Mmmm... pizza...

Another fine piece of investigative journalism from Steve Colbert.

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.

Uncanny - Looney, even

Though I abhor Christopher Hitchens' politics, especially his position on the invasion/occupation of Iraq, I agree wholeheartedly with his anti-theist views, in that "I not only maintain that all religions are versions of the same untruth, but I hold that the influence of churches, and the effect of religious belief, is positively harmful."

But every now and then something happens that makes me think there may be something to such metaphysical nonsense. To wit: As I was getting out of the shower this morning, for some reason I was thinking about one of my favorite pieces of recorded music: the version of Gerry Hemingway's "If You Like" on his Quintet's CD Slamadam. Lo and behold, not more than 30 minutes later, I hear the tune played on the WNUR Jazz Show (by DJ Mike B, I believe). I thought, "Maybe I heard the DJ say something before I went in the shower about Hemingway or the Random Acoustics label or something like that which would have made me think of that tune" -- but no, he didn't.

This kind of stuff happens a lot. Most memorably, one evening before bed I decided to read an article about the great filmmaker Chuck Jones -- someone about whom I'd never read anything before -- and when I woke up the next morning and turned on the radio, I heard the announcement of his death.

But instead of bending my knees and looking towards the sky, I'd rather just savor the moment, giggle, and move on, thinking "how strange and lovely."

F'n Tommy F.

A year after derailing the Thomas Friedman "globalization train" theory, Matt Taibbi chimes in on a new load of horseshit by that racist neoliberal apologist, whose misguided ideas about political economy are less nauseating than his compulsive habit of opening a Pandora's box of mixed-metaphorical worms and letting them run amok:

Friedman is such a genius of literary incompetence that even his most innocent passages invite feature-length essays. I'll give you an example, drawn at random from The World Is Flat. On page 174, Friedman is describing a flight he took on Southwest Airlines from Baltimore to Hartford, Connecticut. (Friedman never forgets to name the company or the brand name; if he had written The Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa would have awoken from uneasy dreams in a Sealy Posturepedic.) Here's what he says:

I stomped off, went through security, bought a Cinnabon, and glumly sat at the back of the B line, waiting to be herded on board so that I could hunt for space in the overhead bins.

Forget the Cinnabon. Name me a herd animal that hunts. Name me one.

This would be a small thing were it not for the overall pattern. Thomas Friedman does not get these things right even by accident. It's not that he occasionally screws up and fails to make his metaphors and images agree. It's that he always screws it up. He has an anti-ear, and it's absolutely infallible....

Taibbi continues:

In a Friedman book, the reader naturally seizes up in dread the instant a suggestive word like "Windows" is introduced; you wince, knowing what's coming, the same way you do when Leslie Nielsen orders a Black Russian. And Friedman doesn't disappoint. His description of the early 90s:

The walls had fallen down and the Windows had opened, making the world much flatter than it had ever been—but the age of seamless global communication had not yet dawned.

How the fuck do you open a window in a fallen wall? More to the point, why would you open a window in a fallen wall? Or did the walls somehow fall in such a way that they left the windows floating in place to be opened?

Four hundred and 73 pages of this, folks. Is there no God?

C'mon, Matt -- of course not.

Workers Memorial Day

The statistics are horrifying.
Here's a good idea that will probably get nowhere with our corporatist Congress. But now's as good a time as any to spread the word.

Wall, meet Head

The Daily Show once again exposes the SCLM.

Any wonder how crap like this can happen here?

Well, at least the Head Homophobe hasn't (yet) proposed that we convert abandoned military bases into massive "gay bathhouses." No, these retrofitted facilities will not produce Holy Smoke indicating the cremation of Cher fans, but rather smoke which will merely expedite the destruction of all humankind.

Oh, screw it all -- let's party!! (and they're ruining that as well)

Directorial Range

A real NYT article discusses a new film, The Great New Wonderful, about

a handful of New Yorkers a year after the [9/11] attacks as they struggle to cope with emotions - grief, rage, helplessness - that seem inexplicable, and that have no obvious outlet. The director [is] Danny Leiner - known for the stoner movies "Dude, Where's My Car?" and "Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle"....

I don't know if the director is any good, but this will certainly make a Danny Leiner retrospective rather unique -- unless someone discovers that Claude Lanzmann directed this gem.

The Real Deal and the New Pope (aka Benny Pisshitspitnfuck)

A great piece by Bob Herbert on FDR's "Second Bill of Rights" (also the subject of a book by UofC's Cass Sunstein).

Other than Thomas Frank, George Lakoff offers the most insightful analysis of social/political polarization in the U.S. -- not Red vs. Blue, but Strict Father vs. Nurturant Parent, where the key distinction lies in liberals' notion of

Morality as Empathy: Empathy itself is understood metaphorically as feeling what another person feels. We can see this in the language of empathy: I know what it is like to be in your shoes. I know how you feel. I feel for you. To conceptualize moral action as empathic action is more than just abiding by the Golden Rule, to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. The Golden Rule does not take into account that others may have different values than you do. Taking morality as empathy requires basing your actions on their values, not yours. This requires a reformulation of the Golden Rule: Do unto others as they would have you do unto them.
***
...conservatives also see morality as empathy and nurturance, but they assign a lower priority to them than liberals do. The result is that nurturance and empathy come to mean something different to conservatives than to liberals. In conservatism, moral nurturance is subservient to moral strength. Thus, moral nurturance for a conservative is the nurturance to be morally strong. For conservatives, moral empathy is subservient to moral strength, which posits a primary good-evil distinction. That distinction forbids conservatives from empathizing with people they consider evil, and so empathy becomes empathy with those who share their values.
***
...[L]iberals too have the metaphor of Moral Strength, but it is in the service of empathy and nurturance. The point of moral strength for liberals is to fight intolerance and inhumanity to others and to stand up for social responsibility.
***
Strict Father morality allows one to impose experiential harm on others in the name of the abstract metaphorical principle that Morality is Strength. In short, strict father morality allows you to hurt people in the name of morality. That violates experiential morality, which is the foundation of every abstract moral system. *** [T]he foundational and empirical pathologies in strict father morality, and, hence, in conservatism, are inherent and cannot be remedied. They make strict father morality an inherently pathological moral system.

His book Moral Politics elaborates on these ideas (though I haven't read it yet). Beyond the religionists who continue to subjugate their entire lives to The Good Book, what is perhaps more problematic is the fact that the political economy infrastructure built by the strict father system (e.g., capitalist oligarchy) continues to be supported by so many people for whom religionist dogma is not the determinative Word. It's like a disease where the virus ("God") has been destroyed, yet the symptoms persist. It may just be too early in the post-telescope/microscope era to expect a full recovery.

"One must choose between God and Man, and all 'radicals' and 'progressives,' from the mildest liberal to the most extreme anarchist, have in effect chosen Man."
-- George Orwell

Speaking of Strict Fathers, it's genuinely disturbing to see and hear the reports about the choice of the new #1 Catholic (aka Old Guy in Silly Outfit): A local news report interviewed a grade school kid who said, "Since I'm a Catholic, it's really exciting to hear they chose a new pope." A 10-year-old says he "is a Catholic"?!?! This is how religionists manufacture demand for their commodities of fear and ignorance -- get 'em while they're young.

"Although the notion of one god may give comfort to those in need of a daddy, it reminds the rest of us that the totalitarian society is grounded upon the concept of God the father. One paternal god, one paternal leader. Authority is absolute."
-- Gore Vidal

Of course religionism has consequences beyond its psychic abuse of the pious and their offspring: Religionism and capitalism feed off each other, perpetuating the "Strict Father" model of oppressive patriarchy, so well exemplified by the late Pope JPII:

His commitment to the patriarchy was total. Not only would the church continue to be completely male dominated, but challenges to the patriarchal family like a woman’s right to choose when and if to have a child—including both contraception and abortion—as well as the right of lesbians and gays to same-sex relationships were to be condemned.

Terry Eagleton was dead-on about Karol Wojtyla:

The greatest crime of his papacy, however, was neither his part in [the child molestation] cover up nor his neanderthal attitude to women. It was the grotesque irony by which the Vatican condemned - as a "culture of death" - condoms, which might have saved countless Catholics in the developing world from an agonising AIDS death. The Pope goes to his eternal reward with those deaths on his hands.

The new guy appears to share JPII's opposition to the "liberation theology" movement that has preached the social gospel and worked for social justice in Latin America.

Pipecock Jackxon's take on these pious patriarchs:

Tic tic toe. Big Ben de time clock is my headmaster. Together we interpretate disaster for the popes, de deacons, and de pastor, for all who don't piss, shit and poop, and spit and fuck (makin' love like it is), hold up them hand and God will strike them with lightning, 'cause He know that they will be committing a sin, that their grandfather and grandmother did in the beginning, tempted by sin.

As George Bernard Shaw said, "Why should we take advice on sex from the pope? If he knows anything about it, he shouldn't!"

Speaking of patriarchy, invisible guiding forces, and oligarchical imperialism, Mike Wallace (not the "60 Minutes" guy) wrote an interesting review of a book by Steve Fraser, Every Man a Speculator: A History of Wall Street in American Life. Seems like a timely read, given the attempt to destroy, via crisis-mongering, the most successful social welfare program in history:

...there must be many Americans who see the privatizers' ugly effort to divide children from parents for what it is--a menace to contemporary family values. Most people know full well that Social Security has not only been a lifesaver for the old but has provided a measure of independence to the young, shifting some of the burden of caring for aged parents to the country's broad collective shoulders. *** [Fraser's] sweeping historical reconstruction is a powerful reminder that our current economic arrangements are the product of centuries of debate and struggle, not the inevitable legacy of invisible "market forces."

No, those forces are not invisible -- they're very much corporeal. This NYT Magazine piece lifts some rocks to shine the light on the radical anti-democratic ideologues taking over the federal judiciary, including some candidates for the Supreme Court who make Tony Scalia look like a moderate.

"The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness."
-- John Kenneth Galbraith

How 'bout some good news, for a change:
-- Maryland Stands Up to Wal-Mart
-- Union Blues Lift in Chicago
-- Bush Admits Errors, Reaches Out to Global Community... well, maybe not.

"What is objectionable, what is dangerous, about extremists is not that they are extreme, but that they are intolerant. The evil is not what they say about their cause, but what they say about their opponents."
-- Robert F. Kennedy

And, oh yeah, Americans are still killing and being killed in Iraq for no good reason -- especially not the hollow excuse, perpetuated in the military-industrial media, that the U.S. military is there to protect Iraqi civilians from insurgents:

attacks on military occupying forces, and by extension mostly US military forces, accounts for 75% of all attacks. Meanwhile, civilian targets comprise a mere 4.1% of attacks. This reality is at striking odds with the general picture painted in the press of a narcissistic, mindless and sinister insurgency simply bent on chaos and destruction.

Maybe Robert Wilson has a better explanation than George Lakoff for all of this retrograde, destructive behavior:

The Bible tells us to be like God, and then on page after page it describes God as a mass murderer. This may be the single most important key to the political behavior of Western Civilization.

The sun may be shining and the air may be warming, but these are dark days indeed. Forecast: mostly fucked.

"The less reasonable a cult is, the more men seek to establish it by force."
-- Jean-Jacques Rousseau

"The tyranny of a prince in an oligarchy is not so dangerous to public welfare as the apathy of a citizen in a democracy."
-- Baron De Montesquieu

"When one man is dying of hunger near another who is ill of surfeit, he cannot resign himself to this difference unless there is an authority which declares, 'God wills it thus.' Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet."
-- Napoleon Bonapart

Best Video Ever: contestant #2

Can you guess which decade this video comes from?
I like how he seems to pull the microphone out of his ass.

Corporate Media: "White Woman in Peril!"

The Daily Show, as usual, nails it.
As does pissed off patricia.

You Know Who Rocks?

Lewis Black.