arab Institute with a string of phone messages and emails saying among other things that the "only good Arab is a dead Arab", that various members of the staff were "wicked evil Hezbollah-supporting Arabs [who] should burn in the fires of hell for eternity and beyond" and lauding the Israelis for "bombing Lebanon back to the Stone Age where it belongs." Turns out the AP story left a fair amount of Syring's tirades out of their story. Here's the indictment with all the details. For the record, the folks at the Arab American Institute, the ones on the receiving end of Syring's abuse, released this statement ...

Yesterday afternoon we were notified that the grand jury has returned two indictments charging a long-time State Department employee with Threatening Communication in Interstate Commerce and violating the civil rights of the employees of the Arab American Institute.

James Zogby, the president of AAI, said, “We are pleased with word that the grand jury has returned two indictments. This has been a matter of concern to me and my entire office. The Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice has been responsive, and we feel protected. The threats were both intimidating and frightening – and the fact that the defendant was a 20-year career officer at the Department of State made it of even greater concern.”

Folksy Agreed, though I don't actually mind the order of the primaries so much as I mind the way reporters tend to cover these places. They sort of do this weird "I'm a better anthropologist than the candidates are" fake schtick where they marvel at the ways of Real Americans in their native habitats, sneer at the candidates for failing to be one of the people, and then laugh at the rubes later in the hotel bar.

Short of Purple Hearts, Navy tells vet to buy his own. Last week, Korean War veteran Nyles Reed, 75, learned he had earned a Purple Heart for “injuries he sustained as a Marine on June 22, 1952.” But instead of a medal, he received a form that said the Purple Heart was “out of stock,” and he could either “wait 90 days and resubmit an application, or buy his own medal.” “I can imagine, of course, with what’s going on in Iraq and Afghanistan, there’s a big shortage,” Reed said.

Oh grow the hell up already Thousands dead don't concern him much, but don't you dare pick on his favorite costume. When I read that President Bush had gotten annoyed at a fashion critique in the Austin American-Statesman, I knew there was only one thing to do. I had to go read it. Here are the offending paragraphs:

Bush has two distinct looks when he's in Texas: the ranch-hand man and the crisp appearance of a ranch owner. In recent months, with his sliding popularity, he's opted to look more like "Walker, Texas Ranger" than a sweaty, tough ranch hand.

"As he loses popularity, his image is more and more critical," said Sara Canaday, an Austin-based communication and image consultant. "He's being advised wisely. He'd better step it up. He wants to have this sort of bravado image when he's on that ranch."

If that's the case, it's unlikely we'll see Bush with his 2002 Crawford photo-op accessories: aviator sunglasses, grungy, sweaty T-shirt, cowboy hat, light-colored jeans and Ford F-250.

Jeez, he got mad at that? Touchy, touchy. He's lucky he's not a Democrat.

Minding the Store Wow, that's great news. CNN is running as a breaking news headline that President Putin says that Russia will resume regular long-range flights of its 'strategic' bombers. To decode what that means, during the Cold War the US and the USSR both keep a fleet of bombers packed with nuclear weapons in the air at all times. That's one third of the trident -- ballistic missiles in the ground, strategic bombers in the air and nuclear submarines hidden in the vast depths of the sea, together making each sides' nuclear arsenal impervious to a first strike knock out blow.

That was the theory at least.

If memory serves both sides stopped regular flights of their strategic bomber fleets during the first Bush administration.

Obviously, having them in the air doesn't mean they're going to be used. And they can be scrambled at any time. But unlike 'targeting' of nuclear missiles, which is I think literally a matter of keying in a few numbers to a computer, not having these jets permanently in the air is more than a symbolic sign of having the finger a bit off the nuclear trigger.

And it raises an important point. Not everything that happens these days is uniquely President Bush's fault. Vladimir Putin is no great shakes either. And you can debate whether this is more a reaction to the White House's aggressive push for missile defense shields and military deals with countries on Russia's border or more part of Putin's own growing authoritarianism, trying to stoke xenophobia and increased militarism.

What is not debatable however is that there is more going on in the world -- more opportunities and more threats -- than what happens in the few hundred mile radius around the ancient capital of Baghdad. There is, as we can see, Russia, which still has a few thousand nuclear warheads which could cause some serious headaches. There's China, a vast economic and potential military power that will bulk larger and larger in our lives over the course of this century. There's Pakistan, India, half a billion people to our south speaking Spanish and Portuguese. The list goes on and on.

But our whole national dialog, hundreds of billions of dollars and a lot more are going to Iraq. And more generally the fantasy 450 year long-war epic battle with the Islamofascists. We're close to breaking the US Army and Marine Corps with over-extended deployments. And in hotspots around the world, there's a vacuum, as the world sort of rushes past us. In many ways this is the greatest danger in Iraq, not that our future as a nation is at stake in staying (as the right would have it) or even that it's necessarily at stake in leaving but that our engagement with the country has fixed us with a dangerous national myopia which is letting many other problems fester unattended for going on a decade.

Don't go underground At this moment, rescuers are still trying desperately to reach the trapped miners. The 172 miners.

Chinese emergency teams are searching for 172 miners trapped in a flooded coal mine, state media has reported.

Officials told Xinhua news agency the workers have only a slim chance of survival in the mine, in Xintai city 450km (280 miles) south of Beijing.

Should these men be recovered, it will not only be a cause for celebration, it will be a big exception to the usual course of events in China's coal mines. More than four thousand miners lost their lives in China last year. And the year before that. And the year before that.

Minutemen Brand Thrives in Local Vigilante Groups While the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps and the Minuteman Project, national anti-immigrant groups formed around “border vigils” in 2005, have been struggling with financial mismanagement and internal strife, the “Minuteman” brand has been a steady presence in many localities, with franchises – affiliated or not – independently focusing nativist anger on the immigrant and Hispanic population in cities and small towns.

Emblematic of such groups is the San Diego Minutemen: We noted their over-the-top protests against a Catholic church last month, and last year pointed to a web site by the California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation that provides video of Minutemen aggressively harassing day-laborers and others.

The Southern Poverty Law Center’s magazine has an in-depth profile of the group, describing how it’s under investigation for allegedly ransacking a long-term campsite used by migrant workers.

Then, this Jan. 27, the men and women who remained in the McGonigle shantytown returned from a day's work to find their homes and meager possessions sliced to ribbons. Pants had their seats cut out. Shirts had been cut in half. Sleeping bags were sliced open. Tarp roofs, always scant protection against the chilly winter rains, drooped from their supporting frames in tatters.

Roberto Peña, a migrant who lived in the canyon, told police that he came back to his shack early that afternoon and spotted a group of four men and women using knives to cut up migrant property while a tall, blonde woman videotaped them. The men, he told police, chased him with knives. Peña ducked into the bushes. He lay there, according to a police affidavit, "watching the group destroy his property [when] he heard them saying, 'Fuck Mexicans'."

Minuteman leaders denied involvement, but the video they shot of themselves has been posted to the Internet by Voice of San Diego (via SPLC’s new blog).

Deck the halls with Ronald Reagan. During a visit to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library this week, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) told former first lady Nancy Reagan “that he is working with other senators who want to erect a statue of President Reagan” in the U.S. Capitol. “There could be no more fitting recognition than to welcome his likeness to the halls of Congress,’” McConnell told Mrs. Reagan. Ironically, Reagan never actually served in Congress.

Trouble for “Justice Sunday” Preacher Back in the 2005 and early 2006, the Family Research Council hosted a series of “Justice Sunday” events timed to coincide with important developments in the political battle over judicial nominations.

The first event, titled “Stop Filibustering People of Faith,” claimed that some of President Bush’s appellate court nominees were being filibustered because of their religion and was designed to pressure Senate Republicans to deploy the so-called “nuclear option.”

“Justice Sunday II: God Save the United States and This Honorable Court” was held some months later and timed to coincide with the beginning of John Roberts’ confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court while “Justice Sunday III: Proclaim Liberty Throughout the Land” was timed to coincide with the confirmation hearings for Samuel Alito.

The events featured a wide array of right-wing leaders and members of Congress such as Tony Perkins, Jerry Falwell, James Dobson, Richard Land, Tom DeLay, Bill Frist, and Zell Miller. Among the lesser known speakers was Jerry Sutton, pastor of Two Rivers Baptist Church which hosted the “Justice Sunday II” event, who boldly declared:

“Number one, it's a new day.
Number two, liberalism is dead.
Number three, the majority of Americans are conservative.
Number four, you can count on us showing up and speaking out.
And number five, let the church rise.”

Presumably, this isn’t what he meant by the church being on the rise:

The Rev. Jerry Sutton, a prominent Southern Baptist pastor who lost a bid to become president of the denomination, is now facing an upheaval in the megachurch he leads, including complaints that he spent church money on his daughter's wedding.…[S]ome Two Rivers members are accusing Sutton of failing to abide by church rules and punishing those who question his authority. "We have a fractured fellowship. Somehow, with the Lord's help, we need to put this church back together," Harry Jester, who's been in the congregation for 32 years, said at a church meeting July 28. One of Sutton's former administrative assistants has also said Sutton looked at pornography on his church computer and had an affair with a church staff member — charges that the church denies. The church's executive pastor, Scott Hutchings, said human resource officials at the church investigated those charges and found no evidence that Sutton had looked at porn or had an affair. …About 600 members attended the July 28 meeting, which was organized by the church so that rumors and allegations could be addressed publicly. Sutton also attended, but did not respond to the allegations. At the meeting, Hutchings relayed the accusations brought against Sutton, including charges that Sutton used church money to pay for his daughter's wedding reception and has kept members in the dark on church spending. Hutchings defended the church budget and acknowledged that the church paid about $4,300 for a reception for Sutton's daughter that was open to all church members. He said Sutton personally paid for another separate reception outside the church.

 

Diebold erases history Via Salon:

“Diebold Election Systems” are three words synonymous with the aggressive pursuit of failure. Not only did the company badly implement a dubious concept — unverifiable electronic touch-screen voting machines — but it did so with determined flourish, letting its code and internal communication leak out onto the Web; employing as a chief executive a man who declared he was “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year”; abusing copyright law in an attempt to quell its critics; and, among many other caught-red-handed indiscretions, deleting criticism of itself from Wikipedia.

No wonder, then, that Diebold Election Systems has decided to steal a page from the playbook of that paragon of corporate responsibility Philip Morris (aka the Altria Group): Diebold will erase its sorry history with a simple name change!

Henceforth, when reaching for an example of mind-boggling incompetence, please say “Premier” rather than “Diebold,” because Diebold Election Systems is now Premier Election Systems.

The name change, the company says in a press release, “signals a new beginning” and a “fresh identity” — though in the same release the firm concedes that it will still be making and pushing the same sorry voting machines (machines that, as Princeton computer scientist Edward Felten and his colleagues showed last year, are actually vulnerable to a virus-based attack). Read more…

It seems Diebold has teamed up with FOXNews in an attempt to re-write history. We have to stay on top of this sort of trickery, especially with the crucial 2008 presidential election on the horizon. Let’s review - Diebold Election Systems is now PREMIER Election Systems.

Pat Boone, Voice of Reason (bwahahaha) In the Nation, Christopher Hayes offers some insight into the origin of the “North American Union”—“NAFTA Superhighway” conspiracy theory, which he writes came out of a proposal for a toll-highway in Texas and spiraled into “the first stage of a long, silent coup aimed at supplanting the sovereign United States.”

“North American Union” rumors swirl around the Internet, in spite of (or because of) a lack of factual support beyond a couple disparate, exaggerated elements – such as the Texas highway proposal and meetings between Bush and the leaders of Canada and Mexico that invoke the menacing word “partnership.” These rumors are championed by CNN host Lou Dobbs, Phyllis Schlafly, “Swift Vet” co-author Jerome Corsi, and the John Birch Society, as well as politicians such as Rep. Virgil Goode (R-VA) and presidential candidates Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-CO) and Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX).

But if you were waiting for a moment to take the conspiracy seriously, your moment has arrived: legendary crooner (and occasional far-right spokesman) Pat Boone writes that “We've arrived at the most precarious time in this country since the Revolutionary War…” Continue reading "Pat Boone, Voice of Reason"

What Happened To Padilla Readers will recall that there was considerable doubt about whether Jose Padilla was mentally fit for trial. After three years of solitary confinement, manacled by feet and hands and guarded with almost military aggression - he was forced to wear sound-proof earmuffs and goggles to get a tooth fixed by the dentist, for example - he was a wreck. One of his psychiatric evaluators, Dr Angela Hegarty, spoke to Amy Goodman about what she saw in this broken man after observing him for 22 hours:

AMY GOODMAN: What was the effect of over three-and-a-half years of isolation on Jose Padilla?

DR. ANGELA HEGARTY: I think there’s two things, really. Number one, his family, more than anything, and his friends, who had a chance to see him by the time I spoke with them, said he was changed. There was something wrong. There was something very “weird” -- was the word one of his siblings used -- something weird about him. There was something not right. He was a different man. And the second thing was his absolute state of terror, terror alternating with numbness, largely. It was as though the interrogators were in the room with us. He was like -- perhaps like a trauma victim who knew that they were going to be sent back to the person who hurt them and that he would, as I said earlier, he would subsequently pay a price if he revealed what happened. So I think those would be the two main things.

Also he had developed, actually, a third thing. He had developed really a tremendous identification with the goals and interests of the government. I really considered a diagnosis of Stockholm syndrome. For example, at one point in the proceedings, his attorneys had, you know, done well at cross-examining an FBI agent, and instead of feeling happy about it like all the other defendants I’ve seen over the years, he was actually very angry with them. He was very angry that the civil proceedings were "unfair to the commander-in-chief," quote/unquote. And in fact, one of the things that happened that disturbed me particularly was when he saw his mother. He wanted her to contact President Bush to help him, help him out of his dilemma. He expected that the government might help him, if he was “good,” quote/unquote.

Now put this picture together with the Jacoby memo, noted in this must-read post by Marty Lederman. It all makes much more sense.

Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld set up a detention policy for large numbers of mere terror suspects. With the help of Nazi, Soviet and Khmer Rouge torture techniques - many revealed accidentally at Abu Ghraib - and inculcating sense of no hope at all in the detainees, Bush's goal was to create a pool of detained "enemy combatants" cut off from any source of comfort, justice or recourse, and psychologically dependent on the government. This is what Cheney told us he would do: work on "the dark side." Lindsay Beyerstein calls such a process by its 1950s name: menticide. You can see why, at Gitmo, suicide has seemed more palatable to many inmates. From the intelligence culled from these suspects (again: remember that large numbers have been found competely innocent), the US would win the war against al Qaeda. It was a detention regime designed specifically for the fruits of torture. It is a war crime. Padilla's case shows that we can prosecute terror suspects arrested on American soil through the court system. It shows that torture makes prosecution of serious charges - such as the dropped "dirty bomb" accusation - impossible. And it shows the lawless, tyrannous torture regime that now exists, like slow-acting poison, at the heart of a constitutional republic.