Points for discussion about the NSA program:

The most obvious point — what are the Bushies really up to? No good, I say. There is no plausible explanation for Bushie behavior in this matter that exonerates them.

Next — let’s hear it for bloggers.

Point 3 — The time has come for people calling themselves “conservatives” to make a choice — either you believe in small, unobtrusive government, “strict construction” of the Constitution and fiscal restraint — as the Right has been claiming for several years — or you admit that your political affiliation has devolved into a cult of personality “erected around the person of George W. Bush.” You can’t have it both ways any more. Some will try, of course. But from now on anyone clinging to the myth that George W. Bush Republicans believe in small government and fiscal restraint will have left ordinary cognitive dissonance far behind. They will have entered the Twilight Zone.

Final point: I understand that some commenters are declaring the American people have chosen to give up some civil liberty for the sake of security. I must have missed when the question was put to a vote, but never mind. What passes for political debate on the MSM has failed to articulate one critical point — if we allow the 4th Amendment to be nullified for the sake of the “war on terror,” this will not be a temporary measure. It will be permanent. And once one part of the Bill of Rights is nullified, ignoring other parts will become that much easier.

The one thing that has held our big, sprawling, diverse, messy nation together all these years is the Constitution. Throughout our history we have taken it seriously — so seriously that we engaged in Civil War over what amounted to a constitutional crisis. Over the years we have had honest differences over what some clauses meant, and how they should be applied. Sometimes expedience requires rethinking — during the Lincoln Administration the meaning of coining money was expanded to include printing, for example — and sometimes emergencies require extraconstitutional action — e.g., Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus. And occasionally we choose to amend the Constitution. But we’ve never just walked away from any part of the Constitution that clearly articulated a power or privilege.

But that’s what we’re being asked to do now.

Constitutions, like laws, have authority only when they are enforced. Many nations have adopted democratic constitutions but ignored them. The former Soviet Union, I’ve been told, had a constitution that had no bearing whatsoever on the way government actually operated or on the lives of citizens. It wasn’t worth the paper it was written on.

As I said above, in times of extreme danger presidents have taken on extraconstitutional powers. But it has always been understood that these were temporary measures required to save the nation. Not just provide enhanced security for some citizens, mind you, but to ensure the continued existence of the United States itself. And when these war powers have been used, they’ve been used openly, and for a brief time. They were given up as soon as the immediate crisis had passed.

But Bush’s “war on terror” may not end in our lifetimes. Probably won’t, in fact. This nation could be under a threat of terrorism for the next few centuries. Even if Osama bin Laden were captured tomorrow and al Qaeda were disbanded, other leaders and organizations will arise to fill the void. I understand this is happening already. And even if the threat of radical Islamic terrorism were to end we might not realize it for a few years. And in that time other threats may emerge.

In other words, the 9/11 state of emergency is now the new normal. This is the way the world is going to be for a long time. I believe we are entering a new stage of human history in which wars are no longer fought between nation-states but between ideological tribes of people. All of our rules and conventions that applied to the Civil War or World War I and II will need to be re-examined in light of new reality. The phrase state of war itself may need to be redefined.

It is unrealistic to abandon an article of the Bill of Rights for decades, generations, centuries, and expect that it will somehow come back into force in some unknowable future. And if Sam Alito is confirmed to the SCOTUS we cannot count on the courts to save us from the folly of the rest of government. No; if we abandon an article of the Bill of Rights now, for the sake of “security,” we are abandoning it for good.

I’d like to see that point brought up, even once, by the MSM.

See also: Jacob Weisberg writes in Slate:

In fact, the Senate hearings on NSA domestic espionage set to begin next month will confront fundamental questions about the balance of power within our system. Even if one assumes that every unknown instance of warrant-less spying by the NSA were justified on security grounds, the arguments issuing from the White House threaten the concept of checks and balances as it has been understood in America for the last 218 years. Simply put, Bush and his lawyers contend that the president’s national security powers are unlimited. And since the war on terror is currently scheduled to run indefinitely, the executive supremacy they’re asserting won’t be a temporary condition.

E.J., Jude and Anonymoses provide a pretty solid case of what needs to be done.

As for me, I consider it almost a done deal, utilizing these simple steps:

1) Get out of the way while Bush hoists himself on his own petard. He will, too. He’s contradicted himself so many times that his own words and those from others within the executive branch, can be used to impeach him and to convict him as well.

2) In the meantime, demonstrate to the American public that there is an alternative party to vote for. Well-chosen words in recent days by Gore, Reid, Kennedy, Leahy, Kerry and others have proven that the party has a pulse. But even the comatose have pulses. The heart directing that pulse and the spine behind the heart will not become evident without sure and solid actions.

Who among elected officials will stand and loudly proclaim that the viability of American democracy’s at stake and the Bush administration’s actions are so clearly unconstitutional that impeachment is the required remedy and no other action can now suffice?

A large majority of Americans already senses this: Bush must go. Now they look for a clear sign of leadership on this issue alone. So start by filibustering Alito. Take the unprecedented step that guys like Lindsey Graham have dared you to do. He said they’d ‘clean your clock’ which carries on the tradition of bullies that has been the approach championed by George Bush throughout his public tenure.

Conversely, the one traditional way to deal with bullies has always been to stand up and announce you will not surrender American principles of liberty and justice, nor the rule of law to any bully, no matter how big they are.

What other choice is there?

Repeat after me: “while the President is under the dark cloud of his own making, having committed clear violations of constitutional law, it has become imperative that we not permit him to pack the Supreme Court with jurists committed to his defense. I oppose the Alito nomination for this reason and will oppose all Supreme Court nominees advanced by this president until the question about the constitutional violations has been settled.”

Who cares if the Republicans scrap the rules to kill the filibuster? Force them to defend the indefensible. Let America see who’s putting partisanship above the best interests of the country. Give the public an unequivocal stance that will give them a reason to stand and cheer you on. Give them the leadership they crave, the leadership they deserve.

Everyone hears the messages of Osama Bin Laden, but have you ever considered the message Osama’s been hearing back from us?

He hears “We are afraid of you. We’ll surrender our laws, human rights, civil liberties, the complete foundation of America itself, to anyone who promises to protect us from you. We’ll sell our souls to the devil, because you’re so scary. We’ll blow up half the world, if necessary, no matter who gets hurt.”

Osama’s not hearing a message of strength. He’s hearing the message that we’re afraid, which is exactly what he wants. ‘Talk loudly but carry a rubber stick’ only makes him laugh.

And what are we so afraid of? That Al Qaida might attack us and kill a few thousand of us? Or like me, do you fear that our children will lose the freedoms that served us so well for the 229 years since America was founded, that our cowardice will become our legacy for the generations that succeed ours??

Whether it’s the protective cronyism surrounding the windfall profits oil industry, the massive fraud of the public treasury during the faux rebuild of Iraq, the claim of protecting White House advisers who screwed New Orleans and Mississippi during hurricane season and the rebuild project (unlike anything the world has ever seen before, he said, and yes, I believe the world’s astounded by history’s biggest sellout), or the obvious pile of contradictions in the spying on American opponents of Bush’s policies, one single pattern has emerged.

Secrecy. In the name of national security, Bush has yet to prove that the nation’s more secure. Bush, his appointees and cronies are more secure because of the shield from public scrutiny that’s been constructed. But even there they’ve proven incompetent in plugging the leaks in the levee of justice, as the truth keeps seeping out, steadily exposing where the bodies of reality are buried.

Only tyrants thrive under secrecy’s veil.

Bush’s claim that the wiretapping program could have prevented 9-11 is an outright lie, as egregious a claim as he’s ever made. From insiders, to outside investigations, to leaks like the Downing Street memos, to internal investigations by the Pentagon and other government agencies, an unprecedented amount of evidence has poured in to completely refute the Bush claim that the intelligence was flawed.

The intelligence was correct. The White House heard from intelligence sources that a terrorist attack was imminent, that Al Qaeda was considering flying planes into buildings, that an anti-terrorism strategy needed to be established. And they chose to ignore those sources until 9-11 happened.

In the buildup to the Iraq War, an endless parade of advisers - both civilian and military- and intel assessments from US agencies to the UN, reached the same conclusions: Saddam Hussein was not connected to Al Qaida, was not developing nuclear weapons and in the final months before Bush attacked Iraq, he was even destroying missiles that marginally exceeded the range of flight that he’d agreed to limit them to. Amid a cacaphony of voices that denied every justification for war that Bush was using, he deliberately ignored all of them not by making a ‘best guess’ but by following through a plan to overthrow Saddam that was begun before 9-11 and that he was determined to do in spite of the intelligence.

The sole responsibility for every plan that’s gone awry in Iraq, for every death that’s occurred since March 2003, for the lack of troop protective equipment, for the missing billions of dollars of reconstruction money, for the no-bid contracts awarded to companies that added further corruption to the expense - all of it - rests on Bush’s shoulders alone. His insistence on a war that was never justified by any evidence, that was promoted by unproven speculation that forwarded his preconceived agenda has produced one startling consistency: every speculation was completely wrong.

The intelligence didn’t fail us. The President did.

We didn’t need more intelligence in the form of unconstitutional wiretaps, or any other sources. We needed more Arabic translators to interpret the intel that was already being collected.

As the case is built against Bush’s unlawful actions, remember all the information his administration is currently suppressing: the second set of Abu Ghraib tapes that includes the sounds of women and children being raped, the secret pre-9/11 meetings with energy execs where Iraq’s oil was discussed, the discussions that took place in Rumsfeld’s private war room, the names of detainees held and of most who were released after a year or more of unjustified detention, the evidence of terrorist attacks they claim to have thwarted, the failure to thwart the direct 9-11 attack on the Pentagon, the record of extraordinary renditions, the existence of secret military prisons across the globe, the record of domestic antiwar groups that have been targeted with wiretaps and other government actions, the national security advice and decisionmaking that magnified the human cost during Hurricane Katrina, and much, much more.

The consistent modus operandi of the Bush administration that’s producing the eye-burning glare in the public spotlight now is secrecy, denial and coverup, and a growing list of proven lies.

If Congress is to regain any credibility for its own patterns of rubberstamping the President’s military choices without sufficient exercise of oversight or budget refusals, it now must stand in behalf of the American people to restrain and remove any and all principals within the White House that have engaged in the massive fraud that has damaged and continues to damage our country. If that responsibility cannot be non-partisan, let it be by any whose highest allegiance is to the nation’s best interests.

That’s the leadership the nation is begging for. Leadership with integrity. Leadership committed to what’s right for the country without regard to the individual political consequences that may result.

As I complete this, the word just came in that Senator Robert Byrd has indicated he’s voting for Alito. I’ll commit myself to his defeat, along with any other of either party who makes that choice. Our first and highest partisanship must always be to the nation and it’s crucial that even public servants we’ve long supported understand the stakes.

As the American people stand up, the corrupt (and the misguided who seek refuge in politics as usual) must be forced to stand down. We cannot sell out our heirs. We cannot sell out the essential elements of a functional democracy. The path ahead is difficult and both personal and political damage will likely be incurred. But the only other choice assures even worse damage.. The only other choice risks the loss of the best America’s ever been with every path blocked to its restoration.

The price is too great to ignore the peril confronting us. Political expediency must give way to the greatest rebuilding project the world’s ever seen: the rebuilding of American integrity, which cannot be done on the cheap.

Mister Bush loves to talk about spreading “democracy” and “feareedom” (which I suppose is either a cross between fear and freedom, or a Freudian slip)…but when it happens, do we accept the results?

Thoughts? Opinions? Predictions?

via Thomas Nephew, comes a good campaign issue for all those Dems running for Congress.  ReadtheBill.org wants to drag legislation into the sunlight:

ReadtheBill.org is a new national organization dedicated to forcing
Congress to post all proposed legislation online for 72 hours before it goes to the floor of Congress. We call this the "72 Hours of Sunshine Rule". It is needed because Congress has degenerated into chaos. The House of Representatives still has a rule on the books requiring proposed legislation be available to members for three days. But the House waives this rule routinely and rubber stamps huge bills in the middle of the night, clueless of their content or cost. Senate rules are fuzzier but the result is the same. This chaos in Congress costs every American. Provisions and giveaways slipped through Congress are one reason that the U.S. has a national debt of $8 trillion. These sneaky provisions also invite plain-old corruption.

When I first saw the story, I thought the ReadtheBill people were demanding that members of Congress read the bills they vote on.  The abdication of responsiblity that resulted in the passage of the dreadful USA PATRIOT Act  should be enough to have us in the streets demanding mandatory pre-vote tests of every voting member to prove they know what they’re making into law.   But this is much better.  If Congress doesn’t want to take the time to read what they vote on, then we will.   And, since corporations write a good bit of all the legislation that makes it to a vote, it would be nice if the rest of the people subject to those laws had a chance to know what surprises are in store for them.

This is the perfect sort of issue for Dems to jump on for the midterms.  The U.S. Congress is functioning as a dark swamp of corruption right now.  The Dems need to promise to drag the whole joint into the sunshine and drain it.  Then they need to actually do that.

I’ve given short shrift in recent weeks to people we’ve lost. And now we’ve lost Chris Penn. My sympathies go to his family and friends, but especially to his brother, Sean, who I regard as both the premier actor of his generation, and possibly the most courageous activist in the entertainment world, for his actions in Baghdad and New Orleans, in recent memory.

And what can be said about Shelley Winters? As a kid, I just thought of her as a loudmouth broad. As an adult, I watched and listened to her, and realized how wrong I was. She was as much a celluloid giant as anyone was, and when she spoke, she had something to say. Hollywood has lost not only a great actor, but, for the time she was in her prime, a pioneer as a strong woman in an era where that was to be frowned on. My condolences to everyone in the world, for her loss.

Losing Wilson Pickett just makes me feel old. Every garage band and teen nightclub in the mid-Sixties knew three basic songs that every sex-addled teen demanded (because the songs represented liberation from the puritan dominant social ethic that prevailed back then. Those songs were Louie Louie, House of the Rising Sun, and Pickett’s “In the Midnight Hour.” To him, and to Lou Rawls who passed just before him, I hope they’ll boogie on into infinity.

Jack Anderson, a personal hero of mine, moreso than those one-hit wonders who exposed Watergate. Every blogger who sticks pins in self-inflated crony politicians today, carries on Anderson’s mission of keeping politicians in perspective - as public servants, not our daddies. I just think it’s ridiculous how little attention his death drew. He was more influential than all but one or two politicians throughout the time he covered them, and more of a patriot than most of the denizens of the political class that afflicts us today.

And while I’m on goodbyes, let me say ‘goodbye and good riddance’ to the host servers of Godaddy.com. Sometime between tonight and Sunday, we’ll be on our new host, finally ending all the access and reboot woes that afflicted us the past eight months. Sorry it took so long to resolve, but my own family and financial woes had me digging my way out of a landslide of lifesurecansuck.

Finally, to offset those farewells, let me offer one hello. To Melanie of Chandrasutra, who will guestblog here from time to time. At a time when the Americans south of the Rio Grande are moving towards humanitarian populism, it’s alarming to see the Americans north of Fargo beginning a shift to the right. Melanie will be our Canadian correspondent to keep the spotlight on the leaders of that movement. I hope it’ not a Pandora’s Box harbinger of worse tyrannies to come…. otherwise, where can Americans in exile flee to if the theocrats of the New Repression become entrenched? Go south, eh?

There’ll be other newbies to welcome soon, so come back often to experience their magic.

Yesterday, I was debating a man whose daughter was raped. She reported it but the prosecutor declined to prosecute the men who assaulted her.

The man told me he was planning to track down the guys and permanently disable them, so they could never rape again. I explained that such revenge would only get him locked up in prison.

“What revenge?” he replied, “and it would not be illegal at all, because President Bush says so.”

I was intrigued and asked him when he spoke with Bush.

“I didn’t,” he said, “but I heard him tell all Americans that this was legal, right there on TV.”

“How so?” I asked.

“Well, first off, this isn’t about revenge. It’s about a preemptive strike to prevent these monsters from ever harming another woman,” he declared.

“Furthermore, since I’m divorced,” he continued, ” the state has made it abundantly clear that they want what’s best for my kids and that I’m a principal in maintaining her life as safely and soundly as can be done. They want us all to care for all kids that way. So the best way to keep her and everyone safe is through this preemptive attack.”

“Bush says Congress told him to do anything necessary to keep Americans safe, which makes it legal. So in keeping the women in my city extremely safe, my actions must be legal, too.” His point seemed valid .

“You might want to say that you have foolproof evidence the guys are trying to build a nuclear missile,” I advised, ” That way you can torture them first and no laws at all have to be observed.”

August 12, 1996, our President:

Our intelligence services have been sharing more information with other nations than ever, to stop terrorists before they act, capture them if they do, and see that they’re brought to justice. We’ve imposed stiff sanctions with our allies against states that support terrorists. When necessary, we’re acting on our own. A law I signed this week will help to deny Iran and Libya the money they use to finance international terrorism.

Second, our antiterrorism strategy relies on tough enforcement and stern punishment here at home. We made terrorism a federal offense, expanded the role of the FBI, imposed the death penalty. We’ve hired more law enforcement personnel, added resources, improved training. And I’m proposing a new law that will help to keep terrorists off our soil, fight
money-laundering, and punish violent crimes committed against Americans abroad.

Third, we’re tightening security on our airplanes and at our nation’s airports. From now on, we’ll hand-search more luggage and screen more bags and require pre-flight inspections for any plane flying to or from the United States. I’ve asked Vice President Gore to head an effort to deploy new high-technology inspection machines at our airports and to review all our security operations.

We’ll continue to press forward on all three of these fronts. But we cannot cast aside any tools in this fight for the security of our country and the safety of our people. That is exactly what the Republican majority in Congress did by stripping from the antiterrorism legislation key provisions that law enforcement needs to help them find out, track down, and shut down terrorists.

Law enforcement has asked for wiretap authority to enable them to follow terrorists as they move from phone to phone. This is the only way to track stealthy terrorists as they plot their crimes. This authority has already been granted to our law enforcement officials when they’re dealing with organized criminals. Surely, it is even more urgent to give them this authority when it comes to terrorists. But Congress said no.

That was in response to the terror bomb at the Atlanta Olympic Games. And don’t forget this: “Surely, it is even more urgent to give them this [wiretap] authority when it comes to terrorists. But [the Republican] Congress said no.”

No to wiretapping foreigners with court oversight. But now they’re saying yes to wiretapping Americans with nobody overseeing the President. And don’t buy the claim that 9-11 changed everything. The first bombing of the World Trade Center - had it succeeded - would have killed far more because the bottom exits would have been blocked.

The Republican Congress is choosing this course now because the President is a Republican and back then, the President wasn’t. They’re happy to sell the Bill of Rights to save their party. And I bet they’d even sell those rights back to us, one by one, if the freemarket could establish the price.

They’re priceless, those rights. But if you want a deal on the right to hypocrisy, I know where you can get some, cheap.

Now let’s get back to spying on the real terrorists.

Of course, I agree that any wishywashy woman isn’t up to the task.

But I’d vote - in a heartbeat! - for the author and political expert that The Apostropher quotes here. If only we can get Bill Moyers to join her ticket, I’d even vote for them twice.

Fortunately, there’s a better plan afoot for Democrats…

The 101st Fighting Keyboarders are all abuzz about Iran’s nuclear program, calling on Israel or the US to take it out before a predicted March 22 test.

At Protein Wisdom, Jeff Goldstein says:

We are witnessing the Cuban missile crisis of our era, I fear—only this time, we can’t rely on the secret agnosticism of the communists to save face and blink; instead, we have the heavenly assurance of a diety who insists that it is an Islamic mandate to conquer and force submission—even if that means doing so by vaporizing millions of people who stand in the way of Allah’s will.

I don’t know about your era, John, but Cuba was the Cuban Missile Crisis of my era. And Oliver North and John Poindexter, under Reagan’s wing, was the centerpoint of the Iran Contra scandal that supplied weapons to Iran, also of my era. Part of that folly is explained by wikipedia:

During his period as Reagan’s Special Envoy to the Middle East (11/83-5/84), Rumsfeld was the main conduit for crucial American military intelligence, hardware and strategic advice to Saddam Hussein, then fighting Iran in the Iran-Iraq war. During this period, US policy supported Iraq, believing it to be a useful buffer against Iran’s new religious government, although the United States had originally been hesitant to work with a Soviet client state.

When he visited on December 19-20, 1983, he and Saddam Hussein had a 90 minute discussion which covered Syria’s occupation of Lebanon, preventing Syrian and Iranian expansion, preventing arms sales to Iran by foreign countries, increasing Iraqi oil production via a possible new oil pipeline across Jordan. Not mentioned was Iraqi production and use of chemical weapons.

The Iranian government had cited several Iraqi air and ground chemical weapons attacks in the preceding two months, and the Iranian news agency had reported the use of chemical weapons as early as 1981. The US State Department first condemned the use of chemical weapons in the war on March 5, 1984, two days before the ICRC confirmed Iranian allegations. During his bid for the Republican nomination in 1988, Rumsfeld stated that restoring full relations to Iraq was one of his best achievements.

Less than three years later, his proudest achievement would be attacked by coalition forces after Iraq invaded Kuwait because Kuwait wouldn’t renegotiate Iraq’s war debt. A handful of years after that, he was part of the group asking Clinton to attack Iraq.

Arming both sides of that conflict was part of the Zero Intelligence strategy of my era. At least 300,000 died in that stalemate and the Rumsfeld Doctrine was established: guess a lot about what Shias and Sunnis will do, arm them both, disarm them both, doubledeal both and try to defeat both when they realize the sting they were stung with. Then create the conditions for endless war.

The crisis of the Rumsfeld Doctrine occurred in my era as well, again and again and again. But whatever the era is this time, Goldstein’s operative word is ‘fear’, as he notes.

My fear is he’s got his facts wrong. There was no secret about Communist agnosticism, and the Commies didn’t blink. They negotiated a two way deal of missile removal with Kennedy. And the ‘heavenly assurance of a diety (sic)’ who ‘insists that it is an Islamic mandate to conquer and force submission’ might just as easily be a human decision to obtain nuclear weaponry defensively because those humans fear that the flipflopping Rumsfeld might consider it his mandate to conquer and force Iran into submission.

And should we trust Jeff to get tomorrow right when he keeps getting yesterday wrong?

Over at Winds of Change, Thomas Holsinger has our invasion planned out exactly. Twenty days of secret military buildup, 7 to 10 days to topple Iran’s government than it took to topple Saddam’s, and more American troop casualties than are being suffered in Iraq.

In his words:

If Iran’s occupation entails 200,000 men and is twice as intense as Iraq’s in terms of casualties, we’re looking at 1 fatality per 1200 men per month. 200k x 12 months = 2400k divided by 1200 = 2000 fatalities per year. This is certainly a lot compared to Iraq’s occupation campaign, but it also indicates that American casualties in Iran will be acceptable by any reasonable standard.

In my opinion the occupation campaign in Iran will be awful only for the first year, and then conditions will improve much faster than in Iraq for reasons mentioned above in this post. My guesstimate at this point is about 3000 American fatalities over two years for both the conquest and occupation campaigns in Iran, though the first year would be ghastly.

Apparently, this ‘acceptable’ level of fatalities will be used in the Army’s recruiting campaign this year. “Stop those dangerous religious nuts! Your bonus will be huge and only 3,000 of you have to die! -Love, your security conscious chickenhawks, under a desk near you.”

The New York Times, Hillary Clinton and numerous chickenhawken bloggin’ patriots have advanced the idea that we have to invade Iran to prevent nukes from proliferating to the world’s pistachio capital. Not one of them has yet weighed our military’s manpower needs and where they’ll get the cannon fodder from that’s willing to go on another of George & Dick’s Excellent Misadventures.

Especially when you consider that the newly freed Iraqi majority - the Shias - would be quick to join Iran against us in such a war.

Clearly, this calls for killing two snowbirds with one stone. I say, raise the age of military service from its new height of 39 to 70. This would also solve the pending shortfall in Social Security revenues 35 years from now and the only added protectivewear would be armor plated Depends. And the chickenhawks could continue to develop war strategy in their family rooms while watching American Chopper and dreaming of the day they’ll become tough old bikers too.

Now I don’t mean to minimize the risk of nuclear proliferation. In fact, it seems like yesterday us liberals were being called cowards and Commies for warning about the inevitability of proliferation throughout the globe. But I still don’t buy the line that nukes in the hands of Muslim fundamentalists are inherently more dangerous than in the hands of any Western nation. Not that it’s any comfort; after all it was a Christian nation that vaporized hundreds of thousands in the world’s only nuclear attack.

Why is a resumption of the MAD doctrine any different than it was when crazy godless Commies shared the balance of power? Consider: Iran’s economy still requires Western purchasers of their massive oilfields’ output, so what would they gain by nuking the world’s largest oil consumer? Or what would they gain by nuking Israel? Radioactive clouds drifting from that tiny country would sweep across several Muslim countries, destroying the support of several of their current allies.

What’s being proposed relies on the notion that American governments would only use nukes when absolutely necessary, and all other nuke possessors are mad, mad, mad and likely to bomb decent society on a whim or instruction from their God. (Which raises the question of whether it’d be more prudent if we just launched first strikes against all the blood-lusty Gods abounding in the heavens, since they seem to be the main agent provocateurs).

I don’t disagree that there’s frothing dog loonies in governments all over this globe. But the evidence is in that our frothing dog executive branch remains the biggest dog with no less froth dripping from its jowls. And since us patriots know its wrong to control arms (when nukes are outlawed, only outlaws will have nukes), we should make nuke possession mandatory by every government, then we’d all be safe.

Tom Holsinger adds these words of comfort:

Fear of possible Iranian nuclear weapons use against an American invasion is not a valid reason for doing nothing. A thousand more American civilians have been killed by enemy action at home in this war than American servicemen killed at home and abroad. Not invading Iran will increase this disparity by several orders of magnitude. We have armed forces to protect our civilians from the enemy, not vice versa – soldiers die so civilians don’t. We will invade Iran to protect the American people from nuclear attack. That is worth the risk posed by Iranian nuclear weapons to American soldiers, and the burden of deploying 200,000 troops there for several years. Our reserves knew when they enlisted that they’d be called up for the duration of a major war. Invasion of Iran to protect America from nuclear attack, and preserve our freedom, counts as a major war.

“A thousand more American civilians have been killed by enemy action at home in this war than American servicemen killed at home and abroad?” Huh? I musta missed that news on Fox.

Yeah, invasion of Iran would be a major war, as Iran’s size is comparable to the size of the toughest enemies we’ve ever fought: Germany, Japan, Korea and Vietnam. And mind you, we only won one of those utilizing non-nuclear weapons, and two were stalemates. And the one ‘we’ won actually took the combined efforts of us, a massive Soviet military and Great Britain. I’m so glad the new pundithawk class has overcome the manpower logistics problems by simply saying we’re better warriors now compared to that puny third world Iran.

They forget that Iran once unleashed algebra on the world, the most hideous weapon we’d face again, with our child warriors more unprepared than before.

The most practical solution to this imminent threat is actually quite simple. Launch a preemptive bidding war to buy all the radioactive base materials like uranium all over the globe. That could be had for a fraction of the cost of the current Iraq War… seriously.

Then any country like Iran who refused to sell their uranium would have only sufficient material to build one or two nukes, but not more. Which effectively would neutralize the threat because their one strike capacity would only ensure their own demise in the retaliatory strike they’d face.

The only drawback to this plan is that it’d limit the freemarket weapons market and there’s plenty of US weaponsmakers armed with power lobbyists to prevent such a radical step. It’s just too anti-capitalist to envision not arming everybody like we do now.

It’s really a dillemma. But there’s one thing certain. Leaving the planning to the same chickenhawks who outlined the plans for Iraq and postwar Iraq, is tantamount to strapping on explosives and blowing ourselves up. There are solutions available that have worked before, but first we have to overcome our fresh allergic reactions to international laws and treaties. And find a way to convince the world that we really don’t support torture and mass murder and Pat Robertson fatwas, and that our gulags will be dismantled, so evenhanded justice will be in vogue once more.

Of course, that would require convincing the world that our crazy theocrats are at least as sane as theirs are. That’s a pretty tall order, but it can be done. All we have to do is nuke Kansas, Utah, Wyoming, Alabama and parts of Texas.

Jeff Goldstein concludes:

“As with Iraq’s gassing of the Kurds, Iran’s elimination of the Bahais in the 80’s, which was woefully under reported by the MSM, will be used by the left if we take action against Iran to condemn those who would defend freedom by saying we didn’t care then and we only do now because of the oil.”

“Used by the left.” How depressingly popular that phrase has become in recent years…

Darn that lefty MSM! Dang those liberals who think our foreign policy is motivated by the economics of oil above human liberation! It’s a sure bet that every foreign policy debacle is not caused by the crummy planning, ignorance, racism and root uncivility of the Nukem Now crowd. It’s always the fault of the pot-smoking hippy playing folk music and the restraints he, a bunch of lefty professors, and Dan Rather place upon our combat troops.

Okay, I admit it. We lefty hippies really are the world’s greatest superpower. And if the Rightwingies don’t quit whining about it, we just may have to leak the information to their wives and daughters that there’s more than the missionary position and sex can be fun without all those babymaking responsibilities. It’ll be the Preemptive Strike of all preemptive strikes. And it’ll completely disarm the 101st Fighting Keyboarders, as they’ll be forced to cyber fulltime with sweet Mormon virgins instead of planning more wars.

Orson Scott Card has written a long essay defending Intelligent Design.

Oy, but it is depressing.

It’s a graceless hash, a cluttered and confusing mish-mash of poorly organized complaints about those darned wicked “Darwinists”. He lists 7 arguments. Then he repeats his list, expanding on them. Then he goes on and on, hectoring scientists about how they should behave. For a professional writer, it’s just plain bad writing—I’m struggling with how to address his arguments, but he’s written such a gluey mass of tangled ranty irrationality that it’s hard to get a handle on it. Ugly, ugly, ugly…and why do these guys all seem to think the way to defend the ideas of ID is to whine about the perfidy of all those scientists? Not once does he bring up any evidence for ID.

Card can’t discuss the evidence, because he doesn’t know or understand the evidence. That’s apparent when he begins by praising Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box, and regurgitates the argument from irreducible complexity. Irreducible complexity is not a problem for evolution, and Behe is a tired old fraud who hasn’t had a new idea in 15 years. That Card would be impressed with DBB says only that he doesn’t know much biology and that the depth of his thinking is remarkably shallow.

Oh, well. I’ll try the brute force approach and discuss each of Card’s arguments in turn. This will get long.

His first complaint is that ID and creationism aren’t the same thing, and we’re just being mean to conflate them.

1. Intelligent Design is just Creation Science in a new suit (name-calling).

1. You have to be ignorant of either Creation Science or Intelligent Design—or both—to think that they’re the same thing. Creation Science is embarrassing and laughable—its authors either don’t understand science or are deliberately deceiving readers who don’t understand it. Frankly, Creation Science is, in my opinion, a pack of pious lies.

Card hasn’t read the testimony in the Kitzmiller case, I presume. That was one of the points made: that the textbook the ID proponents were pushing on the schools began its editorial history as a creationist tract. The founding father of the Intelligent Design movement, Phillip Johnson, wrote this:

“If we understand our own times, we will know that we should affirm the reality of God by challenging the domination of materialism and naturalism in the world of the mind. With the assistance of many friends I have developed a strategy for doing this,…We call our strategy the “wedge.”

What is disingenuous is to claim that ID proponents are not driven by the same ideological motives of the old-school creationists: all that has changed is that they’ve become more clever about hiding those motives. If creationism is a pack of pious lies, then so is ID; ID is even less honest than upfront creationism.

But the problems that the Designists raise with the Darwinian model are, in fact, problems. They do understand the real science, and the Darwinian model is, in fact, inadequate to explain how complex systems, which fail without all elements in place, could arise through random mutation and natural selection.

There’s a series of false assertions. The Designists do not raise legitimate problems; I’ve looked, and a good problem would be one that prompts interesting research. They just don’t, and I note that Card fails to list any of these “problems”. The IDists assert problems, which is trivial and easy to do, given that our knowledge is incomplete—the real issue is whether they can provide tools to approach the answer. They don’t.

They also don’t understand the real science. Behe’s work is glib nonsense that ignores any rebuttals, Dembski doesn’t understand the theorems he criticizes, and Wells’ Icons of Evolution is an embarrassing example of poor scholarship. I don’t see any evidence that these people actually understand evolution (and sometimes, that they get it completely wrong), which leads into Card’s next complaint.

2. Don’t listen to these guys, they’re not real scientists (credentialism).

2. Real science never has to resort to credentialism. If someone with no credentials at all raises a legitimate question, it is not an answer to point out how uneducated or unqualified the questioner is. In fact, it is pretty much an admission that you don’t have an answer, so you want the questioner to go away.

That is correct, degrees aren’t that big a deal, and I’ve said so myself. What matters is evidence, logic, and methodology—claiming that those on the side of evolution are the ones practicing credentialism is exactly backwards, though.

It’s the Discovery Institute and other creationists before them who wave around lists of “X hundred scientists who doubt evolution!” Project Steve was set up to mock that tactic. It’s Jonathan Wells who got a Ph.D. as a tactic to use in his goal of “destroying Darwinism”. My side relies on the evidence and the science; the ID side relies on authority and propaganda.

Card continues this practice of getting the problem backwards in his next complaint.

3. If you actually understood science as we do, you’d realize that these guys are wrong and we’re right; but you don’t, so you have to trust us (expertism).

3. Expertism is the “trust us, you poor fools” defense. Essentially, the Darwinists tell the general public that we’re too dumb to understand the subtleties of biochemistry, so it’s not even worth trying to explain to us why the Designists are wrong. “We’re the experts, you’re not, so we’re right by definition.”

Behe and his group don’t think we’re stupid. They actually make the effort to explain the science accurately and clearly in terms that the lay audience can understand. So who is going to win this argument? Some people bow down before experts; most of us resent the experts who expect us to bow.

The irony is that there are plenty of Darwinists who are perfectly good writers, capable of explaining the science to us well enough to show us the flaws in the Designists’ arguments. The fact that they refuse even to try to explain is, again, a confession that they don’t have an answer.

I find this the most infuriatingly dishonest of Card’s arguments. It’s transparently stupid.

Where are these “Darwinists” who tell the public they’re too dumb to understand biochemistry? Look at most of the people promoting evolution, and what do you see? College professors, professional educators, who put most of their day-to-day effort into teaching 18-22 year old kids subjects like biochemistry. We know the subject is difficult, but if we thought people couldn’t learn it, we’d be out of a job. Another category of people promoting evolution are the popularizers, scientists and journalists and writers, who are explicitly reaching out to the general public to explain these ideas. Is Carl Zimmer demanding that people bow down before him? Yeah, there are writers who patiently try to explain things—here’s a list—we don’t refuse to explain, instead the creationists refuse to listen.

Card’s claims aren’t just nonsense, they’re offensive nonsense.

Now watch: more reversals.

4. They got some details of those complex systems wrong, so they must be wrong about everything (sniping).

4. When Darwinists do seem to explain, it’s only to point out some error or omission in the Designists’ explanation of a biochemical system. Some left-out step, or some point where they got the chemistry wrong. They think if they can shoot down one or two minor points, then the whole problem will go away.

Wow. This is ironic. All Intelligent Design creationism has are god-of-the-gaps arguments—and all Card himself has been able to do in this essay is claim that IDists point out flaws in evolutionary explanations. We aren’t to rely on credentialism, but on the actual evidence for a position…so pointing out that the Designists have a poor understanding of the evidence seems like a valid criticism to me.

They ignore several facts:

The Designists are explaining things to a lay audience, and Behe, at least, tells us up front that he’s leaving out a lot of steps … but those steps only make the system more complex, not less.

Yes, biological systems are complex, and more complex than the caricatures of creationists suggest. This, however, is not an argument for design. Evolution, as a process built on the refinement of random events, is extremely good at generating complexity. Which will produce the more complex arrangement of parts, a guy with a milling machine, or a winter storm at the beach that throws up a tangled pile of driftwood?

The Designists are working from secondary sources, so they are naturally several years behind. Of course a scientist who is current in the field will understand the processes better, and can easily dismiss the Designists as using old, outmoded models of how the systems work.

“Several years behind”? They haven’t even started! You do not build a research program on secondary sources, but on direct observations of phenomena in nature. Shouldn’t we dismiss ideas generated by people who understand the processes more poorly than we do, that are based on interpretations of secondary sources, and are base on old, outmoded models? Whose side is Card on here?

What they never seem to show is how the new understanding reveals a system that is not complex after all, one in which each step in the process confers independent benefits on the organism and therefore could have evolved through random mutation and natural selection alone.

They don’t do this because the current findings rarely reveal a simpler process than was previously thought. Almost invariably, they find that the system is more complex and therefore harder to explain, and therefore the Designists have even more of a point than they thought.

Errm, name some, Mr Card. I think you’re making stuff up.

In comparisons of extant organisms, we are going from one complex, highly derived form to another; that’s what we’d expect. But when we look at individual systems, we do see patterns of change that sometimes involve increases in complexity over time, and sometimes decreases (again, what we’d expect; evolution does not impose a direction against or in favor of complexity). We can look at the history of many components and see a pattern of evolutionary change…for instance, in the evolution of the immune system, which also happens to be one of the icons of Intelligent Design creationism.

5. The first amendment requires the separation of church and state (politics).

5. The church and state argument is deliberately misleading. First, the Designists are not, in fact, advocating “God.” They are very careful not to specify who or what the Intelligent Designer might be. So they are not advocating for any particular religion, or any religion at all. For all anyone knows, the supposed Intelligent Designers might be an alien species of mortal, ungodlike beings.

I actually have some sympathy with this argument. I think court cases are stop-gap measures to prevent the advance of ignorance into our public school system, but don’t actually address the root causes of the problem. If we focus only on case-by-case attempts to block the creationist challenges without actually getting out there and educating people, we’re doomed.

However, Card’s argument is flawed in two ways. One, as I mentioned above, the motivations of the founders of the Intelligent Design creationism movement are religious, and the followers are blatantly so—see Bill Buckingham and Sharon Lemburg. It’s built with a religious goal, and the majority of it’s proponents see it as a clever ploy to advance religion into the public schools.

Two, it wouldn’t matter if they were peddling little green men, ala the Raelians—it’s still wild speculation with no supporting evidence, and doesn’t warrant inclusion in the public school system. That’s the nub of the problem, not religion, but the unscientific nature of the speculation.

6. We can’t possibly find a fossil record of every step along the way in evolution, but evolution has already been so well-demonstrated it is absurd to challenge it in the details (prestidigitation).

6. The “we can’t possibly find every step along the way” argument is an old one that doesn’t actually fit the current situation. It is the correct answer when defending the idea of evolution against those who believe in an ex nihilo creation in six days.

The fossil record is very clear in showing the divergence of species, with old ones going extinct and new ones arising over a long period of time. And the general progression is from simpler to more-complex organisms. The fact that evolution takes place is obvious. You don’t have to find some improbable fossil graveyard where each generation conveniently lay down next to their parents’ bodies when it came time to die.

But fossils only show physical structures, and the Intelligent Design argument concedes the point. The Designists (or at least the smart ones) are not arguing for biblical literalism. They freely admit that evolution obviously takes place, that simple organisms were followed by more complex ones.

They also accept the other obvious arguments for evolution, like the similarity of genes among different species. They have no problem with the idea that chimps are so genetically similar to us because we share a common ancestor.

Whoops. Mr Card is showing his lack of knowledge of the subject. Many of the IDists certainly do deny common descent: Paul Nelson, for instance, and Phillip Johnson, and perhaps he should read some of Casey Luskin’s babble. I would love to know what that Moonie, Jonathan Wells, thinks about common descent. Perhaps these are not the “smart ones”?

Their argument isn’t against evolution per se. Nor are they doubting that natural selection takes place. Their argument is that the Darwinian model is not a sufficient explanation.

So “we can’t find fossils representing every step of evolution” has nothing to do with the issues being raised. The Designists are not anti-evolution. They are anti-Darwin.

Read Johnson. Their argument is against naturalism. It’s even deeper than Card knows: they are fighting against the foundations of all of science.

Look, this is amusing, but it’s also pathetic. Card is sitting there at his computer, trying to tell us what IDists believe, and he’s getting it all wrong; he’s trying to tell us what scientists believe, and he’s not only getting it wrong, he’s telling stories that are 180° reversals of the scientific position. He’s a caricature of the ranting right-wing poseur, making up his “facts” as he goes along to support an uninformed position. Some pundit.

7. Even if there are problems with the Darwinian model, there’s no justification for postulating an “intelligent designer” (true).

7. Yes, there are problems with the Darwinian model. But those problems are questions. “Intelligent design” is an answer, and you have no evidence at all for that.

Quite right. There are problems in evolution; if there weren’t, it wouldn’t be a very interesting field of study. Intelligent Design creationism is an assertion without evidence, but I wouldn’t go so far as to dignify it by calling it so much as an answer—the Flying Spaghetti Monster is also an “answer”. We should have higher standards than that.

There’s much more in Card’s article. He goes on at length complaining about those wretched scientists who are trying to push their Darwinian religion on everyone, but it’s all undercut by his sublime and unreasoning ignorance of what scientists actually say. I mean, seriously, he’s ranting about “Darwinists”; there aren’t any real Darwinists anywhere, it’s a code word used by creationists and nothing more, so you have to understand that I read this kind of thing with a superior smirk, watching the little whiner reveal how little he knows of the subject every time he uses the word.

Here’s one excerpt from his protracted temper tantrum to show you what I mean.

Evolution happens and obviously happened in the natural world, and natural selection plays a role in it. But we do not have adequate theories yet to explain completely how evolution works and worked at the biochemical level.

That is a true statement, according to our present state of scientific knowledge.

And when Darwinists scream that we do too know how to explain evolution, and it’s natural selection, so just stop talking about it, they are dogmatists demanding that their faith—the faith that Darwin’s model will be found to explain everything when we just understand things better—be taught in the public schools.

His potted summary in bold is something I, and virtually all of the biologists I know, would mostly agree with. (The one problem is that phrase “at the biochemical level”, which means something rather specific to most of us; I hope he’s not trying to suggest that there are mechanisms other than physics and chemistry operating on the molecules of life, which would be just silly. I think he just wanted a nicely pretentious science-y word to toss into his statement, so I’ll let it pass.)

It’s pretty much exactly what we want taught in school. We then want the instructors to go on and explain what evolution is and cover the major concepts and lines of evidence supporting it, of course; mentioning some of the problems real scientists work on is a fine idea, we’d just rather the genuine areas of controversy were discussed, rather than the bogus baloney the Discovery Institute likes to talk about, and it would really help if before they discussed the bleeding edge they were prepared with the fundamental concepts first.

Ah, but that last paragraph…that’s where Orson Scott Card the pompous opinionated twit bellows out. There are no “Darwinists”. We aren’t screaming that we know how to explain all of evolution. We don’t think it’s all natural selection. We aren’t telling people to stop talking about it. We aren’t being dogmatic, we aren’t demanding “faith” be taught in public schools. This is nothing but Card’s straw man.

We are saying that evidence should be taught, that students should understand the best available theory that explains that evidence. We want students to question using the tools of observation and reason and experiment, not revealed knowledge and the dicta of authoritarian dogma. We don’t think speculation of the sort the Discovery Institute pushes warrants serious commitment in the school curriculum; if you want to talk about it, fine, go ahead (everyone does anyway!), just don’t pretend it is a substantive issue.

I like some of Card’s writing. It’s sad to see that in addition to being a hateful homophobe, he’s also an apologist for bad science and poor science teaching with a feeble grasp on what science is actually about.

Matt, of All Things Global, reminds us to revisit our the great cartoonist, David Rees.

Rees has cranked out six new ones in the past seven weeks.

By exceeding the courage and integrity of Chris Matthews - low bar, admittedly - Kevin Sites has emerged as a leader - if not the pre-eminent leader - of foreign hotspot reporting.

In Iran, as in the US, the views the royals project does not always reflect the depth and complexity of the populaces they claim to represent. Sites displays a side of Iranian society that admires the American culture reflected by our filmmakers and that risks the wrath of its theocratic government.

Many reporters offer the narrow view that the actions of governments define their countries. Sites reminds us of the similarities in the populations of societies. Many seek the essential human freedom to express themselves, even when that puts them at personal risk. Of course Sites can appreciate that since his hot zones coverage endangers him as he pursues what he finds important to express: the more complete story.

He and Chris Allbritton rank as the finest leaders in war reporting available today. They have the courage to risk themselves to the wrath of both parties in a duel, the wisdom to listen and observe well, and the integrity to report it as they see it, complete with self-critiques. Not as they think their audience wants to see it, like Chris Matthews does.

Therein lies the difference between real and faux journalism: courage, integrity and wisdom. It’s like the difference between chandelier-swinging sex and the mutual masturbation that goes on between Matthews and his fans.

Leadership can be found in any field of endeavor, though leaders among politicians and entertainers command more press. It’s obvious, too, that as the progressive blogosphere has noted, Chris Matthews only leads with his chin.

I’m not filled with outrage at Matthew’s willingness to expose himself as a fool, nor do I find it surprising that more fools, such as those mentioned by Wolcott, abound.

I’m outraged that we have a terribly incompetent and ineffective commander-in-chief that finds it necessary to play one-upsmanship spin games every time the serial killer (Bin Laden) speaks on tape. Anti-Americanism across the globe - not just in Muslim countries - has increased in five years of his leadership to levels not seen in nearly half a century. Including the very Christian countries of America, south of Texas.

If we’re putting terrorists out of business - as Scott McClellan claimed - why has terrorism multiplied in the past five years, faster than at any time in modern history?

I’m outraged that the commander-in-chief calls himself a compassionate conservative when his record displays that he’s neither. He’s financially outspent every previous President… combined. And his compassion demonstrably extends only to oil company executives, pharmaceutical company executives and insurance company executives, along with the wealthiest of the wealthiest Americans. Their personal and professional portfolios have benefited from his foreign and domestic policy decisions, while everyone else foots the bills.

And the endless spin game infuriates, because it’s misnamed ’spin’. In reality, ’spin’ is just a politician’s word in place of ‘lying’. “I say it’s so” does not change reality for anyone, no matter how often that shpiel is repeated.

Here’s the reality, the facts no-one can change:

• More Americans who oppose the president’s policies get wiretapped than Al Qaida members who would kill Americans.
• More detainees in our military prisons have been held without due process and released as non-threats than detainees who’ve been convicted of terrorist activities.
• More American troops have died because of this president’s decisions regarding Iraq, in less than three years, than died from the decisions made by the six presidents before him - combined - over 28 years. Yet the one man who the President claimed to fear, the man who had not attacked another country in a dozen years, sits in a cell after being toppled nearly three years ago, while more than 30,000 Iraqi civilians have died. And that number rises daily. They pay the price for the brutal dictator they had no control of, though even he lacked the weaponry to threaten America.
• A soul-wrenching holocaust is ongoing after several years due to the actions of a terrorist Muslim government and the President has yet to send troops there, where hundreds of thousands have been murdered, because the dead children, women and men are black Africans.
• The Soviet Union was the greatest threat to the world after Germany and Japan were defeated in World War II. At their military peak they possessed enough nukes to kill the entire world population ten times or more. Yet the 44 year Cold War required less spending than Bush has spent on Iraq, even though Osama Bin Laden was hostile to Saddam Hussein …. and neither of them possesses one single nuclear weapon.
• The president’s actions have caused Al Qaeda to exceed its recruiting goals. And have caused the US Army and Marines to miss their recruiting goals with the worst shortfall in the 32 years since the military became all-volunteer. Global terror attacks occurred 175 times in 2003 and 655 times in 2004, more than tripling. (Way to put them outa business, Scotty!)

Spin is lying.

The outrage I have left over is not for Chris Matthews, but for his employers. After all, they know they get quality reporting from folks like Keith Olbermann. So why do they employ clowns of Matthew’s ilk?

Simple. Controversy breeds publicity and ‘there’s no such thing as bad publicity’ has long been the motto of borderline entertainers who wouldn’t know good publicity if it bit them on their ass.

Politics has long been about bread and circuses. Corporate media executives now believe journalism is about circuses for bread. In pursuit of ratings, any trick will do, and there’s whores a’plenty in the wings eager to turn those tricks.

Yet news - and even oped reporting - traditionally sinks to such depths on slow news days. Today we have a major war underway, a president unapologetically violating the Constitution - essentially dismissing the Bill of Rights that anchors our democracy, a genocide raging in Darfur … and the titular head of a loose confederation called Al Qaeda that achieved the deadliest result of any attack on US mainland soil since the War of 1812. Which provokes a comparison to an award winning filmmaker whose only crime has been to demonstrate that the king wears no clothes above his neocowboy boots.

Matthews mocks the gravity of serious world problems and his employers encourage it. They cheapen the lives of Americans risking their lives to carry out presidential orders when they compare public enemy number one with a filmmaker whose works are reminiscent of what journalism used to be.

There’s nothing inherently wrong utilizing caricature to make a point, but caricature in the hands of a real journalist is supposed to speak truth to the power that endangers our nation.

A more apt usage would have the President - our Public Enemy number two - compared to Paris Hilton. A know-nothing rich kid of zero talent and unremarkable appearance who gained the public spotlight only because of daddy’s wealth and whose one trick pony to maintain that spotlight is wholly defined by who they’re screwing lately.

The only ways that falls short is that Hilton’s cluelessness doesn’t cause thousands to die, and doesn’t threaten the continued existence of American democracy. And she’s not violating domestic and international laws while proclaiming to protect us.

It’s the executives at MSNBC who draw my ire for the likes of Matthews, a skank who represents the Fourth Estate like a man with a fifth of Sneaky Pete. With the nation and global democracy seriously endangered, those MSNBC execs respond to this crisis by poledancing and showing us their twits and asses.

Here’s a memo to MSNBC, (and the RNC and DLC): your twits are nothing to look at with so much silicone visibly leaking.

Where art carney?

Paleface speak with forked tongue in defense of his jackoff son. How apropos that he writes from Rancho Mirage.

Says infidels will face the Comb of Death.

A year or so ago, I was reading about descendants of Muhammed, and noted how some descendants were among the Spanish nobility, who had intermarried with French and English nobles, and that some of their offspring were among the founding families in Virginia and Maryland, if not other states.

Carroll is an old Maryland family — one of the founding families. There is a county in Maryland named Carroll County. I’m not sure, but I seem to remember that name being in the Mohammed descendancy, along with Corbin, Sanchez, Navarre and others. Granted, it has been a while, and I may be jumbling names in the wind. If so, I apologize.

I would think that Miss Carroll’s captors would think twice about putting a descendant or relative of their spiritual leader, Mohammed, to death.

If there are any knowledgeable genealogists here, who happen to know more about Mohammed’s genealogy, I would appreciate your input.

Today is the day Miss Carroll is supposed to either be released or killed. The thought of her dying is too painful to entertain. Maybe by showing how connected we all are, minds and hearts might be changed, and Jill Carroll will be spared and released.

This is my prayer.

- anonyMoses

There is one wild card in the whole Samuel Alito confirmation process that could — even though it’s a longshot — derail the whole thing for the GOP.

If, and this is a big if, a relatively convincing argument could be made that Judge Alito would basically gut the body of judicial work Sandra Day O’Connor has developed over the past 25 years, that might cause Justice O’Connor to re-think the timing of her retirement.

The key here is to find a way to reach Justice O’Connor on this.

Because, after all, if Justice O’Connor decided tomorrow that she would rather not retire after all, then Sam Alito ain’t gonna be on the Court.

The question is how do you reach her? How do you convince her to stick around for another year or so to make sure the Democrats have a majority in the Senate, perhaps, to at a minimum avoid the “nuclear option.”

She must view the propsect of Sam Alito taking her place as so odious that she decides to delay her retirement, just long enough for the Democrats to prevent Alito from Ascending to the Court.

Would she do it? It’s not as far fetched as you might think.

Her opinion in the Ayotte abortion case kind of laid down a marker on how she might be thinking.

In a footnote, O’Connor explained:

“It is the sad reality, however, that young women sometimes lack a loving and supportive parent capable of aiding them “to exercise their rights wisely.” Hodgson . . . (holding unconstitutional a statute requiring notification of both parents, and observing that “the most common reason” young women did not notify a second parent was that the second parent “was a child- or spouse-batterer, and notification would have provoked further abuse” (citation omitted)). “

I consider that a warning shot across the bow of those [Alito] who want to give parents and HUSBANDS OR BOYFRIENDS — a veto over the right to choose].

She later sets up the central questions in the Ayotte case in such a way as to presuppose that any “undue restrictions” on the right to choose that negatively impact a woman’s “health” are “unconstitutional.”

We turn to the question of remedy: When a statute restricting access to abortion may be applied in a manner that harms women’s health, what is the appropriate relief?

O’Connor also goes out of her way to establish what the current constitutional limits are on the right to choose an abortion. The fact that the decison was 9-0 is interesting, as well. It may be a sign of respect from the other justices that this may be O’Connor’s last opinion on the Court, and none of them wanted to gainsay it with a negative dissent.

In any case, the precedential value of the case — with all nine justices signing onto the holding and the reasoning — may be a sign that the basic right to an aborttion is not going anywhere anytime soon.

It is also a signal that O’Connor feels strongly about it!

I think a public writing campaign to urge Justice O’Connor to delay her retirement by women across America might have more of an impact than people might think.

If women across America plead with Justice O’Connor to stay on a while longer to prevent Judge Alito from ascending to the Court, and eviscerating their rights, she might actually reconsider.

I know it’s unlikely. But it sure is worth a try.

Here is the address to send substantive comments to the Court:

Public Information Officer, Supreme Court of the United States, Washington, DC 20543.

You have to do it in writing, I’m afraid. But, it may be worth it.

From MSNBC:

Google has refused to comply with a US government subpoena for information about how people use its search engine, opening one of the first legal battles over whether law enforcement agencies should have access to the increasingly far-reaching data held by search engine companies

In all the hoopla about Bush’s illegal wiretaps, with civil libertarians suing for justice, one complicit group is seemingly getting off scot-free: the telecommunications companies. They acceded to the Bush encroachments on our freedom, rolling over on all Americans without objection.

Bush should pay for his crimes and so should the telecoms. And it’s great to see a corporate giant like Google standing up to the Texas Tyrant, to try and put America back into America.

As for all the Ma Bells and other corporate skanks, may their CEOs be fired and go homeless in the country they sold out.

(Now go tell Google’s brass why you appreciate their response to George of the Bungle.)

Look, I opposed some of the liberty violations in the anti-terror acts, even when Clinton and Kennedy pushed them. I refuse to defend bad laws no matter which party pushes them.

But what gets me about the Bush defense is it’s still predicated on false memes rooted in fear. Sure, Bin Laden and his ilk are dangerous, but they aren’t Stalin, Hitler, Mao… they’re more like Castro in the threat they pose. We didn’t go to the extremes in denying due process to end the USSR, so why give up so much for a two-bit punk like Osama?

Bush’s defense is “Anything, to keep you safe.” But the reality is his neglect of terrorism contributed to 9-11, not our freedoms. And more Americans have died or been wounded because of Bush’s choices than Osama’s. Ten times the civilians in Iraq have died than died on 9-11 and those Iraqis had nothing to do with our losses. Safe?

More of the world has turned anti-American due to Bush. We face more enemies by far than we had in 2001. With protection like that, we’ll soon need to find our own caves to hide in.

And Bush has yet to explain why FISA’s rubberstamp was not sufficient or efficient, nor how his way has delivered a single positive result. Proof convinces the skeptical. ‘Trust me’ has too much reasonable doubt when Bush’s record is considered. Show me the safety, Georgie! Otherwise, you’re just talking outa your sphincter (or vice-sphincter, as the case may be).

It only took me a year after 9-11 to get past my fears of Al Qaeda, to live with courage and principle instead. Yeah, they’re dangerous, but that’s no reason to shrink like violets from the principles of freedom and justice.

It’s also critical to recognize that once those fears abated, I started seeing and predicting nearly every game Bush has played and lost. A majority of Americans favor impeachment now, but there’s millions more who should.

And that’s the point I’m making. They should oppose Bush, and before 2006 is past, they will. Why? Because it will eventually come out that Bush has wiretapped political opponents and domestic criminals (which the courts clearly have stated is unconstitutional, reserving the surveillance to foreign threats alone). Unfettered by oversight, Bush has crossed way over that last line and now he sits, terrified that the rest of the truth will come out.

When that story’s told, all the king’s whores and all the king’s sycophants won’t be able to put that bad egg together again. The rotten sulphurous smell keeps growing and it’s no longer about if Bush’ll be impeached, but when.

…and they’ve been sent there by chickenhawks.

__________

Blogger Sarah Devon of Athens, Georgia has made a comment about Maureen Dowd’s latest column, Looking for a Democratic Tough Guy, or Girl.

If the Republican party is Jack Bauer, maybe Edwards is a stronger breed of Democrat, one that doesn’t really have a place in today’s pop culture. Maybe he’s a Robin Hood of sorts. Maybe that’s what Dowd wants to see. I know it’s what I want to see.

The GOP has a guy doing his darndest to play a Jack Bauer role. Of course, we all know that Bauer is a fictional character played by a (very good) actor who is a tough-guy beholden, with respect, to the power of those who command him. Kind of like Bush, pulled by the strings of those who read the newspapers for him - that is, if you take away the courage to face war and gunfire; if you take away Bauer’s extremely uncanny sense of intuition; and if you remove Bauer’s ability to tell the truth to those he serves; and if you rely on pop fiction.

If the show “24″ featured a Jack Bauer that hung around the office hiding AWOL under a desk while his comrades were being shot at, Maureen Dowd’s “brave-like-Bauer” simile might come closer to reality.

In recent polls, we see that the public clearly understands that the Jack Bauer they’ve been seeing on their TV screens gets different results than the bumbling Bauer wanna-bes in the Bush administration. The real Jack Bauers are the ones they irresponsibly stuck on the battlefield. You know their faces. They are the ones who are sitting ducks today in Iraq because of the idiotic missteps of the leader who would not listen to the voices that mattered.

I agree with Sarah - I want the real deal - and not an actor. We don’t need a scripted brave man/cave man. John Edwards isn’t a “Johny-get-angry.” He’s a passionate fellow with principles who, like most honorable characters and great leaders in literature, will not hide behind a mask of false bravado; will not lie or mislead; will call a duck a duck when everyone can see it’s a duck - (maybe even before others can even spot the duck); is respectable; trustworthy; standing strong in his convictions. Cheery, reverent, thrifty - maybe John Edwards is more like a Boy Scout leader than a ‘blam-blam’ Bauer. What’s wrong with that?

WE WANT A LEADER WHO IS…..

More Mr. Smith Goes to Washington than Ernest in the Army.

More Mr. Darcy than Mr. Ed.

More Viggo Mortenson from Lord of the Rings and less Sonny from “I, Robot”

More Jesus in the temple than Satan in the torture chamber.

To a colleague and humanitarian with a great heart, we’ll miss you as a blogger, and worry till you feel recovered.

BradBlog covers the challenge a wounded Iraqi vet posed to the talking heads of the Rabid Right… just before the traumatized patriot committed suicide.

Be sure to read Comments #16 and #24, too.

Rest in peace, Doug Barber. You’ve completed your mission with honor and I’m sure you’ll be sorely missed.

Here’s the results of yet another failed, multi-year investigation of a Clinton appointee, that blew another $21 million of our tax money… and ended with political accusations instead of the desired result. You know… evidence?

Prosecutor Barrett lived off the government tit for a decade and the best he could do for the Rabid Right was to time his accusations to a time when his president stands accused of several Constitutional violations more egregious than any that any previous president ever committed. Yes, let’s distract the public attention from criminal conduct to the halfbaked theories of a prosecutor too incompetent to complete his investigation within any time frame that might do any good for any citizen.

Criminal obstruction of his inquiry and coverup make for good chatter in the studios of the mouth-foaming punditry, who quiver at the thought of Hillary running for the White House. It’s noteworthy that, per usual, nothing in the report even hints that she was involved in any way, shape or form.

Even Barrett’s published theory is incredibly weak:

Mr. Barrett’s 746-page report said that the tax and obstruction phase of the inquiry ended without a definitive conclusion, but it declared: “These agencies’ treatment of possible charges against Cisneros was at best questionable and at worst represented serious wrongdoing. There seems to be no question that Cisneros was given special consideration and more limited scrutiny because of who he was - an important political appointee.”

“Seems to be no question”? The appendices attached to the report clearly question that assertion, denying it outright:

They suggested that the prosecutor had turned his disappointment in his inability to prove the obstruction allegations into unprovable theories.

Theory versus theory. More than ten years and $21 million later. The judicial panel cleared it for publication in November and he waited till now. I guess that helped him pay his Christmas bills.

And once again, vast public resources were poured down the drain in pursuit of speculation that could not be substantiated beyond the fact that Cisneros admitted lying. Justice department and IRS officials do not all come from one party, so making a conspiracy theory out of this requires tinfoil hats.

Get your Reynolds Wrap out, boys and girls, as they try to take down the President who left office 5 years ago. At this rate, they’ll enter the 21st Century just in time to convict Alger Hiss… of jaywalking.

USA Today:

Raid Mohammad, who sat at Bush’s right arm during the meeting, said he permanently left Iraq on the advice of his father, an outspoken journalist who was repeatedly imprisoned by Saddam’s government. The father was kidnapped in 1981 and his body was left on the family’s doorstep three days later, Mohammad said.

“I always say the best thing that have ever happened to Iraq in the last 30 years is the removal of Saddam,” Mohammad, who now lives in Austin, told reporters as he left the White House. “But the scariest thing is that within three years, I can see and I can feel that some of those who were brutalized by Saddam started to feel nostalgic for the days of Saddam. That is the most dangerous scenario.”

The White House denied that the meeting, added to the president’s public schedule Tuesday evening, was meant to deflect criticism of the administration in an annual report from Human Rights Watch issued Wednesday.

The report said the Bush administration has a deliberate strategy of abusing terror suspects during interrogations. The White House accused the organization of having a political agenda and ignoring the fact that the United States has liberated millions from tyranny.

It kinda made me nostalgic thinking back to what the US did when it was still a democracy. I thought it was nice that Bush grants such credit to his predescessors.