Who's Crazy?

A rare moment of sanity on Capitol Hill, courtesy of George Galloway. Democrats should take a few lessons from this George.

But turn the dial to 60 Minutes for some more insanity from the American Taliban that makes me want to throw my TV and/or myself out the window. Jesus Fucking Christ. Let's hope the ACLU puts an end to this particular form of abuse & homicide.

UPDATE: Katha Pollitt on "Virginity or Death!":

What is it with these right-wing Christians? Faced with a choice between sex and death, they choose death every time. No sex ed or contraception for teens, no sex for the unwed, no condoms for gays, no abortion for anyone.... *** As they flex their political muscle, right-wing Christians increasingly reveal their condescending view of women as moral children who need to be kept in line sexually by fear. That's why antichoicers will never answer the call of prochoicers to join them in reducing abortions by making birth control more widely available: They want it to be less available. Their real interest goes way beyond protecting fetuses--it's in keeping sex tied to reproduction to keep women in their place.

What Fucking Balls

A magazine made what may be a serious mistake (though of course there's a heap of other documented cases of the military's systematic use of severe humiliation tactics, subsequently buried after the initial uproar over Abu Graib):

Newsweek magazine, under fire for an article that prompted violent protests by mistakenly reporting that U.S. interrogators at Guantanamo Bay had desecrated the Quran, said Monday it was investigating the matter and would make other corrections or retractions if needed.
***
"It's puzzling. While Newsweek now acknowledges that they got the facts wrong, they refuse to retract the story," said presidential spokesman Scott McClellan. "I think there's a certain journalistic standard that should be met. In this instance it was not.
"This was a report based on a single anonymous source that could not substantiate the allegation that was made," McClellan added. "The report has had serious consequences. People have lost their lives. The image of the United States abroad has been damaged. I just find it puzzling."

Let's get this straight: It has been definitively proven that the Bush Administration intentionally lied to justify its invasion of Iraq, which led to hundreds of thousands dead and wounded, and free promotion for Al-Qaeda's recruiting department. They've never admitted a mistake, and our Kommander-and-Thief has even joked about the fact that there were no WMDs. The incompetence of their intelligence gathering and war planning has been shown to be roughly equivalent to that of the Russians in WWI. And they have the nerve to criticize the "journalistic standards" of a magazine? As if Newsweek is responsible for increasing anti-American sentiment around the world, and not Bush's militant imperialist policies.

What fucking balls.

UPDATE: kos has a similar post, without pointing out the obvious.

UPDATE: Taibbi chimes in:

It's funny. The only time anyone thinks to blast the use of "unnamed sources" is when the mistake occurs in that rarest of phenomena in mainstream journalism: the dissenting piece of investigative journalism. *** [K]issing ass is not a crime in America, while questioning the government often is. At least, you better not screw it up if you try. God help you then.

Round One: Fat Cats 1, Theocrats 0

This filibuster "compromise" is a travesty.

LiberalOasis gets it exactly right:

pressure from corporate interests (who want the judges, but also want the Senate to function so they can get more friendly legislation) is still cutting against the efforts of the Dobsonites [the radical theocrats led by James Dobson].

Fox’s Chris Wallace said yesterday, “I talked to a big business executive this week who was not happy [about the nuclear option]...he said, this is going to be bad for business if the Senate shuts down.”

Yup, Congress was on quite a roll, with class action "reform," bankruptcy "reform," repeal of the inheritance tax, tax breaks and drilling rights given to oil companies, etc. This resolution of the current filibuster struggle perfectly illustrates what today's Republicans (and most Democrats) are all about: lots of noise from the Christo-fascist fundamentalists, but ultimately the wealthy elite calls the shots. There was no way they were gonna risk a shut down of the expensive machinery that rubber-stamps their piracy.

However, this battle for control within the GOP is far from over. Once a seat opens on the Supreme Court, the theocrats will put everything they have (and then some) into getting their way, since the Supremes are the ones who ultimately rule on the issues that matter most to them (marriage, reproductive rights, church/state separation, etc). Should they succeed, there may be no going back.

These judges are by any measure (except perhaps whatever measure they use, if any, in Texas) incompetent and unethical jurists -- especially Karl Rove's hand-crafted monster Priscilla Owen, who thought nothing of taking money from Enron and Halliburton, not recusing herself from cases in which they were a party, and ruling in their favor.

Rich on the Anti-Gay Crusade

Frank Rich explains why Republicans are so intent on going "nuclear" (read it while you can):

Today's judge-bashing firebrands often say that it isn't homosexuality per se that riles them, only the potential legalization of same-sex marriage by the courts. That's a sham. These people have been attacking gay people since well before Massachusetts judges took up the issue of marriage, Vermont legalized civil unions or Gavin Newsom was in grade school. The Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate groups, characterizes the religious right's anti-gay campaign as a 30-year war, dating back to the late 1970's, when the Miss America runner-up Anita Bryant championed the overturning of an anti-discrimination law protecting gay men and lesbians in Dade County, Fla., and the Rev. Jerry Falwell's newly formed Moral Majority issued a "Declaration of War" against homosexuality. A quarter-century later these views remained so unreconstructed that Mr. Falwell and the Rev. *** Their cronies are no different. As The Washington Post reported, Rick Scarborough, the Texas preacher and Tom DeLay acolyte whose "Patriot Pastor" network is a leading player in the judiciary battle, first became active in politics in 1992, when he helped oust a local high-school principal for the crime of presiding over an AIDS-awareness assembly. ***

Which judges do these people admire? Their patron saint is the former Alabama chief justice Roy S. Moore, best known for his activism in displaying the Ten Commandments; in a ruling against a lesbian mother in a custody case, Mr. Moore deemed homosexuality "abhorrent, immoral, detestable, a crime against nature" and suggested that the state had the power to prohibit homosexual "conduct" with penalties including "confinement and even execution." Another hero is William H. Pryor Jr., the former Alabama attorney general whose nomination to the federal bench was approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday. A Pryor brief to the Supreme Court on behalf of the Texas anti-sodomy law argued that decriminalized gay sex would lead to legalized necrophilia, bestiality and child pornography. It was Justice Anthony Kennedy's eloquent dismissal of such vitriol in his 2003 majority opinion striking down the Texas statute that has since made him the right's No. 1 judicial piñata.

What adds a peculiar dynamic to this anti-gay juggernaut is the continued emergence of gay people within its ranks.

Happy Birthday, Studs!

93 and counting

Virtual Studs

Nervous Proofreaders Are

How many times do you think writers and editors are going over stories that mention the title of the new Star Wars film, "Revenge of the Sith"?
Future Congressional investigations I see.

Golden Skeleton

A new act of identity correction by The Yes Men
(read this and this for a refresher on Dow & Bhopal)

Eva Cracks Wise

A few jokes for the White House stenographers.
Hey, remember this hilarious bit by hubby last year?

A murderous psychopath and his obedient poodles.

Letters, they get letters

The Sun-Times gets my 2 cents (rather than 50):

Regarding the May 2, 2005, commentary by Lisa A. Rickard, "Lawsuits choking state's economy":

Lisa Rickard is absolutely right that there is an "abusive legal climate" in Illinois. However, like others arguing for "tort reform," she fails to acknowledge that businesses are more responsible for this abuse than are "trial lawyers": According to a study by Public Citizen, corporations "file four times [in Cook County, almost six times] as many lawsuits as do individuals represented by trial attorneys, and they are penalized by judges much more often for pursuing frivolous litigation." So while there are certainly many frivolous tort claims filed by "trial lawyers," the much greater problem -- ignored by pro-corporate shills like Rickard -- is the out-of-control litigiousness of corporate lawyers.
Jason Guthartz
Lakeview

Here's that study. From the summary:

Corporations think America is too litigious only when they are on the receiving end of a lawsuit. But when they feel aggrieved, businesses are far more likely to take their beef to court than are consumers.

I should have also referred to these facts (taken from this article):

[T]he numbers don't support the corporate claims. The frequency of tort suits has been declining for a decade. According to an April 2004 Department of Justice study, the number of tort cases in state courts declined by nearly a third (32 percent) between 1992 and 2001. Only 3 percent of cases ever go to trial and the median jury trial award fell by more than half, from $64,000 in 1992 to $28,000 in 2001.

More here:

• Greg Palast
• Dan Zegart & followup
• Ted Rall
• Ralph Nader
• and Molly Ivins, who notes that the Bush Klan's push for "tort reform" is consistent with their habit of promoting "a weird fix for [a] nonexistent problem (so reminiscent of nonexistent WMDs, the "crisis" in Social Security and other non-problems)."

119 Years Later...

In the post-Reagan era of corporate piracy, the assault on workers continues; as Molly Ivins points out:

The Tax Justice Network recently reported the world's richest individuals have placed $11.5 trillion in assets in offshore tax havens to avoid paying taxes, a sum 10 times the GDP of Great Britain. The ratio of CEO pay to average worker pay reached 301 to one in 2003. *** In 1982, the ratio was 42 to one. ***
In previous recoveries, workers got an average of 49 percent of the national income gains, while corporate profits got 18 percent. This time, the workers are getting 23 percent and the corporations are getting 44 percent — about one half as much as the share that has gone to corporate profits.

Looking at the statistics from another perspective, if we assume a 9-5 workday, by 4:00pm on the first workday of the year, the average CEO will have earned more than the average worker will earn in the entire year. (Or: From 1982 to 2003, the time it took the average CEO to earn the average worker's annual income went from seven days to seven hours.) As the wealthy keep getting their tax breaks, the trickling tinkling down continues. more here

Even businesses which some might think would have a more enlightened approach to labor rights have sided with the forces of global destruction.

In yet another Orwellian reversal, Bush's "ownership society" has nothing to do with what that might really mean.

Today, May Day, is the time to join the movement that will correct such reversals, demanding basic fairness and responsibility along with an end to imperial aggression.